Andreas Papathanasis calls for recognition of the fact that in game design, simple isn’t bad and complex isn’t good. Thoughtlessly chasing complexity in game design makes games less legible, less accessible, and less approachable while increasing development cost.
Mike Bithell shares several important lessons he’s learned in his game development career that could also function easily as general life and career advice.
In the latest episode of YouTuber Razbuten’s series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play video games, the focus is on VR.
For me, the major takeaway is that because VR games don’t have decades of convention to lean on, they need to be much more intuitive and approachable than other games. As a result, while they’re roughly as approachable as other games for experienced players, for new players they are far more approachable… once you get over the hurdle of the expensive equipment required and the somewhat stigmatized and antisocial nature of the headset.
A short but interesting look at a change to Astroneer’s crafting system, illustrating the value of having multiple perspectives and challenging your assumptions when making design decisions (as well as the importance of ensuring that the complexity in a design is coming from the right place).
Not only is this an entertaining video of Beat Saber-inspired gameplay in Minecraft, you can actually download the custom world and play it yourself (full instructions in video description on YouTube).
I just love when games enable this kind of shareable creative expression and interactive intertextuality.
This is an entry in the middle of a series of essays about the author’s experience with EVE Online, but it contains a fascinating insight I’m actually ashamed I never figured out myself.
The reason competitive online game communities are so frequently toxic isn’t just due to lack of consequences or some kind of repressed negativity being inherent to competitive gamers. It’s because in many of these environments, toxicity is a competitive advantage. Hassling your opponents can distract them, provoke them into actions that backfire against them, or even make them concede just to get away from you. Getting comfortable with constant insults and offensive language makes you immune to these weapons and more able to use them, so toxicity will often spill into non-competitive places like forums and prevail even among friends and allies.
Such games thus actively encourage toxic behavior by default. This will mean more wins for the toxic players, but will drive away others, which is a trend worth fighting.
The debate over games as art is long since settled, but it’s interesting to revisit - a lot of quality analysis came out of discussion of the successes and failures of so-called “art games”. Here, Leigh Alexander takes a look at the briefly-influential Every Day The Same Dream and how it serves to illustrate that what makes games art is not what they say but how they say it, using interactivity to provide experiences impossible in other media.
The writeup also contains a bonus link to a contemporaneous article by Emily Short discussing two other “art games” of the time, Home and The Graveyard.