Zen Of Design

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

Category: Game Design (Page 20 of 22)

Fighting Fire with Warcraft

January 26, 2005 /

Jamie Fristrom, whose been known to pontificate himself from time to time (when his blog is up and running, that is), had this to say:

But didn’t WoW itself fight fire with fire by taking the best features of the best MMO’s and combining them?

An excellent question. The copout answer is that, inside the games industry, Blizzard is a law onto themselves. But I’m not satisfied with that, of course. The books I’m distilling this line of philosophy from (Positioning and the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by the esteemed Al Reis) are full of examples about how unbeatable titans like Coca-Cola, Xerox and Volkswagen screw up because they extended into new territory with a me-too product. So let’s dig further.

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Playing It Safe Means Playing to Lose

January 20, 2005 /

Here we are talking about how playing it safe in the world of design is a loser of a philosophy. To prove that I can link any disparate topics, here is a similar discussion about football. The esteemed Dr. Z (probably the best technical football columnist) writes about how some teams get so scared of taking a huge chance and instead lose quietly.

There are coaches who are always looking for ways to beat you, who will go for the throat. Give us 40 seconds and one time out and we’ll put points on the board, is their philosophy. These coaches have Super Bowl rings.

There are coaches whose playbooks are filled with things that can go wrong. They have a fine working knowledge of the terrors of the game. They coach not to lose. Yet they lose, maybe not over the course of a season, or a career, but they lose the big ones. Let me tell you about this latter breed.

The article was spurred by two incidents, in two seperate weeks, where fraidy-cat coaches were so terrified of an unlikely scenario (interception, fumble, sack) that they gave their kickers long, unlikely field goals in very hostile, pressure cooked circumstances, rather than try to throw a couple passes to get a little bit closer and make the kick a little bit easier

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The Joy of Not Being Everquest

January 19, 2005 /

At first glance, you would have sworn that Earth and Beyond would crush Eve. Earth and Beyond had a huge team, an enormous budget, a spiffy marketing plan and a head start. It had a supremely talented team, including many responsible for various Command and Conquer licenses and others with MMO pedigrees (a rarity at the time). It had a winning idea – a modernization of classic games like Netrek and Elite with a massively multiplayer component. And, of course, most of all, it had the Electronic Arts label. And nobody beats EA, right?

A funny thing happened on the way, though. Somehow, on the way, E&B became “Everquest with Spaceships”, first in the mind of its execs and design team, and after that, in the mind of it’s fans. It’s as if, whenever facing a design crossroads, they asked themselves, WWEQD. “What would Everquest do?” Continue reading

Redefining ‘Unconventional Weaponry’

January 16, 2005 /

I won’t be happy until we see some of these in Command & Conquer: apparently in the mid-90’s the US military was contemplating a ‘Gay Bomb’:

The plan for a so-called “love bomb” envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale.

Others up for consideration include a ‘Who? Me?’ bomb which would mimic flatulence, a swarm bomb that would draw swarms of insects on the opponent, a vampire bomb that makes enemy skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight, and a halitosis bomb which gives all the bad guys bad breath. Really, most Magic cards are more plausible than the ideas in this article.

Found via Ludology.

Quick Links for the January Cold

January 8, 2005 /

Sorry for being out of touch. Work has been busy lately (endless brainstorm meetings!), and my weekends will be dominated by the football playoffs this week and next. Just to point y’all to interesting stuff to tide you over:

What Casual vs Hardcore Actually Means

January 3, 2005 /

In the Toyetic thread yesterday, Abalieno said this:

[B]eware when you say that there’s space for a casual MMO, you are also aiming to casual subscribers.

This is, interestingly, very wrong, but most game observers wouldn’t realize this. That’s because ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ are the most misused words in the game industry. In fact, I misused it in my own comments. Continue reading

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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