Psychochild’s Blog

• Game Development
• Games Design

Yet another danger of being a game designer: spam emails. The worst are the spam emails with random words. Sometimes they arrive in combinations most people would discard. Yet, when I saw an email with the subject "ethical boredom", I had to double-check the sender. That totally sounds like the title of a post that could be made on Terra Nova, doesn't it?
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• Game Development
• Games Business
• Games Design
• Games Programming

EverQuest 2 just released its latest expansion Echoes of Faydwer. Congrats to the team!

Of course, if I'm blogging about it then there's something to complain about. Oh, yes, there will be complaining.

Online game developers got really clever and figured out that players could make better user interfaces than they could. It started with the venerable EverQuest, then spread to WoW and EQ2. In fact, the player-made interfaces are generally superior.

Until it comes to patch day....
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• Game Development
• Games Business
• Games Design

Over at Broken Toys, Scott rants about the evils of EA and manages to work in a clever denunciation of RMT while he's at it. You are a sly one, Mr. Jennings. At the center of his arguments against both EA and RMT is his assertion that, "Simply because if someone is paying money - the measure, by almost any criteria, of the value of a person’s time in our society - to avoid part of your game, that part of the game is not fun."

Time to start the argument!
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• Game Development
• Games Design
• Weekend Design Challenge

Humans have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. (I've used my sixth sense to know that some might want to talk about the sixth sense or other "senses", but let's leave those aside for now.) Games traditionally focus on the first two: sight and hearing. Most advances in technology have focused on graphical presentation, or how to fool the eye into thinking it is seeing more than it really is; that is, a 3D representation of a world on a 2D surface. Some advances have been made in hearing as well; music and good sound are slowly being recognized as some of more important elements of games. (We've come along way since PC speaker sound, at least!)

The other three senses don't get so much attention. We have a bit of touch response with force feedback controllers, but this is a very gross level of feedback. You can't "touch" something soft in a game and actually get the sensation on your own fingers. Companies in the past have tried to push digital scents, but people don't really seem to want the fresh scent of gunpowder and rotting corpses while playing for some reason. Similarly, although I'm sure someone out there wonders what the zombie tastes like, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of progress on that front.

So, here's this week's challenge: can you develop a way to include other senses in a game? Some initial thoughts after the break.
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• Game Development
• Games Business
• Games Design

One of the biggest problems that designers face is how to play a lot of games in limited time. Sounds like a real tragedy, doesn't it? But, seriously, it's hard to keep abreast of all the different games that you need to play if you actually want to, you know, develop games. This can be a serious problem in some situations because you just can't keep up with some genres. Epic multi-hour RPGs fell off my lists a long time ago, for example.

So, what can you do?
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• Game Development
• Games Design
• Weekend Design Challenge

I was at a "think tank" called Project Horseshoe over the weekend. (That's why this WDC is a bit late.) The goal of the get-together was to spend time thinking about the difficult problems in game design. I submitted an issue that became the focus of a small group of very smart game designers:

Games As Legitimate Medium

This the single most important question facing our industry, in my opinion.

I hesitate to use the word "art" here, but that's usually how this is described. A less loaded way is to ask: What will it take to have games considered a legitimate medium? Right now most people consider games as something for kids, and this is why we get slammed for things you see in nighttime TV.

To paraphrase Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics: "As long as the broader community assumes that comics [or, in our case, games], by their nature, are without social value and, by their nature, are suitable only for kids -- then charges of obscenity will always hit their mark." So, what do we have to do to be considered a serious medium like movies, books, and TV?

Related to this, how can we make "mature" games without resorting to sexual titillation or hyperviolence?

So, now is your chance to prove that you could have participated with top of the field (and me ;): what is your thoughts about this issue? Read on for a bit of insight into what we discussed.
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• Personal

Yep, it's that time of year again. I'm now 33, three years past the "do not trust" date. ;)

If you're dying to buy me a present, there's a link to my Amazon wishlist to the right. Or, you can treat yourself to my book by following the link on the top of the left-hand column!

Have a fun day!

• Game Development
• Games Design

PvP tends to be a touchy subject. People with bad flashbacks of UO shiver at the mere mention of PvP. However, not all PvP must be in the form of combat between players or groups. Many games, even games that heavily restrict PvP combat, have competitions between players that fall in the realm of PvP.

I'll talk about two obvious ones: Rankings and Economics.
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• Game Development
• Games Design
• Writing/Reading
• Weekend Design Challenge

"Brevity is the soul of wit," as they say.

Recently, Wired posted an article about "Very Short Stories" . The challenge: write a story in six words. For most people, this is surprisingly possible. You can convey a lot of information in just six words.

Brevity has a lot of other virtues, too, especially when it comes to game design. A 750 page design document sounds impressive, but how many people do you really think are going to read all that? Having a poet's soul and being able to write compactly is a skill that will serve any developer well. There's a reason Raph posts "The Sunday Poem" on his site.

Slashdot also posted a story about this. There were some good posts there. So, the task this weekend is to write a story. Bonus points for making it game-related. Super bonus points for making it game-design related!

Some of my thoughts in the full article.
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• Game Development
• Games Design
• Meridian 59

Ryan Shwayder wrote a bit on his blog about WYSIWYGn't Loot. He argues that if you see it on a monster, it should drop in the loot when the monster dies. It's rewarding and fun, after all.

Of course, he realizes that there are some problems with this. So, he talks about how to make it so that tons of loot that would likely drop won't bog down the economy, primarily by making most items worthless. Of course, he doesn't consider the impact of this behavior on the technical side.

So, let's talk about why some ideas, like this one, aren't implemented in current games.
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