The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Signal to Noise, an industrial design oriented blog, points out this article claiming that complexity causes 50% of product returns.
The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found… Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.
Last Friday, I was an emergency fill-in on a panel for the AGD on the topic as to whether or not games are art, where I was a speaker alongside Scott Jennings and Allen Varney. Being as I didn’t know at 5:00 that I was speaking on a panel at 7:30, it was an interesting panel, and one which I felt remarkably unprepared for. Still, we had a good discussion (J has posted his notes on Gamasutra).
The topic was specifically about Roger Ebert’s rather catty and self-important quotes claiming that games will never be as important as other mediums, for a variety of reasons. Continue reading
The fiancee pointed this out to me, although I’ve been sitting on this one for a while…
Naughty America the Game is, pretty much exactly what you’d expect – an online, sexually charged virtual world that the designers hope will become a meat market for real-life dating. But how to deal with the fact that the guy that you’re talking to might be a serial killer? Continue reading
I like to watch. Heh heh. Heh heh heh.
According to this article, though, if I want to put an observer mode into my game, I’ll have to pay Microsoft, who apparently discovered and patented it.
Patent No. 6,999,083 “provides for a host of technologies that enable groups of networked game spectators to enjoy a unique and richer experience to viewing the action within a networked multiplayer game.”
Metafilter links to this site detailing the religious faith of all your favorite comic book heroes (with neat-o collages).
Of note: almost no heroes are atheist, but many villains are. 1 mention of a Mormon character, despite that it is the fastest growing faith in America. And unsurprisingly, no comic book writer has yet had the guts to label either a hero or villian as a scientologist (although one transparent analog exists).
Speaking of China, Raph has a list of differences between the Chinese market and our own. One thing I don’t see in his list is any differences in content localization. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what those differences are.
In Korea, rumor has it that Starcraft had one bit of localization of content – removing a floating corpse in the intro movie – before the game was allowed on that market. In China, Magic the Gathering is fanatical about removing or obscuring anything that looks like a skull – be it animated monster, death armor adornment or random bone lying in the corner. The strange this is that zombies are okay, and skeletons with eyes are fine. Take a look at some of these minor changes that Wizards, for some reason, found necessary. Continue reading
The China trip got postponed, at pretty much the last possible minute. Which is good – I don’t think I was mentally prepared for what looks like on paper to be 26+ hours in transit. Mental note to myself: find a doctor willing to dispense something that will knock me nearly comatose for the journey. The trip’s going to be in April.
Instead, I spent my Saturday evening dining with some old friends. Then I went to a party to welcome Balseraph back to town (him and I worked at Ninjaneering together) – he’s spent the last few months consulting with Saga of Ryzom. Also in attendance were J and Glyph from Twisted Matrix. You know your friends are geeks when the party has the girls of a local Burlesque group drinking it up, but you spend the night in the back arguing about quest design.
These are the things that make Mondays tolerable: RedOctane says we could be seeing ‘five or six’ titles by mid-07.
“We are working on Guitar Hero 2, which will have 40-plus new tracks,” Sumner told MCV. He also confirmed that genre spin-offs including Country Rock for the US and a Metal edition are on the cards. He even pointed to further possibilities for the peripheral, adding, “you could absolutely do a plug and play version”.
Clearly, I can go on living now.
So Dungeons and Dragons went live this week. Congrats to the team!
Actually, what i wanted to say was that D&DO warranted a mention on last night’s Colbert Report. I swear, I almost choked on my chicken pot pie.
Update: Here’s a link to Colbert geeking out.
“The good news is with D&D now available on the internet, the social outcasts of this generation are relieved of the agony of any social contact. Enjoy your magnificent isolation, and don’t forget to bathe.”
They sure don’t make games like they used to: Slashdot links to a site that has found a long lost Penn and Teller game. (Something Awful also has info, including screenshots)
“The most infamous part was ‘Desert Bus,’ a ‘VeriSimulator’ in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I’d read the bus veers to the right, so you can’t just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point. I’d assumed for years that the entire thing was a hoax, but last September, Frank Cifaldi (founder of Lost Levels) received a backup CD-ROM made by a fellow videogame writer of a review copy he’d received a decade earlier.
And you thought grinding for exp was bad!
© 2024 Zen Of Design
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments