Archive for game design
27 May, 2012 at 6:18 pm · Filed under game design ·Tagged design language
The Ultimatum Game: 2 players – 1 proposes a split or deal, if the 2nd player accepts it then the deal goes through, if the 2nd refuses the deal is off and both parties gain nothing.
“The Ultimatum Game has been pointed to as a way of showing that humans are economically irrational. Why do people reject an offer of 25% of the total pot? If the pot is $100 then they are choosing between getting $25 or nothing at all. So why do they choose nothing at all?
The answer seems to be that people generally find offers below 30% to be insulting. It’s insulting that the other person should suggest such a derisory sum, even when it’s free money. So they prefer to have nothing and punish the other person’s greed. And remember the other person is losing $75 in this case whereas I’m only losing $25.”
http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/05/the-ultimatum-game.php
“"Cutting off the nose to spite the face" is an expression used to describe a needlessly self-destructive over-reaction to a problem: "Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face" is a warning against acting out of pique, or against pursuing revenge in a way that would damage oneself more than the object of one’s anger.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_the_face
In isolation this mechanic is of limited play value. If there is an opportunity to build up a picture of a player’s personality, then the Ultimatum Game could be more interesting. E.g. in games of ongoing negotiation and diplomacy.
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15 May, 2012 at 5:19 am · Filed under game design ·Tagged design language
A simple escalating risk and reward mechanic designed to draw you in, challenge you to know when to stop or lose all in a final ‘step too far’.
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10 May, 2012 at 4:39 am · Filed under game design ·Tagged design language
A game feature, carefully designed to bring the player back to the game on a regular or agreed cadence over and over.
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10 May, 2012 at 4:04 am · Filed under game design, quote
“Where TV and video games diverge dramatically is in the way they work as a medium. TV has three core features – it’s scheduled, it’s broadcast and it’s passive. Video games do none of these things.”
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-05-09-tv-is-better-than-games
Appointment mechanics bring an element of schedule to social games, which in turn creates greater engagement. This parallel’s some of the benefits of TV’s more rigid schedule. DVR’s and on demand delivery start to erode TV’s fixed schedule, and perhaps reduce the benefits of simultaneous revelation and social opportunities.
“In much the same way, we can tweet about TV and everyone else who is watching the same thing at the same time can GET INVOLVED IN THE CONVERSATION. This is social proof, and social proof on a grand scale. This, again, is behavioral economics.”
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20 April, 2012 at 3:00 pm · Filed under design, game design, quote
“Usefulness is best achieved by thinking about everything as user experience. If you start with “useful” as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first. And you’re less inclined to get lost in your own jargon, product-development silos, or legacy.Usefulness is best achieved by thinking about everything as user experience. If you start with “useful” as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first. And you’re less inclined to get lost in your own jargon, product-development silos, or legacy.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669503/user-experience-is-the-heart-of-any-company-how-do-you-make-it-top-priority
“Being useful doesn’t always mean asking the focus group. It’s fair to say that customers don’t always know what they want. Customers now play an increasingly equal, participatory, and critical role in brand and business. But co-creation should not be accepted as a default solution to every challenge. Even when consumers do know what they want, empowering them to create it might not result in the most impressive solution. Observing consumers is usually a more effective way of discovering unmet or poorly met needs, and can reveal hacked solutions that suggest real opportunities of how to be useful in the world.”
Be careful to avoid the ‘faster horse’ answer.
http://genecloud.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/turn-feedback-into-inspiration/
Think how you can be useful in areas that are not necessarily in your core but still drive customers to your business.
- Look for ways that customers are navigating around obstacles and build a business out of that.
- Consider how you can connect your customers directly to one another. And have them create mutual value.
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4 April, 2012 at 3:10 pm · Filed under design, game design, quote ·Tagged product owner
“We’re looking for people who can say, ‘I have a product idea, I can think through a need, I can think through a customer base, build something, ship it, and then iterate based on how it’s being used.’”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669445/how-facebook-finds-the-best-design-talent-and-keeps-them-happy
- A product idea
- An understanding of the need it fills
- Targeted for a customer
- Ability to build it
- Leadership to deliver
- Perspective to know when to stop, and finish it
- Collect and understand feedback
- Iterate and respond that feedback
- Learn
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29 April, 2011 at 12:01 pm · Filed under game design, publishing, quote
“The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that if authors could infuse their stories with enough "semblance of truth," readers would suspend their disbelief of the clearly fabricated tale.”
and advice on using suspension of disbelief in convincing others in business and life;
“In order to inspire others and convince them to suspend their disbelief, you must celebrate, through language, the idea above yourself. Treat the idea as if it were a character you were embodying on the stage. Compelling others is "a function of your capacity to imagine and to subsume one’s own ego in favor of whatever character or idea it is that you’re trying to portray," says Wright. "The idea becomes larger and more powerful than you and there is then hopefully some type of levitation that happens and the story touches people."
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38129
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22 March, 2011 at 1:46 pm · Filed under design, game design, life, quote
Understand and empathize with consumers of your product to stimulate innovation.
