"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up.
Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.
This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)
Games have their own visual rules which are often contrary to other kinds of camera. Camera design dictates how players see into the game world, and ultimately how they play, so without good camera design your whole game may end up unplayable.
It’s very difficult (read: expensive) to change a poorly designed camera without rewriting a game entirely. This is why I consider gamatography (like photography, but for games) to be the first design task on any project, the first spec to be written and the first code that needs to be prototyped.
There need to be clear rules that will govern the camera throughout the whole of the game, sooner rather than later. Do it right and camera acts as a foundation on which you can build. Do it wrong and you’ll create a user experience nightmare.
Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.
Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.
When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:
The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.
Asynchronous gameplay is a popular phrase for describing various forms of online games that connect players but don’t require simultaneous play. Many eminent commentators have talked about the possibilities for this kind of gameplay, and how it might be the future for games.
However, in a fascinating debate on Gamasutra initiated by Ian Bogost, Raph Koster and I ran across a confusion of terms. Raph said that asynchronous games have existed for hundreds of years, citing play-by-mail Chess as an example. Except I think play-by-mail Chess is synchronous. When talking about synchrony, we actually meant two entirely different things.
Where many people casually talk about synchrony in relation to whether players are together in real time, I think it means games that require players to be in sync with one another in game time. This article elaborates on that idea and describes how real and game time intermingle.
Rovio have had less than £5 of my money, and for that I have received hundreds of Angry Birds levels. Whether in the main game, Rio or Seasons, it's fantastic over-delivery and should be applauded.
However, Angry Birds Seasons irks me. It has a tendency to lock level packs to dates. You only get a level per day. Worse, it insists on validating the date against its server on a per-level basis. So you can't play it on the Tube, on a flight or in a foreign country.
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