Handy Vandal's Almanac

This might be useful as a game design paradigm:

Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth and the fate of others in society. The authors of the new study are theoretical physicists and chemists at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. In nature, bacteria live in large colonies whose numbers may reach up to 100 times the number of people on earth. Many bacteria respond to extreme stress — such as starvation, poisoning and irradiation — by creating spores. Alternately the bacteria may ‘choose’ to enter a state called competence where they are able to absorb the nutrients from their newly deceased comrades. ‘Each bacterium in the colony communicates via chemical messages and performs a sophisticated decision making process using a specialized network of genes and proteins. Modeling this complex interplay of genes and proteins by the bacteria enabled the scientists to assess the pros and cons of different choices in game theory. It pays for the individual cell to take the risk and escape into competence only if it notices that the majority of the cells decide to sporulate,’ explained Onuchic. ‘But if this is the case, it should not take this chance because most of the other cells might reach the same conclusion and escape from sporulation.’

- Slashdot

See also:

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Bacteria

Veteran game design Ernest Adams lists some of his favorite examples of bad game design.

Here, he quotes an example provided by Kris Kelly:

Teleporting NPCs

Kris: “I can only think of one occurrence of this, but I’m sure it happens in other games. In Neverwinter Nights 2, there’s a large battle involving fire giants and a red dragon. You are expected to fight on the side of one or the other but I, being a sneaky type, decided to start the battle on the side of the red dragon and then sneak out while he was fighting the giants and raid his lair.

“I wander over to his abode, loot sack at the ready, only to be confronted by a fully-healed un-harrassed-by-giants red dragon who is hell bent on fighting me, I beat him up a bit (and he reciprocates), then decide to go back to the giant fight (because it was easier) and there he is again, fighting the giants and fully healed once more.”

Look: a dragon is either guarding its lair or it’s fighting giants somewhere else. Not both. Clearly the designers implemented two dragons and led the player to believe they were both the same. Not fair and not fun.

- Ernest Adams @ Gamasutra

Not everyone is content to play commercial games on commercial game servers: some enterprising individuals are motivated to set up private servers.

For legions of gamers, entering Azeroth or the Kingdom of Khanduras is a chance to shake off the rules and conventions of the real world, and immerse themselves in fantasy.

In these mythical lands almost anything goes.

But for a select few, even the freedoms offered by these imaginary worlds are too restrictive.

These gamers turn to the world of the “private server”, privately-hosted versions of commercially-available games where the creator’s rules no longer apply.

For every game with an online community, it is likely that scores or perhaps even hundreds of these exist.

There is no official tally because such servers are usually under threat of closure from games firms. But a quick web search will turn up advertisements for hundreds.

- Nick Ryan: The closed world of private game servers @ BBC

The article goes on to note that “the top games companies have been less than impressed by such developments,” and that some companies have taken legal action against unauthorized private servers.

Via Slashdot.

Unreal developers will love these online video tutorials … and — of course — the free SDK:

UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.

- Unreal Development Kit @ udk.com

- Video tutorials @ epicgames.com

Via Slashdot.

Paul Spinrad has posted some interesting observations about storytelling, simulations, and reality — concepts which are directly relevant to game design:

[S]torytelling, like language itself, is a compression scheme — ideally, you leave out everything that doesn’t matter or doesn’t in some way contribute to the whole. If you’re decompressing the story — reading, listening to, or watching it — the first thing you need to know is, is this true? You need to know where to put it in your head, whether to incorporate it into the model you use to navigate the real world, or whether it should go into the “not true” bin. Our survival depends on this distinction.

Meanwhile, on the storyteller’s side, there are many reasons to blur true and not-true — particularly, I think, if a story is being told for profit or to maintain of power relationships. Stories interpreted as real demand more attention and more likely to influence people’s actions than fictional stories.

- Paul Spinrad @ Boing Boing

Postscript:
“I think the ‘based one a true story’ line puts the audience in a sort of voyeur mode, the same place our brains go as we slow down and rubber-neck out of our car windows as we drive by accidents. Wanting, hoping, desiring a glimpse of a bloody body or gore spilled out on the pavement.”
- cmyk @ Boing Boing

Nadya Direkova — currently a Senior Interaction Designer at Google, previously with Razorfish — discusses the application of game design techniques to web page design:

This talk illustrates how game design thinking provides new tools for the design of non-game products and campaigns. We discuss four ways in which game-design techniques enrich interactive design:

1. Understanding that in our ultimate goal as designers is to make the user happy. Games accept this by default.
2. Understanding a product or message better by imagining it as a game. If you have a message you want people to find and interact with, invite them to play with it!
3. Conveying a message by building it into an advergame.
4. Using game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.

- Nadya Direkova @ idxa.org

Via The Acagamic.