“Internalizing the values of your users makes innovation easier, but getting there is hard …the goal is not to ask them what we should design, but to gain insight, absorb it, and translate it into a language our clients understand. Without that insight, any attempt at innovation is no better than a wild guess.”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663453/true-innovation-starts-with-the-user
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16 March, 2011 at 8:20 am · Filed under game design, life, quote ·Tagged anticipation
Comedian Jack Benny: ‘When you are speaking, timing is not so much knowing when to speak, but knowing when to pause’
Seven types of pause:
- Phrasing: taken whenever a punctuation mark is used.
- Breathing: to enable breath to be renewed.
- Rhythmic: associated with the rhythm of speech
- Underlining: used after a word or phrase to let its importance sink in.
- Emotional: used during emotional passages to enhance the effect.
- Confident: used at the beginning of a speech to emphasise the speaker’s authority and confidence. (and create anticipation)
- Emphatic: used before a word or phrase to make it stand out. (or tease)
http://www.speaklikeapro.co.uk/Power_Of_Pausing.htm
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9 February, 2011 at 9:24 pm · Filed under design, game design, quote
Get out there and observe and talk to your audience.
“In our socially-mediated world, marketers must place greater emphasis on understanding their audience as people rather than as consumers.
To build a social brand, marketers need to discover who these individuals really are. This requires research that can elicit stories about how people feel about their world, the subtext of which defines their identities.”
http://www.allfacebook.com/how-to-target-social-tribes-on-facebook-2011-02
IDEO say it is human-centered;
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, president and CEO
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9 February, 2011 at 9:10 pm · Filed under game design, quote
Online games provide many forms of structure, language, opportunity for ritual and belief systems.
Here are five things that characterize a social tribe:
- Possession of a unique revelation: An ideology that in some way rejects the mainstream and is symbolic of an uncompromising idealism and certainty that is expressed with romantic passion and cold logic.
- A belief system: A mythology about how the world works and how tribe members, and the tribe, can maximize “self” in relation to that world.
- Ritual: The creation of recurrent, exaggerated or stylized behavioral routines that represent the tribe’s belief system; this helps establish institutional memory.
- Distinctive lexicon: A characteristic lingo and a set of emblems to display membership.
- Boundaries: A pseudo-speciation that defines where the tribe begins and ends — i.e., the “other” is not like me.
http://www.allfacebook.com/how-to-target-social-tribes-on-facebook-2011-02
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1 January, 2011 at 10:23 am · Filed under game design, publishing, quote
Dis`cov`er`a`bil´i`ty
The quality of being discoverable.
A critical issue for all digital publishing.
“9. Discoverability becomes HOT – Amid glut of content, discovery will become the new obsession of publishing. Publishers of all sizes will begin to realize obscurity is the biggest threat facing their business. Solution: maximize availability of product, leverage metadata, create books that resonate with readers, enlist fans as extension of sales force.”
Mark Coker founder of Smashwords
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/publishing-predictions-for-2011-from-smashwords_b18421
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31 December, 2010 at 5:26 pm · Filed under game design, life, publishing, quote ·Tagged rewards
Two of the ten point in the HUGHTRAIN Mk II, that are directly relevant to game design.
“1. The market for something to believe in is infinite.
We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary. We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.
“7. Your job is no longer about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synapses in your customer’s brain as possible.
The more synapses that are fired off, the more dopamines are released. Dopamines are seriously addictive. The more dopamines you release, the more the customer will come back for more. Your customer thinks he is coming back to you for sane, rational, value-driven reasons. He is wrong. He is coming back to feed.
http://gapingvoid.com/2006/11/23/the-hughtain-mark-two/
1 – get the subject, setting, story and situations right, so that people care about them and they have meaning.
7 – dopamine is at the heart of lots of human behaviour. Get your rewards paying out in dopamine, and create anticipation for rewards & outcomes to pay out more dopamine in advance.
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31 December, 2010 at 10:19 am · Filed under game design, quote ·Tagged rewards
“… not only do US college students have higher self-esteem than previous generations, they now value self-esteem boosts more than sex, food, receiving a salary payment, seeing a friend or having an alcoholic drink.”
And a note of caution about how you can become addicted to rewarding behaviours
“…’Of course we should enjoy the good things in life, but not so much that we want them more than we like them,’ Bushman’s team concluded. ‘We do not want to become addicted to self-esteem or other rewards, or we will become "slaves" to them, to borrow the words of Fritz Perls”
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/12/better-than-sex-us-college-students.html
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19 December, 2010 at 12:57 pm · Filed under game design, quote
“Researchers Andrew Przybylski and Scott Rigby, who work with game designers, believe people are motivated to play a particular video game based on how well it satisfies three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence deals with a sense of control, mastery, and feeling like you’re making things happen the way you want. A well-designed difficulty curve makes us feel an ever-increasing sense of competence, as does appropriate matchmaking in multiplayer games. Games high in autonomy give you the opportunity to make many meaningful decisions about what goals to pursue and how to pursue them. Finally, relatedness is concerned with a feeling that you matter to other players through social interactions with them.”
via http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/12/15/the-psychology-of-shooters-online/
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