PUBLIC MARKS from bcpbcp with tags "game design" & design

A comprehensive compendium of game design "patterns"

Hypothetical biofeedback computer game with pulse rate sensors.

# Make it really hard. # Have a dozen mediocre game modes instead of one good one. # Make it a 600 MB download that requires two next generation video cards and 4GB RAM. # Price your game at $35 or $3.50 and sell only from your myspace homepage. # Use the right mouse button. # Give it a terrible name or theme. # Award low scores. # Expect users to read. # Make it challenging and cerebral. # Ignore what everyone else says about your game.

Coming up with game ideas is a creative process without much structure to it.

Designing games everyone can enjoy

A blog about my life, game design theory, music, and whatever else is currently in my field of interests.

DDR + Asteroids

This talk was given as part of an IBM Games on Demand webcast conference. “We should remember that 90% of the online game players out there are playing a game that was not developed by a professional: they’re playing CounterStrike, which was user-created.”

"Eric Zimmerman has run "Game Design Challenges" at several GDC's now. At each, he picks a difficult topic to design a game about, and then lets loose three designers to come up with a game based on the topic. I participated in the inaugural one in 2004, losing to Will Wright's "Collateral Romance" idea, which involved setting non-combatants down inside a first person shooter, with the task of making it to the other side a la Casablanca, and hoping that they would form attachments along the way. Warren Spector didn't come up with a game idea, and I presented what's below."

"This is an approximate transcript of the text of my lecture at the 2004 GDC. I present it in this form because the nature of the material does not lend itself to the traditional paper format. Also, because the lecture is informal and to some extent ad-libbed, this is not a verbatim document."

"I wanted to briefly mention two very different games that I’ve been spending time with recently. The first is Guitar Hero by Harmonix and the second is Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space by Digital Eel. Neither is a traditional game, and both have some good lessons about game design to share."

What does it mean to talk of a grammar of game design? And does specifying such a grammar give us an insight into the underlying structure of games, or a new method for approaching game design - or both? Because games vary from pure mathematical formalisms (at the ludic extreme) to behavioural descriptions (at the opposite extreme), any formal reductionistic system will either be focused primarily on the former, or require sufficient latitude to express practically infinite diversity. One such approach is to define a categorial grammar of game design.