Category: Game Design (Page 14 of 22)

AGD Summary Part 1: Sex In Games

October 29, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The nice thing about living in the town where a major conference is being held is waking up the next day in my own bed. Sure, with a hangover, but that’s a lot better than the standard GDC ‘what-the-hell-way-I-thinking’ airplane trip home.

On Wednesday, I went long enough to see the Sex in Games talk hosted by Brenda Braithwaite, who helps run the Sex SIG for the IGDA. Her talk was very good and very funny – while I was well familiar with the history of sex in games (I’m a … er… student on the topic), she encapsulated it well, managing to give insights into it without condemning or condoning it. Continue reading

The Point

September 26, 2005 / Damion Schubert

This gets back to game design eventually, I promise.

If anyone has paid any attention to television this fall, as the new season kicks in, you’ll have noted that it’s been a little wierd. After a seeming eternity of every show being a bad Law and Order ripoff, with half of them being cancelled before midseason, for the first time, the networks are taking crazy chances. Continue reading

Super Happy Fun Player Kill

August 24, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Yet another hint that gaming is entering the mainstream – worldwide. My fiancee fell in love with Shanghai on her business trip out there, and watches a couple of blogs from the area. That’s where she saw this interesting tidbit.

Chao Ji Nu Sheng (”Super Voice Girls”) is the Chinese version of American Idol. Certainly nothing wrong with that, other than the blight which is Reality TV now having invaded all cultures except perhaps the African Bushman. And you have to give the Chinese credit for getting rid of the annoying guys and just putting cute Asian women on stage – it would be interesting to compare their demographics to ours, where AI is, at least anecdotally, a show that appeals to women and teen girls. But this is the part that caught the eye of my fiancee: Continue reading

Parks and Casinos

August 19, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I generally haven’t been watching the blog because work’s been keeping me busy – Wolfpack’s preparing a dog and pony show of our new project for the Ubi brass. Also, when I’ve had time to poke my head out to look for my shadow, I’ve been too busy casting stones in this Terranova thread, which covers design of social spaces vs enforcement of them. A poster there insists that designers worry too much about enforcement, and not enough about designing compelling social spaces. Nonsense, I retorted. Central Park was considered a deathtrap until they stepped up enforcement, and now it’s one of the safest urban parks in the world. Somewhere along the way, Scott brought the snark.

Ironically, the Austin Game Conference has accepted my lecture proposal regarding what MMOs can learn about Casino design, and how more designers should take lessons from other fields when designing social spaces. It’s a lecture idea, I might add, I’ve been letting stew in my head for more than a year. I would have posted it as an article here but then none of you would have been able to get a response past Spam Karma. =)

We’ll Always Have Spore

August 16, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Scott Miller is going on again about the importance of owning your Intellectual Property. A key snippet

If you look at the top 40 console games (lifetime sales) since 1995, 31 of them, or 77 percent, are original brands (including sequels within these brands). That leaves just nine out of 40 as licensed game brands. That’s near total dominance in favor of original IP. Some of these top selling brands include: GTA, Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Halo, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Driver…

So, if original brands control nearly 80% percent of the chart every year, why aren’t we seeing a LOT more original games in development? It’s clear that the real gold mine in our industry is with original IP (and their sequels and spin-offs). Publishers would be so much better off in the long-run by creating original IP versus licensed games. Owning an arm’s length list of home grown IP should be the goal of every publisher, because it gives them ultimate control of their own destiny and revenues.

Yet we have a large publisher like THQ being out-IP’ed by a little game studio like Id Software, who’ve created three blockbuster IPs, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.

How To Make In-Game Ads Work

August 12, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Here’s a free idea for Massive Inc, the people putting ads in games like SWAT 4 and Planetside.

Encourage your partners to make the ads destructable. Continue reading

The Heroes’ Journey, and Luck

July 30, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Scott Miller posted this one a while ago: an article by Bob Bates regarding using the classic Hero’s Journey theorums about storytelling first articulated by Joseph Campbell. I saw Bob give this speech at a game conference recently, and the article, if anything, is better than the presentation. Continue reading

Needs More Cowbell

July 28, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Jamie mentions a new bit of slang wandering around his office: Cowbell, as in this game needs more of it.

It comes from this famous SNL skit. And I love it…because I used to be a huge Blue Oyster Cult fan. But I was talking about the Call of Duty team. “This level needs more cowbell,” they’ll say. And what do they mean by that?

In a word – explosions. But more than just explosions. They mean seeing your buddy get capped right in front of you. They mean a plane gets shot down overhead and plummets straight at you, trailing smoke. They mean stuff catching fire. They mean the building collapses around you.

You KNOW that one’s going into the ZenLexicon. If we all start using it, maybe ‘cowbell’ will start becoming a judging criteria in PCGamer reviews.

Original comment thread is here.

Terrible Endings Destroy a Lot of Wonderful Games

July 24, 2005 / Damion Schubert

So I may just have a shorter temper than I used to, but I was totally prepared to quit Psychonauts again, in the final level. In the level after my bout with gaming OCD, I was furious with rage. I’m going to save my reasoning for a later post (which will be a lengthy one entitled ‘why the platformer is doomed’), but suffice it to say for now that the designers put together a level that, all combined, everything that is wrong with the genre.

Which was surprising, because up until that point, I was discussing how this Game Of The Year candidate could walk on water and heal lepers to anyone who would walk by my desk at work. Fortunately for Psychonauts GotY chances, God of War also managed to screw up their final levels with inane jumping puzzles. That’s when I started to realize how common the phenomenon of having a good thing and then screwing it up with a bizarre aberration of a game design decision near the end is. I started to make a list of the games that have screwed this up, in my experience.

Psychonauts: Jumping puzzle from hell.
God Of War: Inane ‘hell’ jumping puzzles inserted into a game that had previously been fairly light in them
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: The interminable sewers level, which were 1/10 as cool and 10 times as long as any other level in the game, with too much combat and not nearly enough cool, sexy vampire stuff.
Halflife (1): The ‘Zen’ levels
Alice: Some insanely stupidly hard boss monster. To be fair, I don’t know how close to the end it was because I quit in disgust