Time for a little experiment. Here’s the deal: most of my free time on weekends has been going to Purity, as I’m trying to get something decent to submit for the IGF deadline in November. This is well and good, but the casualty is you folks – my miniscule readership. Rarely do I feel I can justify the time it’d take to write an entry for this blog. So the experiment is this: I’m going to post some summaries for longer-form blog entries I want to write, you people tell me which sounds most interesting, and I’ll do that one next. I make no promises for the quality of the final post, even if you thought it sounded really exciting at the time… just like game development!
Coelacanth – Sometimes in game design a long-forgotten idea is just as good as a never-before-seen one. Doom is a game I keep coming back to as a designer, and it holds very different lessons for those looking back on it today compared to what it taught the industry in its heyday (ie “use cutting edge technology to make something dark and violent”). The game’s blazing speed, focus on movement-as-defense and twitch aesthetic are quite unlike anything seen in a contemporary FPS. What are some other coelacanth games, what can be learned from them?
What I Get Out of Indie – I barely possess 0.001% the indie cred of a Pixel, a Phil Fish or a Jon Mak, but working on a small-scale game in my spare time has already taught me as much about what I do in mainstream game design as the converse. I’ll argue for why I think indie development is good for the AAA soul and why, if you have the time and drive for it, making something tiny and precious in your off hours can make you a better developer.
Intrinsic / Extrinsic – Jon Blow’s notion of “junk food games” set me thinking about what sort of common mechanic/aesthetic values a designer can embrace if they wish to design a game that’s the opposite of junk food – enriching, or otherwise fulfilling in some more lasting way. Dogs are trained to recognize the sound of a clicker as an abstraction for something legitimately rewarding, as opposed to the “self-rewarding behaviors” that they pursue with no prompting. My theory is that by presenting conflicts and (optionally) rewards that engage faculties humans already use in daily intellectual and emotional life, we foster “meaningful play” and take the first step towards nourishing rather than narcotizing players.
Positivity – Open GameTab or Kotaku and look at the top headlines – chances are, one of them is something like “Developer X flames Developer/Company/Game Y”. Flaming is cathartic, everyone feels like doing it sometimes, but its net effect increases the ambient level of cynicism and hostility in the gamer meta-population. As I become more of a visible person in the game industry I’m trying to focus very exclusively and explicitly on the things I’m passionate about, rather than who I think is clueless or terrible or Ruining Videogames. Life is less stressful and interviews are easy. All it takes is the ounce of creative and intellectual maturity needed to recognize that there is no single “right way forward”.
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August 5th, 2008 at 3:49 am
B. Because if you think you have one thousandth of the indie cred of those people I’m going to have to gracefully counter with: “you’re full of shit”. Writing that post will likely bump your indie cred up to 0.45%.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:58 am
My vote would be with the Intrinsic/Extrinsic entry, as the whole junk food game thing has been in the back of my head since I saw the video of Jon’s talk. I also came close to snapping my DS in half last night playing Final Fantasy 4, dealing with the random monster encounters and monotonous combat with very little room for player expression, so this feels like a pertinent topic.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I think that “what I get out of indie” would be good to hear.. followed by intrinsic/extrinsic and then coelocanth, personally. I think you got your point about positivity across already with your summary 🙂
August 7th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Sorry to not be the “big comment guy”, but I’m proud to define myself as a part of you’re readership. But anyway.
The “What I Get Out of Indie” post looks like interesting, since a lot of people glorify indies, but don’t actually have a real viex of wat indie is. I would enjoy being part of the ones that glorify nowing what indie is, and so this post would be helpfull for that.
I guess “Intrinsic / Extrinsic” is the other post that really interest me with “Coelacanth”.
But actually, everything looks very nice, so if you could all…
August 7th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Intrinsic/Extrinsic, though I will probably agree with you as I do with Blow, and it won’t be that interesting in the end. 🙁 Maybe my vote should be ‘whichever, except for intrinsic/extrinsic’?
August 15th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I’d like to read the positivity one.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Never heard of Doom as “Coelacanth”.. aye?
Intrinsic/Extrinsic +
October 27th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I note that your readership’s already chosen “What I Get Out of Indie,” but hey — I’m new to your blog, and I’d love to see you expound on the “Coelacanth” idea. There are a wealth of interesting new observations to be made about Doom, particularly in the “oldie but goodie” context. And if you’re intending to point out a few other such games and their seemingly extinct mechanics, that’s great, too…