“Every form of media in some sense has [an] ability to displace people in their imagination into some other place … when we see our kids playing these games, we don’t really think of it as the same with reading, but in some sense, people get just as absorbed in books as they do in these games.”
– Will Wright
Via Rock Paper Shotgun.
Wolfshead recently published a thoughtful and extensive essay 
about risk, skill, and related topics in game design. Here’s an excerpt:
For risk to be leveraged effectively as an element of game design, there has to be some way for the player to mitigate that risk or risk becomes an arbitrary punishment. The way to do this is to ensure that your game requires skill on the part of your players. Without the requirement for skill all you have left is a game of chance where luck or a random number generator determines the outcome — not the abilities and choices of the player.
The art of game design is knowing how to calibrate the perfect balance between risk and reward to create adequate challenges that entice players to improve their skills.
– Wolfshead @ Wolfshead Online
Brian Green adds this insightful comment:
I think Richard Bartle said it best in that this issue is like the eternal struggle to get children to eat vegetables instead of candy. There are things that are good in the short term (candy, easy gameplay) and things that are good in the long term (vegetables, a sense of wonder). As adults, we understand that it’s important to eat vegetables to maintain our health, but kids would eat candy until it nearly killed them if they could.
The struggle is to convince players that they should seek out things that are good in the long term. However, this is about as easy as convincing kids that eating vegetables is the best option. The worst option, as Bartle quipped, is to try to serve candy-coated vegetables.
Consider children playing peek-a-boo: we want to be scared (but not too scared!), and then reassured that everything is okay.
Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Sim City and Spore will be co-producing a new program on CurrentTV called “Bar Karma” –
Will Wright’s new TV venture makes producers out of the audience
Anchored by technology that Wright has developed exclusively for Current TV, the series, tentatively titled Bar Karma, will enlist viewers to join an online global community at a special web destination entitled, “Current TV’s Creation Studios.” At this virtual television studio, users will participate in the development of all creative and technical aspects of production and communicate directly with the producers of the show.
– Evan Narcisse @ IFC
Further evidence of what I have been saying for years: computers, games, movies, and television will merge into a new hybrid technologies involving large numbers of people, around the clock and around the world.
“Games are an art form. I proudly wear my scarlet letter — A for art!”
– Warren Spector, keynote speaker at PAX 2010
Warren Spector is lead developer of Epic Mickey, a videogame that is “part of an effort by The Walt Disney Company to re-brand the Mickey Mouse character by moving away from his current squeaky clean image and reintroducing the mischievous side of his personality.”
Screenshots from the opening sequence: the sorceror retires for the night …
Mickey faces the consequences of his actions:
I was fascinated by Fantasia — especially The Sorceror’s Apprentice — at an early age. So yes, I’m curious what Epic Mickey has to offer.
The Exterminator’s Want-Ad is a wickedly clever short story by Bruce Sterling (one of my favorite writers) about a dystopian future where political prisoners are sentenced to role playing games. Here’s a taste, for inspiration:
When we weren’t planting beans in the former back yard, or digging mold out of the attic insulation, we had to do rehab therapy. This was our prisoner consciousness-building encounter scheme. The regime made us play social games. We weren’t allowed computer games in prison: just dice, graph paper, and some charcoal sticks that we made ourselves.
So, we played this elaborate paper game called “Dungeons and Decency.” Three times a week. The lady warden was our Dungeon Master.
– Link
What if William Shakespeare had been a game designer?
Wall Street Journal: You mentioned Shakespeare as one of your interests during your MFA [in theater directing]. What do you think he would have been like as a game designer?
Jonathan Knight: Shakespeare would have been on the forefront. He was an innovator and not just a great story-teller. Arguably, he’s more of a medium innovator. He borrowed heavily. “Hamlet” is a complete rip-off of a story on the prince of Denmark. Some people think he lifted it from a work that actually came between the two stories.
He was such a master at harnessing the new. For him, the new medium was open air theater on the south side of the Thames. He solidified a big portion of the English language with his plays much like Dante did with Italian vernacular.
Source:
James Knight interview @ The Wall Street JournalKnight is executive producer of the upcoming videogame Dante’s Inferno, developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts.]
Interview by Jamin Brophy-Warren.
