What Games Are

Extensible Actions [Game Design]

A game action is simple to understand, program and implement. The more complicated part is getting your head around the idea that games work best with extendable actions. Extensibility means that the action itself may be simple, but there is scope to expand or embellish it to have many uses.

Not all actions are equally extendable, which makes finding the right ones challenging. However finding great extensions is the best way to achieve elegance in your game design. And that, in turn, leads to success.

Game Dynamics and Loops [Game Design]

So we’ve discussed loops. It’s time to talk about game dynamics. A great game dynamic is at the heart of most successful video games because it structures the individual actions that the player takes, and the reactions of the game (the loop) into something more significant. They are a huge part of what game design is about, but they are also hard to express in conceptual form and difficult to understand.

Hopefully this post will help you do both.

 

Gamification: Avoiding The Fate of ARGs [Meta-games]

Supposedly, there's much that can be done with gamification to build deep engagement with users. Games can enhance lives. Everything can become a game, from work to social causes, education and art.

Sure, but actually these ideas are not new. From virtual worlds and alternate reality games (ARGs) to World of Darkness live action roleplaying (LARP) and Killer, the idea of melding persistent play and real life is one that has taken on many forms for as long as the games industry has existed.

As a general grouping I would call them meta-games. They are a lot of fun to create and run as a designer (In fact I got my start in game-making through LARPs), and they have the quality of seeming to change the player’s world. But they also have a critical failing.

Meta-games don’t scale.

 

The What Games Are Digest #4 [Weekend]

It’s been an energetic week. I am just shy of 400 subscribers across various sources, and I’ve also crossed the 5000 Unique visitors point (in the last 30 days) point as of today. Huzzah! In addition, my Mac App Store post from last week featured on the Gamasutra network, which led me to my second biggest day of traffic ever. Huzzah indeed.

Also, I’d like your feedback: When I began this blog, I often posted twice a day. Over the last two weeks, I’ve tried focusing on one substantial post per day (1000+ words) rather than two pint-sized ones. It seems to suit my writing style better, but at the same time, I worry that re-sharing that post twice on Twitter and Linkedin might be annoying to some readers.

I’ve been doing it that way so that my European and US readership will see them (they peak at very different times) but is it too much like spam for your tastes?

 

Five Amazing Opportunities! [Trends]

1. The Mac App Store.
2. The Kindle
3. Gamification
4. Groupon-style games
5. Android Tablets
6. ....

Lists are easy. The names and platforms may change, but there are always new entrants. The hard part isn't execution. Execution is complicated, but achievable if you put good designers and developers to work with the tools they need.

The hard part is that everybody has the same list, so everybody's making the same software. The hard part is creating and living a marketing story that makes people pay attention, because there is no list to tell you how to do that.

Pinball and Social Games [Environments]

I once thought of social games as being very similar to slot machines, but I now think a better analogy is pinball. The art of great pinball is not the skill (which tends to put off more people than it attracts) but rather the rewards. While social games are clearly very different from pinball in many ways, the two share some surprising similarities.

If You Measure It, Will They Come? [Resonance]

A favoured put-down in business blogs at the moment is the phrase ‘If you build it, they will come’. It refers to Field of Dreams in which a man sets out to build a baseball field in the middle of his farm because the ghosts of baseball tell him that he should. The theme of the film is to do with following your dreams. Don't worry, it promises. Everything will work out if you commit.

Nonsense, says the business community. Believing in dreams is the path of irrational exuberance, vanity and storytelling. Validate. Get out of the building and talk to customers. Sell them something to prove that you really do have a market and not a whole lot of hot air. Measure. Learn.

Are the naysayers right or wrong?

Single Player Games Are Not An Aberration [Trends]

(Thanks for the image Martin)

Three separate commenters (James Wallis, Brenda Braithwaite and Michael Acton Smith) made the following observation in Nicholas Lovell’s ‘What is a Social Game?’: single player games are only a feature of the last few decades, an aberration. Michael even went so far as to say that the era of single player games is coming to an end.

No. Single play is an essential part of what games are.

 

What Is A Social Game? [References]

Nicholas Lovell, author and blogger at Gamesbrief, has put together a really interesting post in which he asks 26 people what a social game is. The answers depict a wide spectrum of ideas, from the literal to the metaphorical. It’s well worth the read if social games is a topic that you find interesting.

You Need A Marketing Story [Marketing]

(thanks for the image urban75)

A term I’ve used in several posts is marketing story. Marketing stories are becoming increasingly important to all businesses because traditional advertising-led marketing is in decline. Despite this, a lot of people in games have only recently heard of marketing stories, and are not sure what they are.

So what is a marketing story?