Handy Vandal's Almanac

Keith Stuart recently posted a wide range of answers to the question of where good game ideas come from. Excerpt:

Art has proved a fecund source of game ideas. Tetsuya Mizuguchi was inspired by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to create Rez; Ken Levine drew on the Art Deco movement for Bioshock; Uncharted co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand looked at the works of Victorian painters such as David Roberts and Caspar David Friedrich for the exotic locations that Nathan Drake discovers. And countless dungeon designers have looked at the complex works of MC Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for their labyrinthine environments.

– Keith Stuart @ The Guardian

The Entertainment Software Association recently announced the recipients of scholarships for college courses in video game design and related topics:

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) Foundation awarded 30 students with scholarships for the 2011-12 academic year recently. The purpose is to expand educational opportunities for aspiring game designers and impassion the next generation of industry innovators. Totaling $90,000, 15 college students currently enrolled in video game-related programs, as well as 15 graduating high school seniors aspiring to pursue a degree in video game design or development received scholarships ….

This year’s grantees hail from a diverse collection of 21 colleges and universities from across the nation, including DePaul University, Rochester Institute of Technology, George Mason University, and Drexel University. Additionally, this year’s recipients have academic and artistic concentrations in a wide array of video game-related fields, consisting of computer science and programming, software engineering, graphic design, animation and digital entertainment ….

The wide spectrum of schools and concentrations reflects a growing trend among institutions of higher education to offer video game-related programs ….

Generating over $25 billion in revenue in 2010, the video game industry has proven to be one of America’s fastest-growing business sectors ….

– Game Industry News

Congratulations to the recipients!

See also Entertainment Software Association Foundation.

Shibumi (the game) is the subject of the Shibumi Challenge, an upcoming experiment in automated game design.

The overall aim is to compare the dynamics of evolutionary versus Monte Carlo search methods for game design, and to gauge the usefulness of the computer as a creative collaborator in the game design process.

The ideal game system to test these ideas would be:

• Tightly constrained and with a small, clearly defined rule set.
• Simple enough that most of the rule combination space could be searched.
• Complex enough to provide a range of interesting games.
• Small enough that its board state would fit into a single integer (for efficient implementation).
• Novel enough that its search space was largely unexplored.

While I was looking for such a system, abstract gamer Tom Gilchrist mentioned a concept from Japanese aesthetics called shibui. Shibui objects balance simplicity with complexity; they may initially seem deceptively plain, but will reveal hidden depths and become more interesting the more time is spent with them.

– Cameron Browne @ BoardGameGeek

See also Shibui @ Wikipedia.

Kyle Bean has created a series of “weapons made from harmless materials” for CUT magazine.

These images have a playful quality — playful about violence — which makes me think about game design, and the pleasures of violent videogames.

CUT magazine: ‘Soft Guerilla’

A series of weapons made from harmless materials for a feature article centred around the topic of ‘Guerilla Gardening’ and ‘Yarn Bombing’.

Photography: Sam Hofman

– Kyle Bean

JoelE recently posted some thoughts on “the differences in feel between Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2” which I found interesting, even though I haven’t played those games.

I am particularly impressed by the game JoelE invented to demonstrate his thesis:

To explore what kind of effect secondary military objectives have on games, I made a simple game that can be played on a chess board. Here are the rules:

• 1s can move 1 space
• 2s can move 2 spaces
• 3s can move 3 spaces etc.
• Green spaces upgrade from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc.
• Each upgrade space can be only used once per piece.
• To take a piece, move into it.
• The game is lost when all pieces are gone

Here is a picture of the starting position of the game:

If you guys want to try this game, and see how the upgrade spaces affect it, you can play on a chess board, using pawns for level 1, horses for level 2, bishops for level 3, queen for level 4, and king for level 5. You may need to improvise if you run out of pieces.

– JoelE @ teamliquid.net

This is brilliant: re-purposing a chessboard as logic analyzer for computer game strategies.

“Landscape architecture … reminds me of how game design — not just spatial design, but the designs of rules and systems — can shape player behavior.”

Tom Armitage recently posted some interesting observations on landscape architecture and game design:

Above the village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds, stands Broadway Tower. It’s a three-story-high structure, with three turrets: a folly which the Arts and Crafts movement would later use as a holiday retreat. And yet when it was built, in the 18th century, its purpose was not to be an attractive tower to overlook the village.

Rather, it was designed to look good from 22 miles away, from the grounds of the Earl of Coventry. Lovely as it is, its real job is to be a romantic piece of background scenery on the horizon.

