Conflict is crucial to creating drama, and drama is really our #1 goal. Conflict is the intriguing, engaging heart of drama that we all connect with. Simple conflict can be created through external challenges which the protagonist must overcome. But importantly, conflict is also about the internal struggles that a protagonist or character needs to deal with while overcoming the challenges they face. The simultaneous combination of the two makes for dramatic and meaningful situations.
Challenge is the external obstacle, barrier, fight, argument, puzzle, maze or hurdle to cross
Struggle is internal, emotional, characterful, relationship obstacle that is often as big a hurdle as the challenge.
Put the two together and you have meaningful conflict which will engage, demand attention and have the potential to be remarkable.
As a bonus, leaving uncertainty in the resolution or outcome can create a sense of anticipation which will amp up the engagement.
Narrative advice isn’t always easy to apply directly to game design. Games often focus on the direct challenges and tend to leave the inner struggle on the table. Finding ways to includes more emotional struggle in your game could add stronger connections, hard choices, variation, personality, believability and depth. All things which will make your game better.
Forming opinions or proposing solutions can be easy and yet is a heavily biased process. Being determined to listen, to understand, and consider different perspectives before you formulate your opinions or solutions will lead to better ideas.
Listening isn’t always easy, people present their opinions, or solutions and often poorly communicated views rather than sharing the core of the topic. Listening is an active process, that requires engagement, digging and exploration. It can take time and persistence.
Listening can trigger your personal defenses, if you feel or have a sense of responsibility for the topic, how can you impartially listen?
We love new combination words, often meaningless or confusing to outsiders. However, Tokenomics is an example of a great combination which has literal elements as well as emotional value.
What IS Tokenomics?
Tokenomics studies the factors that drive the demand for tokens.
It includes:
• math • supply vs. demand • incentives • value accrual • Human behavior & game theory
“A great film demonstrates a profound sense of place or character… A great film is one that I want to dissect.”
Author Laird Barron
Sense of place: “… is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging.
Wikipedia
Can rpg game design create a depth of place or character which sustains player re-visits or multiple engagements? Maybe treat a location or place more like an NPC; provide a little backstory, development, a connection & history. Consider its influcence and role. How does place create drama? Does it reveal something that advances the plot or changes the character (viewer or player)?
“I learned about “iconography” from working with Rob Schrab for several years. In cartooning, you have to draw a certain combination of lines before the audience is going to universally recognize what you’ve drawn.
“If I draw a cylinder, I can tell you it’s a banana, but I can’t make you think “banana” on your own unless I make it yellow, taper the ends and give it some curvature. To further extend this metaphor: Sometimes bananas are green in real life. If I make a green, tapered, curved cylinder, does it look like a banana? It looks like a pepper. You can jump up and down and scream about how you just drew a perfectly good banana, because it looks just as much like a real banana as a yellow one (student filmmaker), but I’m telling you, dude, it’s a fucking pepper, UNTIL you put more time and energy into giving it OTHER recognizable banana qualities- for instance, drawing it half peeled. Okay, now it’s a green banana. You blew my mind.
When creating we like to be different, unique or ‘creative’, unless it can be recognized as a banana it can fall flat. We suffer from the curse of knowledge, we know if it is a banana but the player/audience doesn’t unless it looks like one.
You Didn’t Understand The Problem You Were Solving
You Asked Your Friends What They Thought
You Listened To Users Instead Of Watching Them
You Didn’t Test Your Riskiest Assumption
You Had A “Bob The Builder” Mentality
“…Sharon says it’s as simple as validating, or invalidating, three core pieces of the plan: The problem (Is the app solving a problem people care about?), the market (Are there enough people who have this problem?), and the product (Is our product solving this problem for this market?).
20 February, 2016 at 5:54 am · Filed under game design
The tragedy of the commons is an economics theory, according to which individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group’s long-term best interests by depleting some common resource.
Take an example of overfishing. Every fisherman knows that if there is too much fishing then eventually fish stocks will run out. If all the fishermen could agree to fish at sustainable levels then the fish stocks could last forever. However, if one fisherman starts to overfish then eventually the fish stocks will run out.
When this happens the others might as well overfish as well to get as much as possible before the stocks run out. It only takes someone to start overfishing to mean that it is then logical for everyone else to overfish. The first person might start because they think that just them overfishing will not make any difference but once they start then everyone else soon joins them and the stocks run out.
This is similar to the prisoners’ dilemma. However in the prisoners’ dilemma individuals cannot communicate and so, if they act logically, then they won’t co-operate with the other players and will end up with a worse outcome. In the tragedy of the commons everyone can communicate but it still leads to a situation where a collective resource is overused.
