What Casual Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

Go to https://BuyRaycon.com/razbuten for 15% off your order! Brought to you by Raycon. In this episode of Gaming For A Non-Gamer, I finally had my wife try o...

In the latest episode of YouTuber Razbuten’s series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play various games, the focus is on so-called “casual” life sim games.

Many of the lessons and takeaways echo those that have come before (intuitive theming, low pressure, good tutorials, recoverable failure states, and optional co-op features all help new players learn, cheats/modes that let players focus on what they enjoy are good, etc.) but a couple new ones stood out to me. First, that sandbox games can be downright unapproachable if you don’t already have basic familiarity with what you can do and what kind of goals make sense, so early-game directed progression can be vital for new players. Second, that being part of a shared culture moment can be a powerful draw even if it’s not the kind of culture you normally take part in.

Creating stronger bonds between players and NPCs through group-conflict

This article explores how we can use psychology to strengthen players’ emotional bonds with NPCs in order to give them a more fulfilling experience and keep them playing for longer.

This writeup discusses a study showing the unsurprising result that group dynamics make people care more about others, whether they are real or fictional - we want good things to happen to our allies and bad things to happen to our enemies. This is relevant to game design because caring more about a game’s characters is a recipe for improved engagement. But what I found particularly interesting about the study was that it implies that a good way to make players care even more about their allies is to have them suffer setbacks and losses together, and a good way to make players care even more about their enemies is to make their rivalries as evenly-matched as possible.

Cheating Lets You Experience the Best Parts of a Game More Often - Escapist Magazine

Right now I’m playing Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered on PC. I love it. It’s gorgeous, heartfelt, sincere, and touching. It’s also absolute rubbish. Movement is just too slow. Combat is uninteresting and offers low chance of reward. It’s a huge grind, and it’s a boring one at that. Only one thing is keeping me playing to experience the wonderful story, one tool giving me the patience to slog through the frankly terrible combat: Cheat Engine. Cheat Engine is a longstanding tool that lets users actively edit the code of a game while it’s running. If […]

I’ve been beating this drum for a while, but “cheating” in a single-player game, whether it comes from in-game systems or external modifications, is often a great way to increase player options and make a game experience better.

How Playtesting Improved Moving Out, Out on PS4 Tomorrow

How the dev team incorporated feedback to change the game for the better.

I love stories of how games improve through playtesting. This look at Moving Out features a few interesting lessons, including dialog changes to make sure players go in with the right expectations (the line about insurance), a mechanic that was added because players expected it to be there (the co-op throw), art changes to improve readability and player communication (color-coding rooms), and the introduction of an Assist Mode to increase accessibility and “help more people enjoy the game”.

The modders creating accessibility modes for notoriously difficult games

Some games, like Cuphead, don't come with many difficulty options. What happens when modders make their own? We interviewed some to find out.

When developers don’t add enough accessibility options to their games, modders can come to the rescue.

This provides an object lesson in one of many reasons why “git gud” is a terrible response to people who want easy modes or other accommodations - as seen in this writeup, the presence of such accommodations is exactly what allows many players to git gud when they otherwise couldn’t.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is only possible when modding is possible - and thus, things that take control away from gamers (such as cloud-based games) are a genuine threat to accessibility.

The Game That Inspired Minecraft, But Never Made a Penny

Before Minecraft, there was another game: Infiniminer. The first 500 people to use this link will get a 2 month free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: ...

Did you know that Minecraft started as a self-described clone of a game called Infiniminer made by Zach Barth of Zachtronics? I sure didn’t.

This video presents an interesting angle on the history of Minecraft and also a case study in the value that can be unlocked by allowing player freedom away from the game designer’s authorial intent - and how strange it is to have a game you created get changed into the most successful game of all time.

A look at how Animal Crossing's strong sense of place, playfulness, and generosity work and are especially relevant in the current environment.

All hail Nintendo's animal overlords | Opinion

Animal Crossing looks set to be one of the year's biggest games -- we might reflect on what it says about the appetite for different kinds of escapism

It’d be easy to dismiss the success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons as an accident of timing, simply the result of releasing just as the COVID-19 pandemic was kicking into gear - certainly it doesn’t hurt that the world needs that kind of gentle escapism now (even if Animal Crossing was never designed to be binge-played). Here, Rob Fahey argues that this is a clearly incorrect reading that dismisses the obvious value of and appetite for variety in gaming experiences beyond what the AAA industry typically offers up.

Tangentially, for what such a misreading looks like in hindsight, see the narratives around Myst. As I wrote before, “[G]aming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.”

Six ways to improve your world building

Kate Edwards gives developers advice and tools to build fully realised game worlds

Kate Edwards gives several tips on how to build well-realized game worlds that feel like part of a larger universe.

What Online Multiplayer Is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

Go to https://BuyRaycon.com/razbuten for 15% off your order! Brought to you by Raycon. In this episode of Gaming For A Non-Gamer, I tossed my wife into the w...

Continuing his series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play various games, YouTuber Razbuten now takes a look at how several popular online competitive multiplayer games are experienced by an inexperienced gamer.

Key takeaways include that good tutorials are if anything even more important in these kinds of games, as understanding how to play affects not just one player’s experience but all of them, and a fear of making the game worse for other players can easily drive away exactly the sort of people you’d prefer to interact with online. Yet many games lack tutorials entirely, fail to point new players to them, or just convey the game’s basic mechanics without teaching the player how to actually use their toolkit and be a good teammate.

Additionally, it’s often very difficult to find matches against other players of similar skill levels, which can result in being frustratingly steamrolled while just trying to learn the game. One of the best solutions to both problems is to let players team up against bots - though even this often fails to convey the necessary skills to then play effectively against other humans.