Funny cartoon on game design

[douga]

Funny and informative

 

http://www.wimp.com/gameschoice/

[Komag]

quite long, but yeah, I can see how most "choices" really do boil down to problems really. I think the Sim games are a good example of pure choice - just build and grow how you want!

[jdude]

I thought it was interesting and fun to watch. I've never seen this site before but it looks pretty cool as well.

[Vadrosaul]

Every gamer with a grain of worthwhile criticism on this particular topic should be exposed, nay, forced to play Galactic Civilizations 2, as it quite possibly has the widest array of problems & choices for a game developed in the last five years. When creating your galaxy, there is a kind of pseudoscale of problem – choice, based on how many victory options you enable.

[Domarius]

Zelda Ocarina of Time - Every second NPC you talk to does that "fake choice" thing. Why????????? Why did they bother putting that in the game??? I feel like a trained animal every time I choose "Yes" in that game, once I knew what the outcome was going to be every time.

[demagogue]

That brings up the point that half the problem is an AI issue.

 

If the AI can't play along with a PC's "choice", about the only things you can make meaningful choices about have to be material things, apples or oranges, or building things ... free form stuff like Sims, which doesn't lend itself to much drama if NPCs aren't really involved in it (short of the narrative-tree problem he kept showing, where you script a dedicated narrative-path for each chioce).

 

And of course NPCs can't play along because their AI usually boils down to either flat out stim-response stuff, or at best some economic algorithm where they just do whatever maximizes some variable ... which throws the gameplay right back into the problem sphere, once you realize how you're really "interacting" with the NPCs.

 

If you wanted an NPC to play along with a choice in a procedural way, you'd have to get it to recognize what the choice means to it in more semantic ways, which I gather from other stuff I've read pretty quickly descends into serious crimes of memesis or incoherence. But at least that's where you might want to focus your attention if you wanted to get interesting choice opportunities into games.

 

........................................

 

Edit: Another thing... Why is it that so many people talking critically about pushing the boundaries of games has to be either writing a technical academic article, a piecemeal blog, or making a quirky webcomic? I'm reading about the Interwar Paris art scene -- Picasso and Dali and such (my avatar gives it away!)-- and those guys knew how to techncially innovate their art. And half of it was just their take-no-prisoners attitude, which I'm not feeling with our scene, and this reminded me of that. The ideas are interesting, but it needs ... something.

 

Some if it is just that these guys are clearly milking Yahtzee's schtick and need to work on their act. It's a start, anyway.

Edited March 21, 2009 by demagogue

[Crispy]

You might want to look into the "art games" scene. Jason Rohrer's games, for example. Jonathon Blow's Braid. Both have their fans and detractors.

 

I'm not convinced that Rohrer's small-scale efforts can be successfully scaled up into a decently-sized game without completing destroying the point of them, but I'd be interested in being proven wrong. Braid might demonstrate a way forward, but I can't say as I haven't played it yet (it releases on PC at the end of this month - it's been on XBox 360 for yonks, but I don't have a 360). From the sound of it, Braid may be a bit of a once-off in any case. We'll see though; I'm sure Blow intends to release another game at some point.