On December 06 2012 05:04 Winchestro wrote:
Im curious what you mean with "value". From what i've learned about evaluation of game design descisions, its a good practice to find and define the core gameplay of a game, and then value each descision by asking yourself "How well does this support my core gameplay?". For example the core gameplay of star craft 2 could be defined as something like "Fighting with units". Then you can watch some aspect about the game, like base building or economy and ask yourself "how well the way i build my base and my buildings support fighting with units?"
I was gonna do a bigger post but I don't have the time  . I will just answer this question here.
This is really my own theory, so feel free to disagree.
Customer value is what adds money to your game, and keeps people playing it.
Examples
- Good packaging adds value, when you buy a game in a box you play it more because of sentimental value
- The amount of time spent in a game is valuable to the user, its what gives online games that feeling of "weight"
- Progression adds value, you are probably less likely to quit when you have a well geared character
- Cash items add value, when a player buys a cash item he is less likely to quit the game
- Community adds value, the more friends you have, the less likely you are gonna quit
- You get the idea
Indie games often neglect many of these, which is why most of them never get customer reattainment or make much money. They are always entirely concerned with the game mechanics on a pure level. Value is often what makes the game fun, the gear, the friends, the time you spent.
Many game designers long miss the idea of arcade games, where it was all about the game your score and nothing else. However they do not realise that other forms of value that we see in online games came into play, the money you put into the coin slot, the feeling of a big arcade machine, to the friends you make at the arcade.
sluggaslamoo wrote: Alignment of design and value, is the reason WoW was so successful. Whether or not you think its a good game, it is extremely popular. Value are things like friends, investment (money or time), progression, skill level, etc. Its interesting that Blizzard afterwards went in the opposite direction, by making BNet 2 feel like a barren wasteland, hiding stats from the players, and locking people into divisions.
EDIT: Just reworded some of my statements to sound a little less dichotomous.
|
How would you prefer to break down the immense complexity of game design in order for people who don't have your experience to orient themselves and maybe find the right specialization they can become extremely good in?
I think there are really three core issues new games designers have to address (and I stress game designer. You can be a perfectly fine game developer without doing this hardcore shit, just as you can be a perfectly good plumber, brickie or carpenter without learning architecture. So long as you don't actually try and build the blueprints of the final product, this is helpful but unnecessary. If you ever want to actually design a genuinely great game though, it's absolutely fucking mandatory.)
1) scope/rhetoric: the first is that games are bigger than big. There is so much that can be used to inform game design it's just silly and it's rooted in disciplines from every field of creative practice and academia. The best text I have encountered for demonstrating this scope is Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play which examines various interpretations of what play and games are comprised of and what they mean, using 'rhetorics' to categorise them- for example the rhetoric that games are a civilising tool that abrogate all out conflict into abstracted contests, or the rhetoric that games arise from the brain learning about its environment and recombining it in a variously random or directed fashion and so on. The work is impressive not just in its scope, which is vast, but in that it presents such a variety of different opinions and ideologies around games and play that you can't help but be shocked out of your own way of thinking, if it is at all naive (which it inevitably is). Once this shock has occured, I would hope that the designer would be more open to examing theory, methodology and practice from other disciplines and rhetorics, plus be more aware that they have their own and that it is not the only one.
2) Authorship/stewardship: A dichotomy in all game design is you are designing something (a toy, a set of rules, a scenario) which is ultimately to be experienced by another through action and interaction. This places the game designer in an interesting space. Is one conveying meaning in the traditional authorial sense, where the author wishes to communicate certain patterns of narrative through their text, or is one merely a custodian of a structure which encourages the user to create their own narrative patterns and meaning. The analogy can be made to lego bricks: does one present them as a kit that is to be assembled a certain way to be considered successful, or as a system through which the user can invent and create their own structures within the constraints of the bricks.
It is a crucial point for all potential game designers to understand this dichotomy, their status as authors on the one hand, and their role in encouraging their players to, well, play, always a creative and individual activity. The interactions between these two roles are subtle, complex and diverse. When I say they must be understood I mean not that they must be mastered and their interactions perfectly grasped. Merely that the implications and a basic understanding of the issues must be had in order to make mature and intelligently designed games. There are few if any texts that address this deeply, so to engage with the literature one must combine videogame design texts that take the authorial appraoch (guys like adams, crawford and so on) with theory of games texts (caillois, bartle etc) that emphasise the player's experience and position.
3) Internal/external: The dichotomy between physical and magic (or external/internal) constraints. I use magic in the sense of the Huizingian magic circle (not the Salen&Zimmerman magic circle), the individually defined, internally maintained rules that limit the space of play in most games. The sorts of rules that say the paint lines on the edge of a soccer field are as good as a wall, that the card with a 2 on it is worth less than the card with a 4 on it and so on. These contrast with the rules of videogames which are physical, externally imposed by someone other than the player. Of course, magic rules arise in videogames, but they are rarely anticipated or intended by the designer.
This is the burden of the modern videogame designer. Historically games self-mediate and self-adjust, ironing out problems, adding features and becoming more and more polished through a process of memetic natural selection. (memetics derives from memes, the information equivalent of the gene, which serves the same purpose in the evolution of information as the gene does in biology). Designed games, particularly the heavily regulated modern videogame with its IP controls, antimodification encryption and incredibly complex code, lack much of this capability for adaptive development in the hands of their players. Players can only consensually limit the space further (eg, no sniper rifles allowed), not adjust (sniper rifles deal 10 less damage) or expand (new weapon to balance out sniper rifles) it. In a traditional game this would typically be as easy as a few words between bouts. In videogames it is often impossible, which places incredible responsibility on a designer to get it absolutely perfect.
You don't make things perfect by throwing darts at a board, nor by failing to understand context and theory, so being a game designer is a heavy, heavy burden of responsibility to learn a lot about a lot.
Once these three concepts are understood, games design appears to be a far, far more intimidating prospect, but also a far, far more rewarding and interesting one. There are a lot more things to explore, examine, theorise upon, test and ultimately discover, and these have far greater importance than just getting the next my little pony game's metascore up a few points.
Indie games often neglect many of these, which is why most of them never get customer reattainment or make much money. They are always entirely concerned with the game mechanics on a pure level. Value is often what makes the game fun, the gear, the friends, the time you spent.
Many game designers long miss the idea of arcade games, where it was all about the game your score and nothing else. However they do not realise that other forms of value that we see in online games came into play, the money you put into the coin slot, the feeling of a big arcade machine, to the friends you make at the arcade.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. To design the game you must also understand the social context of the game, its position in space and in player's life. Though I think this would be better phrased as 'engagement' or 'positioning' rather than 'value', Slugga shows he's thinking not just about the mechanics of the game in a systems sense, but in a social sense, a kinaesthetic sense and a contextual sense. A mechanic may work better on a home computer than an arcade machine, even if the interface is identical simply because of the different contexts. A player may value a game that has a large community around it more than an identical game with no community, even if that community plays no part within the game itself. A good designer works this sort of thing into their design.
|
EPT
