Raph Koster's Blog, page 30

Deterding does philosophy

Sebastian Deterding has posted another spectacular presentation on gamification, but really on much more: the reasons why to make games, a great deconstruction of how they function from a social point of view, a lot of insights on game design in general… all in all, really wonderful.

Don't Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design
View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding

The Sunday Song: New Year's Song/1990

I wrote this in 1994. We were living in Alabama at the time, while we went to grad school. A lot of the stuff I was writing back then was kind of like "short stories as songs," very under the influence of folkies like Bill Morrissey; this song in particular is one of those.

Needless to say, it's entirely fictional; I was seven years old in 1978. It's supposed to be a tale told from the point of view of a man on New Year's Eve in 1990, looking back at 1978 and looking at where his life is on that day.

Download audio file (NewYearSong.mp3)
– download "New Year's Song/1990″ (mp3)

This was one of the tracks of an album called "The Land of Red Barns," all of which had that short story vibe, pretty much. I have never recorded decent versions of most of them, and I am making it a project to get all the couple hundred songs I have written recorded and maybe even out there somewhere, so here's this one.

Music geek stuff from here forward…:

The AT4033 for an ambient mic, towards the back of the room. Main vocals on the ATM41HE, and a Digital Reference instrument mic pointed at the guitar (the Blueridge jumbo cutaway). Guitar and vocals were recorded simultaneously to a drum loop used as a click track. The female vocal is actually my voice through the DigiTech Vocalist Live 4, recorded as an overdub. I also overdubbed the violin (played on the keyboard… couldn't get my MIDI guitar to work for some reason!) and a bass part.

Haven't gotten around to EQ'ing it or mixing it really, just tossed a bit of reverb on it here and there and panned the tracks. I did it all last night, and I really should re-do the main vocal independent of the guitar, too, so I can actually pay attention to the notes I am hitting. It's been years since I played this one.

Lyrics & chords below. The "A add E" is x07650 in tablature. I also play the F#7 as xx4320, but all the other chords are basically open, no barres up the neck or anything. It's fingerpicked, of course.

It was in the summer 1978                                                                  Bm A

I met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet                                 Bm A

It was raining outside and we both were wet                               Bm A

Her arms crossed on a plaid flannel shirt                                      E G

Legs crossed under a denim skirt                                                      E G

She was reading Tolkien and tore a page                                        E G

I wrote my number on the scrap and gave it back                     C C7 F#7 AaddE

And it's been a dozen years, been a dozen years                        Bm A E Bm A E

Funny how time moves slow                                                              A F#7 A F#7

It takes forever for faith to grow                                                       A F#7 A Fmaj7

Here's the indentation, this finger, this hand                               C G

This is where I wear my wedding band                                           E

We hiked around campus in '78

Disco tunes played on acoustic guitars

The U Mass quad, the dog, frisbees and fires

We held hands to watch Mideast news

Kissed over the gearshift in a VW

Got our diplomas and made love to the moon

Traded mortarboard caps and laughed

When mine slipped and hit her nose

Chorus

Taking the dog out for a midnight walk

We used to snowmobile along this snow

Been a dozen years with no kids to show

Dog's feeling the ice in her bones

And maybe I am too and the Hatfield whores

Won't get their 20 bucks from me no more

Chorus

It was in the summer 1978

Met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet

Are virtual worlds just for kids?

Observed:

Virtual worlds have gained great popularity among the younger audience, dwarfing their popularity for most adults.
Virtual worlds take a lot of time to engage in.
Virtual worlds for adults have become less and less like worlds and more like single-player or multiplayer games.
Adults use virtual spaces regularly, but with a very different form of identity control largely focused around real-world ties.

Assumptions:

Richard Bartle is correct in saying that virtual worlds are about self-knowledge. ("Virtual worlds are about identity" — Designing Virtual Worlds , p.433).
The Laws of Online World Design (in the humbly named "Koster's Theorem") are right that "Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc."
Child psychologists the world over are right that youth is a time of identity formation and experimentation.

Corollaries:

Users grow out of virtual worlds. They may grow out of one of them, or all of them, if they achieve sufficient self-knowledge.
Users might fall back into them if they lose their community ties or sense of identity, or have high amounts of available time.

Hypothesis:

Kids find virtual worlds, and being at the prime age for identity exploration, dive headlong into them.
Then they grow out of them, and don't need them anymore.
Most adults don't need that sort of identity exploration anymore. Some do, and some just enjoy identity exploration in its own right.
The virtual world boom was about those that did discovering this tool, using it, and then moving on.

A thought I have had for a while, but was brought briefly to mind by this post on NWN… basically, the question is whether it is in fact an inevitable destiny of the medium that it gravitate towards being for kids because of social and market pressures. This would make me sad — not because kids' worlds are bad, but because they cannot fully express the power of the medium.

Game Developers Choice Online Awards noms open!

Step one: be a professional game developer and Gamasutra.com member.

Step two: think long and hard about the best online game experiences you have seen since last June.

Step three: visit the Game Developers Choice Online Awards website and nominate them!

The categories include best online innovation, for pushing boundaries in how we play; best online visual arts; best online tech; best online game design; best online audio; best social network game; best live game; best community relations; best new online game; online games legend (for an individual's career); and Hall of Fame, which Ultima Online got last year, for a game that, well, changed the game.

Go, submit!

The seduction secrets of video game designers

I had a truly wonderful chat on the phone with Keith Stuart of The Guardian a while back, and recently an article surfaced that is the fruits of his interviewing labors: The seduction secrets of video game designers.

It's a bit more of the cogsci thing applied to games, with myself, Margaret Robertson, Jesper Juul, and a bunch of other folks all talking about what makes games tick. A neat element is some analysis at the end of four big games and why they click. I mention signaling theory in the context of Farmville — something I have been reading about some lately, most recently in the entertaining book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Playtesting versus science

…there isn't much resembling a science for designing the abstract game features, or at least not one that is well-known and accepted. Even some of the better-known designers such as Daniel Cook and Raph Koster seem to consider their work to be more about casting an enlightened eye over trial-and-error, relying on play-testers to tell them what is fun. While nobody would seriously argue that you don't need some sort of play-testing – just like graphics programming requires the programmer to actually look at what is being rendered – it seems a bit defeatist to assume that it's not theoretically possible for a knowledgeable enough designer to be able to create a compelling game experience without needing to have others try it first.

via The importance of abstraction « Tales from the Ebony Fortress.

I've certainly made games that were fun right off the bat. It's an exhilarating experience when it happens — though arguably, I played them in my head before playing them in code or on paper, in my first prototype. But I have definitely gotten prototypes to fun before showing them to other people. In fact, I generally don't show them to other people until I get them to some semblance of fun.

So sure, it's possible, and we don't need to be defeatist about it.

What I have never done is gotten them to be as fun as they can be without someone else's eyes on them.

I suspect this isn't any different from any other creative medium; writers need editors, theater needs rehearsals, etc. Workshopping and dry runs are classic tools used in the arts for centuries, regardless of how much we manage to turn art from craft into science.