Some Thoughts on Game Design by Andrew Glassner

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Some Thoughts on Game Designby Andrew Glassner

• Game Design
• Arcade
• Puzzle
• Strategy
• Story

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Some Thoughts on Game Design

• Interactivity is just a game quality
• Game quality is not correlated to interaction
  quality
• Interactivity vs. Participation
• Constant engagement is a plus
• -but not if meaningless a rat isnt having fun
  interacting with game maze to get cheese
• -ATM is interactive, but not fun experience (does
  not belong in a game)
• cant teleport in real world but we should
  provide this in games
• I prefer participatory or competitive experiences

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Some Thoughts on Game Design

• Needless Demands
• Creating interaction by forcing player to carry
  out mandatory actions is ok, until the reach the
  point to where they are tedious and repetitive
• A game should offer the fastest and easiest
  possible way to do everything unless there is
  some entertaining or informative reason to
  prevent it.
• Deliberate deception is an artificial roadblock
  p6
• Player Profiling
• Dont trick players into providing a personality
  description.
• Branching narratives try to deduce personality to
  create responsive story and builds profile of
  player, but it is difficult for a game to
  characterize personality.

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Some Thoughts on Game Design

• Randomness can make a game more interesting by
  adding random elements to the game.
• Better if there are some intentions behind the
  variations.
• Multiple Choice Conversations
• Todays Technology is a very long way from
  creating programs that can understand an
  arbitrary question.

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http//alicebot.org/
http//alicebot.org/
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• Adds questions about personality type in the
  conversation and to determine your personality
  type.

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Things to avoid in design

• Dont keepem guessing with unclear choices p9
• Repeat Painlessly
• Having the player go through a process several
  times in order to achieve a goal.
• Developer may have spent a lot of time creating
  an entertaining passage that they want you to
  see all the details and get a lot of mileage out
  of.
• This can be frustrating to users
• What games can you think of that have painful
  repeats?
• What new options do they have in games to prevent
  this?
• What could we do to help users get to the next
  step of the game and skip already played portions?

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Things to avoid in design

• Spackled Interaction??
• You can spot spackled interaction by asking
  yourself whether the game designer and the
  interaction designer ever needed to speak to one
  another.
• Horribly designed Remotes
• How does this happen?
• Spackling Interaction can be created by
  alternating cut-scenes and interactive periods p11