It was built by the architect James Wyatt, under the supervision of Capability Brown, who was perhaps the foremost landscape architect in English history. Brown’s work reshaped gardens and grounds into carefully designed views for the owners of houses, and defined what landscape architecture itself could be.

We talk a lot about the influence of architecture on game design …. We can all see the influence on games of a medium in which geometric form and structure is used to influence behavior and manipulate the movement of people through space. It feels like there’s an obvious comparison between architecture and the design of three-dimensional game levels.

But I think landscape gardening is perhaps a much more interesting comparison point for the structure of game spaces, and one that is oft-neglected.

Landscape architecture shapes the behavior and intent of its observers without walls or markers. Instead, it focuses on surprise and delight: as your eye follows the gentle slope of a path down to a lake, it should feel like you discovered this. It feels like a coincidence of marvellous proportions, a secret that you discovered, that the eye is led so gracefully. In fact, it’s a carefully designed experience.

This reminds me of how game design — not just spatial design, but the designs of rules and systems — can shape player behavior.

– Tom Armitage @ Kill Screen

Some thoughts on game balance, from a recent article by Adam Robert Thomas:

In general, video games strive for a sense of balance in terms of difficulty. The game needs to be challenging enough that the player is engaged and feels like they’re struggling with a sense of danger that provides tension, yet it also needs to not be so hard that they become frustrated and walk away. This is of course represented in what developer’s like to call difficulty curves.

– The Golden(Eye) Rule of Enemy Design! by Adam Robert Thomas

“PRACTICE is an unprecedented gathering of professional game designers that takes a rigorous look at the ideas and methods of game design. Bringing together veteran designers from across computer games, video games, paper games, and sports, PRACTICE takes a close look at the nuts and bolts of game design.”

PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail
October 28 – 30, 2011
NYU Game Center
721 Broadway, 9th Floor Lobby
New York, NY 10003

Friday 10/28, Reception at 7pm
Saturday & Sunday 10/29-10/30, Lectures/Panels at 9am

Featured Speakers:

• Reiner Knizia – Celebrated board game designer
• Steve Gaynor – Senior Level Designer on BioShock Infinite
• Chris Trottier – Creative Director at Zynga
• Rogers Redding – NCAA Football Secretary-Rules Editor

– PRACTICE home page
– Buy tickets

Via Boston Post Mortem

“A team of students and faculty from Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College is designing and building a groundbreaking computer game to help young people improve their everyday skills in self-control.”

“The use of physiological controllers in a personalized game platform allows us to help our patients help themselves in a new way,” says Dr. Laurence Sugarman, director of the Center for Applied Psychophysiology and Self-Regulation in RIT’s College of Health Sciences and Technology.

RIT game design and development students Ivy Ngo, Kenneth Stewart and John McDonald will work under the supervision of Sugarman; Stephen Jacobs, associate professor of RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media; and Robert Rice, assistant professor at St. John Fisher College’s Mental Health Counseling Program.

The game starts with assessments that help the players learn about and describe their anxieties and repetitive behavior by turning the players into game characters. Using physiological sensors that are built into the game hardware, players then learn how to monitor the physiological manifestations of anxiety and stress, or what is commonly called their fight or flight response. Finally, the players use those same sensors as controllers to move themselves through the game by monitoring and controlling their characters and the stress responses they represent.

“The game was inspired by clients and will involve client input and feedback throughout the development process,” says Rice.

Sugarman says games involving physiological health are newly emerging, yet none combines aspects of assessment, cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback in a creative and customizable setting. This game allows a unique extension of the therapist’s role that provides a fun, engaging platform for therapeutic change, while collecting data on psychophysiological change.

“Mind Media B.V. has also generously loaned, at no cost, the NeXus-10 Biofeedback hardware and Biotrace software used in this project,” says Sugarman.
Aug. 18, 2011
– Scott Bureau @ rit.edu

David Jaffe delivered the PAX Prime 2011 keynote address, recounting some of his experiences and sharing lessons learned in the game design industry.

He began gearing up for his next big thing, which was called Heartland. He described the game as Red Dawn meets Saving Private Ryan, and Jaffe said that he wanted it to serve as a political allegory while also achieving “the Holy Grail of game design,” which is to make players cry upon completion for the right reasons.

The problem with this game, Jaffe said, was that he was making it in order to chase after the next big thing, instead of following his passion. The game was eventually given the green light, but it didn’t take long for members of the team to be reassigned to work on Sony’s reboot of the Warhawk franchise. Jaffe said that if he were honestly in love with Heartland, he would have never let this happen to his team.

– Tom Magrino @ GameSpot

“Your life is going by so quick, the only thing you can do is the thing you have to do.”

– David Jaffe