Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: Academia (Page 4 of 4)

Toyetic Gameplay

January 3, 2005 /

In Jamie Fristrom’s Half-Life review, he unveils a new word, ‘toyetic‘. I like it. Here’s what he has to say:

“Toyetic” was a word given to me by a friend who used to work at Mattel who doesn’t like being mentioned in my blog. It means, “like a toy.” An amusing sidenote is that the guys at Mattel are trying to make their toys more like computer games, while we’re trying to make our computer games more like toys. Or toy chests, anyway. The collection of guns in your typical FPS are already toyetic; a set of toy guns, each with their own kind of play. Half-Life 2 gives us a bunch of new toys above and beyond the usual collection of weapons: the air raft, the gravity gun, the dune buggy, the ant lions, portable gun turrets, squads of soldiers. Each toy comes complete with a context to make it interesting, and makes Half-life 2 feel like a brand new game, not a rehash.

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Academics and Ant-Farming

December 13, 2004 /

I’ve never fully embraced the academic side of our field as others in the industry have. I’m an intensely practical person, and academics, frequently, are not. So it was with some interest that I read Mark Barrett’s indictment of game academia. He starts off with an illuminating bit of background:

In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.

MMOs, due to their shiney new nature, their social aspects, and the insights they can offer on sociology, psychology, economics and social network theory among other things, attract more than their fair share of observers, more than willing to give you their two cents about what you’re doing wrong.

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In the Sausage Factory of City of Heroes

October 10, 2004 /

Too much politics. Let’s talk games. The eggheads at Terranova (Hi, Guys!) have been discussing this Forbes article about City of Heroes, which Forbes terms an ‘out of nowhere hit’. Fair enough. The most interesting part of the article, at least to me, was this:

Lewis spent $2.5 million of his own money, plus loans of $4.5 million from his distributor, the U.S. arm of South Korea game company NCsoft, to create City of Heroes. NCsoft is spending another $18 million a year to market and operate the game and provide customer support.

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What Dr. Bartle And Dr. Kiersey Have To Say

June 5, 2002 /

Largely because a friend’s site made me curious, I decided to take the Bartle’s test again. The results: my Explorer stat went through the roof. That I’m high on the explorer axis has never been a big surprise. When playing Civ, I become obsessed with clearing away every square of black in the game. Anyway, here are my stats, as of now:

Your type is: EAK. 2% of respondents so far fall into that type. The numbers below represent percentage of how many times you selected a given suite when given the chance. Since there are 15 questions for each suite out of 30 total, the number will add up to 200%. 50% thus means average for each suite, and 100% is the maximum score.Your answers were split as follows:
Explorer 93%
Achiever 40%
Killer 40%
Socializer 26%

Humorously enough, I’m marked as ‘famous’ in their database by the powers that be, from my old results. Previously, I was SEKA (60/53/46/40). Not sure what made my Socializer stat fall down the well. But it’s certainly good news, since my CEO duties for my startup require me to be cordial to all manner of oddballs!

I followed this up with the Keirsey test, which scored me as an INTJ (Introvert/iNtuition, Thinking, Judging), which according to the official site, makes me a Mastermind. I gotta say I like the sound of that. Although I’m not quite so sure I’m the all-powerful man behind the throne this summary describes. However, it will serve me well on my ongoing quest to conquer the known universe.

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