There are some great gameplay opportunities lurking in this kind of model.
Especially where information is limited in some way, and there are competing personal goals that are not always clear to all players.
Should game session length mirror the length of ad breaks on TV?
“While 50 percent of DVR users would routinely skip ads, “the number is declining now,” said Poltrack, “because they’re too busy on their phones to fast-forward through the ads,” given that two-thirds of users watch TV while also engaged with a second screen.
b. if that’s not true, it’s unlikely that this person will remain your customer.
If you need to explain to a customer that he’s wrong, that everyone else has no problem, that you have tons of happy customers who were able to successfully read the instructions, that he’s not smart enough or persistent enough or handsome enough to be your customer, you might be right. But if you are, part b kicks in and you’ve lost him.
If you find yourself litigating, debating, arguing and most of all, proving your point, you’ve forgotten something vital: people have a choice, and they rarely choose to do business with someone who insists that they are wrong.
By all means, fire the customers who aren’t worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you’ve just started the firing process.
PS here’s a great way around this problem: Make sure that the instruction manual, the website and the tech support are so clear, so patient and so generous that customers don’t find themselves being wrong.
Not everyone who talks about projects are customers (as defined by them having spend money on the product), however they have an impact on brand, community and customers. Understanding how you deal with the customers & community around a brand is a big deal to live service products.
1. Begin with a provocative set-up 2. Explain how something happens, either to the main character or the environment 3. In one or two sentences, tell how the plot thickens. The stakes are raised when tension appears 4. Mentally analyze the reaction of the audience and adjust accordingly. If the listeners aren’t engaged by this time, strengthen the narrative 5. Build a vision of a scene that involves the senses: sight, sound, taste, vision, and touch 6. Weave a climax that produces an “aha” moment for the audience 7. End when the story is resolved 8. Record your story. To improve your storytelling abilities, record yourself reciting an original fable
It makes no sense to disdain the choices your customers make. If you can’t figure out how to empathize and eagerly embrace the things they embrace, you are letting everyone down with your choice. Sure, someone needs to make this, but it doesn’t have to be you.
If you treat the work as nothing but an obligation, you will soon be overwhelmed by competition that sees it as a privilege and a calling
Could be useful when thinking about presenting choices to the player in negotiations, where the information we provide doesn’t have to be ‘fair’. In most circumstances you want the UI information provided to the player to fairly represent the data and encourage a reasonable skilled choice from the player. In negotiations, or in situations of political will, the ‘character’ wants to manipulate the player and can lie, cheat and skew the information that they present to the player. It is then up to the player to use their knowledge, skill, perception etc to understand the situation in front of them.
“Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It” – Daniel Kahneman
Every choice takes some mental energy. Make the choices you offer the player ones that matter and that they should care about. Don’t make them burn energy on thinks that don’t matter or aren’t meaningful.
The only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose
22 March, 2015 at 3:39 am · Filed under game design
Thinking about the possible roles in a multiplayer game with a more political aspect. Player’s will need to organize, recruit and remind players of their goals etc. This matches the real world role of a whip.
A whip is an official in a political party whose primary purpose is to ensure party discipline in a legislature. Whips are a party’s “enforcers,” who typically offer inducements and threaten party members to ensure that they vote according to the official party policy.
A whip’s role is also to ensure that the elected representatives of their party are in attendance when important votes are taken. The usage comes from the hunting term “whipping in,” i.e. preventing hounds from wandering away from the pack. In the United States there are legislatures at the local (city councils, town councils, county boards, etc.), state, and federal levels. The federal legislature (Congress), state legislatures, and many county and city legisltive bodies are divided along party lines and have whips
“Because there’s so much awesome stuff that’s happening on YouTube, the videos that people are posting, the amazing creations that people are making on Minecraft, all the League of Legends stuff – this didn’t exist before. I think the innovation is just happening in a place where it might be a little bit outside of the control of the developer.”
“That’s been really the challenge that I’ve been suffering: how can we look at the business differently rather than thinking about ARPU’s, what the numbers are, what knobs to turn etc? Instead, we should be thinking about what experiences can we deliver that are going to delight users. The crazy thought that I was giving with the talk today was I believe that there are going to be companies out there that really practice and really understand the value of user experience over time.
I can tell you that Steam users have put an aggregate of about 3.8 billion hours into Dota 2. I can tell you that Steam users tend to put nearly 600 percent more time into the multiplayer mode on Modern Warfare 2 than the single player mode.
snippets of cloud 