I thought this was pretty funny, and scarily close to accurate in some situations.
Category: Game Design (Page 12 of 22)
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
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
Speaking of the 360 and their sales figures of 600K, one is left with one inescapable conclusion: launching at Christmastime is the worst time to launch a game console. Think about it – they’re at 660K units now, far short of reaching their goal of 2.5M in 90 days and 5 million in 6 months. Most of these are due to problems filling the demand for the hardware, which has plagued pretty much every console launch. Continue reading
From CES comes an update about a game designed to improve your meditation, The Journey to the Wild Divine is a game where you attempt to manipulate an on-screen object (in this case, a new-agey crystal) with your biorhythms (in particular, staying calm).
This software includes sensors that attach to your fingers…The first level consisted of a pinwheel that was supposed to rotate when I took a deep breath. It would move, I would get excited about it moving and it would stop. The only way I could consistently make it move was if I talked to Mike about it. I guess I’m calmest when talking. How very apt.
My first thought when reading that was how frustrated failure in games makes me. Which is to say, I’m not sure this game’s for me. Whether it is or not, though, it turns out it’s a game that might not demo well.
The noisy Las Vegas Convention Center is the worst place on the planet to test meditation software. The few people who were willing to try the Journey to the Wild Divine were as equally unable to make the pinwheel move as I was.
Heh.
I was playing Magic Online not long ago. I was down to 1 health, and one more turn would kill me. Fortunately, on my next draw I drew Glimpse the Unthinkable, a card that puts 10 cards in his draw pile (or Library) into his discard pile (or Graveyard). Running out of cards in your library is an alternate win condition, one which rarely happens, but since he only had 7 cards in his library, he was defeated. He was furious.
“Did you just topdeck that card?” he asked me. I responded that I had. He went off in a huff, while I pondered this new verb, which previously I hadn’t noticed but now I see in MTG message board posts all the time. Topdeck is interesting because at first glance, it’s synonymous with draw. But it’s not. Continue reading
Here’s the other thing I thought as I read the Superman Movie Saga. In it, they talk in length about the ‘reimagining’ of the brand. Considered topics include: making his costume not blue and red. Not letting him fly. Making his powers mostly from gadgets. Making Krypton not explode. Making Lex Luthor a Kryptonian. Things that, even though I’m only a casual fan of the Superman license, rub me wrong to the core. The movie producers, on the other hand, seemed insistent that such a ‘reimagining’ was necessary to reinvigorate the Superman license.
The thing that struck me- has any game ever so radically tried to reinvent a character or franchise from another media genre? I mean, sometimes we have to limit what you can do for feasibility, but if we were making a game based on Batman Begins, we wouldn’t start by saying, “He’s too dark. We should try to lighten this up.”
Would we? Am I missing obvious counterexamples?
Original comments thread is here.
The rant last week about sequels brings to the forefront a natural problem with sequels. On one hand, in today’s risk-averse development environments, it’s easy to retreat to your licenses as a safe bet, but doing so so often has the potential to burn out those licenses. Companies need to develop new IPs to survive.
On the other hand, the true value in gaming of developing IP is so you have something to build on for the future. Sequels pay the bills more reliably than untested blue sky IP. Until you drive them into the dirt, that is. Continue reading
Literally, after five years of the conventional wisdom being that only established franchises and sequels could exist in the games market, someone finally got the idea that maybe, just maybe, the people are tired of the same old, same old (found via Kotaku). Of course, reading the article, it looks like Next Gen has just chosen to play up a throwaway line from the analyst and make it the headline.
That doesn’t make it not true, though. The games I’ve seen getting buzz are Guitar Hero, D&D Online, the Movies, Shadow of the Colossus and Civ IV. Only one of those is a sequel, and the other four are at least TRYING new things (although whether they’re succeeding undubitably will spark healthy debate on their own). Meanwhile, no one talking about games in the communities I lurk in has even pointed out that Soul Caliber 3 has hit shelves, much less asked if it’s any good. Continue reading
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