Twain was fascinated, for example, by the typewriter; and he was the first author, or among the first, to submit manuscripts in typed, double-spaced format (as opposed to hand-scrawled in pencil, or worse yet pen).
“The works of Paul Czege stand apart from the collected works of other Small Press game designers” — writes Chris Perrin — “because Paul himself defies any sort of easy classification.”
Depending on your viewpoint, Paul is either one of the most prolific of the Gaming Outpost/Forge designers or one of the least. Also, depending on you how look at it, his best contribution lies in a single game (the still popular My Life With Master) or in the thought and effort he has put into the hobby of role playing and the practice of game design.
… Paul is deeply analytical and quite concerned with what makes the entire role playing experience a good one. This ranges from understanding why people play the way they do to why certain games lead to role playing (as opposed to roll playing) to why certain behavior is emergent in play (bring aspirin to that chat, trust me.)
With Paul, you get a man who has a design principle named after him (the Czege Principle which is best summarized on Gnomestew as “When one person is the author of both the Character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”) His principle has guided the design of numerous player-author games.
- Chris Perrin: Small Press, Big Game #6: Paul Czege
See also:
– Half Meme Press: the independent RPG publishing and experimental play labworks of Paul Czege
Over at A Year of Frugal Gaming, board game designer Jackson Pope of Reiver Games 
talks about quitting his job in order to make games for a living:
The amount of a working computer game you can make in your own time is about a thousandth of a working computer game, whereas I thought I could make a boardgame and get it be a finished product. Over the next three years I worked on a game which eventually became Border Reivers. I was very happy with it but I put it in a tupperware box and left it on my shelf.
A couple of years later I came back to it and thought ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got a working finished game here so I might as well do something with it’. I worked out I could make 100 copies, largely by hand, and sell them over the internet and hopefully make a little bit of money, so I did and 11 months later I’d sold them all! During that time someone else had sent me another game, which became It’s Alive. I made 300 copies of that by hand and sold them over the internet in 11 months, at that point I took the mad decision to quit my job and try and do it full time.
Pope adds:
“I’ve been blogging on Creation and Play for three years now, most people initially heard about me on there or on BoardGameGeek, publicising my game. I’ve now had 150 submissions; some good, some awesome, some not so awesome.”
Interview posted by Dave @ A Year of Frugal Gaming
Game designer Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, is consulting on the design of a children’s playground in England:
The iconoclastic and much-loved game designer is spending a month in Nottingham where he will consult school children, local communities and the NCC Landscape Architect to discuss and develop ideas for the playground.
Councillor Dave Trimble, Portfolio Holder for Leisure, Culture & Customers at Nottingham City Council said, “We’re delighted to have Takahashi-san on board and very much looking forward to working with him on this unique collaboration.”
After considering several sites NCC has selected Woodthorpe Grange Park for the Takahashi-created playground. The site’s natural rolling hills may add to the design and enable some interesting and playful landscapes.
Takahasi has often made comparisons between game design and architecture, and certainly there are parallels to be drawn between play areas and games – they’re both constructed environments designed to enclose, direct and facilitate enjoyment. But could he be starting a new trend? What would happen if more designers took his lead?
Via Keith Stuart @ The Guardian, who adds:
I think Id could knock up a cool, if rather dangerous, Quake-themed adventure playground – all multi-levelled enclosures and trampoline jump points. And how about a Super Monkey Ball one, in which kids are bundled into huge hamster balls and allowed to explore at will?
I’m down with it — Quake that playground!
(Digression: I remember Half-Life Two, there’s an abandoned playground in City-17 … you can spin the spinning-alphabet toys and the merry-go-round … now that was some fine game design, very poignant scene, childhood memories transported into a desolate future.)
In other British playground news:
Council bans parents from play areas
Score one for Britain in its contest with the United States to create the stupidest fear-based society. The Watford Borough Council took the lead by banning parents from supervising their own kids in public playgrounds, “because they have not undergone criminal record checks.”
The only adults allowed to monitor the kids are idiocracy-vetted “play rangers.” The children’s parents must “watch from outside a perimeter fence.”
“One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’”
– Gabe Newell
Over at IGN, Rus McLaughlin takes this idea gives it some kick:
The idea of gamer community-funded game development interests me, sort of like PBS with more headshots.
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