What Games Are

The Enclosure Problem [Gamification]

Aside from an ugly name, thinness of gameplay, sameness of ideas (rewards, levels, badges and points) and a lack of any strong examples of what it is supposed to be, what’s the most fundamental issue that gamification faces?

The basic idea of gamification is that a game can become integrated in life. Gamification proposes to embellish the real world with a layer of game-like things to do and earn, and in so doing enhance lives. So in a sense, gamification’s big idea is to regard life as some sort of infinite game.

The problem? Games are no fun unless they are finite.

You Need a Look [Game Development]

While any game worth its salt ultimately rises or falls on how engaging it is, the issue for many small studios is how to get players to notice their wares in the first place. You can work the magazine and blog circuit, post about your game in Twitter and otherwise try to drum up interest, but I think the most important thing that you need is a look.

A look is not about production values. Sometimes deliberately low-fi graphics are the way to go, and often the more expensive the graphics become, the less interesting they are. Looks are about style rather than technology, and a look gets players into the idea that your game is worth checking out.

Stop Telling Us Your Investment Story [Marketing Stories]

Making games involves a lot of selling to investors. Those investors may be publishers, executives within your own company or outsiders like venture capitalists. Whatever their circumstance, they are the people with the money and you are the person who wants it. At some point you have to persuade someone to sign a cheque.

Selling a vision to an investor requires figures and justifications, but it also requires a story. There’s a particular class of marketing story, let’s call it the investment story, that is used for this task. However it’s a very different kind of story from the ones that attract players, and a big problem that game makers face is that they often end up trying to tell the same story to both groups.

All Games Are About Death [Fundamentals]

Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of graphic novels.

A common whipping boy theme in the media regarding games is that they are violent. Why must they always involve killing, ask the exasperated. Why can’t games be nice? Games certainly can be nice, but take a step back from the visceral element of the violence question and what they’re really asking is: Why must games be based around death?

The reason is that death produces focus and causes change. Without death (whether symbolically or actually) a game has no purpose, no reason to pick up the gun and no sense of motion. Without death there are no wins. There is only activity.

It may be as visceral as a bloody spatter, as ordinary as a rotting crop or as abstract as a penalty shootout, but death is everywhere in games. Death frames a game. Artistically as well as functionally, death is right at the heart of what games are.

The Cautionary Tale of Sony PlayStation [Platforms]

 

 

 

 

 

(headline taken from the Metro UK newspaper)

Sony has become my go-to example of how not to behave if you are the kingpin. Of all the major platforms PlayStation is the most branding- and marketing-led, and yet it is the least well regarded. Developers, journalists and many fans like some of the games on the PS3, but Sony PlayStation the entity? Not so much.

Sony’s big mistake was to develop the most recognisable game platform in the world and then decide to strip mine it for profit. It acted as though its position was unassailable, that authenticity and branding were the same thing, and so it could do as it pleased. In so doing it sacrificed execution in software, hardware and even its fabled design standards, and so lost trust.

Trust is an essential part of succeeding in the viral economy because relying on advertising in prime time is not that effective any more. Given that the future is going to be about more platforms rather than less, and you may one day end up running your own, you would do well to take heed of Sony’s slowly unfurling demise.

Return of the GDD [Game Design]

A new generation is falling into a very old trap: writing large game design documents (GDDs) in order to map out their idea for production, only to then becoming trapped by those documents later on. Most people who’ve worked in games a few years know that GDDs cause more trouble than they’re worth, but many folks newer to games don't realise the folly of creating them.

Here's why: