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OGDA meeting
On Saturday I met with the Omaha Game Developers Association in a Google Hangout for a couple of hours of interview-style questions. The whole thing was streamed live on YouTube and also captured...
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GDCOnline: A Theory of Fun, 10 Years Later
Here are the slides for the design track keynote I gave yesterday, as a PDF. Edit: thanks to Alexandre Houdent for providing a version of the PDF that works on all OSes… Among the topics: a recap of...
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Playing with “game”
The world is full of systems. Often they exist below the threshold of what we perceive. It’s all a whirling clockwork of near-infinite complexity, from the tiny mysteries of quantum physics to the...
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On choice architectures
Yesterday Andrew Vanden Bossche posted a great article called The Tyranny of Choice in response to the formal questions about narrative that were in my post A Letter to Leigh. In the article, Andrew...
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Tools don’t stifle art!
Luke McMillan has a nice article on Gamasutra entitled “An Intro to RLD,” which is about using math to assess the difficulty of jumping puzzles (and by extension, other parts of the content ramp in...
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GDCNext13: Slides for Playing with ‘Game’
Here are the slides for the talk I gave yesterday, entitled “Playing with ‘Game.’” The talk starts out with some basic semiotic theory — basically, the difference between a thing, the name we give a...
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How I analyze a game
The first thing I do is set aside my experience. It is only mildly useful, a single data point, when everyone’s experience is subjective. Oh, I’d like to think it is in some ways more valuable than...
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Balancing novices and experts
Once again, another question that came in via Quora. The issue at hand is, what do you do to balance experts and novices in a game? Especially if there are persistent elements like leaderboards in the...
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Interactive Mountain
Everyone is talking about Mountain. Mountain is a game where you see a 3d mountain. It can be turned. You can play some notes on the keyboard. The mountain does things on its own. Trees grow, clouds,...
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When is a Clone
Just some relatively incoherent notes here, originally written in an email… this post may serve as useful background as it expresses many of the same thoughts in a more coherent form. This was written...
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Games vs Sports
From a game design “formalist” point of view, they are not different. A rules-centric view of games doesn’t care whether the interface is computerized, mediated via apparatus, or physical, so it makes...
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Off to PAX
I fly off to Seattle in a few hours, barring rain. It will be my first time ever at PAX, and I am looking forward to seeing what the hubbub is about. I will be carting some of my tabletop games with...
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PAXDev Game Grammar talk
At PAXDev I gave a talk on Game Grammar. It’s an overview of my current understanding of how all the parts of games fit together. I don’t touch on how every part works — that would have taken far too...
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Teaching to Fish: Sweden Game Conference
I had a great time in Sweden, despite the fact that there did not seem to be a canonical way to pronounce the city was in (Skövde — sort of hghuheffdduh-ish, but depending where I was in the country,...
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Video: Teaching to Fish (Sweden Game Conference)
I posted up the slides to my talk at SGC earlier; now the conference has released video of the session. This talk was a joint keynote for both the Sweden Game Conference, which was a typical industry...
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The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS
I spent last week up in the mountains around Banff, Canada, with a spectacular group of people, as we talked about “computational modeling of games.” This was a workshop held at the Banff International...
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The best posts of the last five years
Five years ago, I was asked to put together a list of the best articles on the website. I did, and it’s been linked as “recommended posts” up on the menu under the Blog section for a few years now....
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Slides for my FDG17 talk on Reconciling Games
I have posted up slides for the keynote talk I gave at the Foundations of Digital Games conference. It was called “Reconciling Games” and it was about fish tanks. Well, fish tanks as an example of a...
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My GameUX Summit keynote: (Dis)Assembling Games
A while back I gave a keynote at the Game UX Summit in Toronto. Video of the talk is now up, so I’ve gone ahead and posted up a whole page for the talk that has the slideshow as well as the video. The...
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My AAAI Workshop talk on game depth
Today, at the kind invitation of Joe Osborn, I gave a talk for one of the workshops at AAAI-18, one on Knowledge Extraction from Games. I was pretty intimidated about talking at all; any time I stand...
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