The Other Kind of MMO: The Materazzi Problem - Twenty Sided

Shortly after I joined Goonswarm, they relocated to a different region of space in the north called “Deklein,” and more specifically the station in the VFK-IV system, which for years to come would be the de facto capital of Goon country. Almost immediately after moving they fought a war. Earlier in this series I promised not only a bunch of long, rambling stories but a bunch of long, rambling stories that contain potential game design lessons. Goonswarm’s war against another alliance called “Goodfellas” is one such story: it illustrates something I’m going to call the “Materazzi Problem.”

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.

Analysis: Every Day's Not The Same 'Art Game'

Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander looks at Molleindustria's Every Day The Same Dream and how it is -- and isn't -- like other "art games", to great success on all fronts.

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.

Most games are bizarrely bad at making their stories accessible. All too often it’s easy to miss lines of dialog or parts of cutscenes with little ability to rewind or replay them. Alex Driml discusses several examples of clever ways particular games have solved these problems.

P.T., Gaming History and the Self-Serving Crusades

DISCLAIMER: This wasn’t an easy article to write, and it’s definitely not a pleasant article to read. But sometimes we must go through…

Felipe Pepe takes a heartbreaking look at the apathy-driven lack of preservation of games, content, and wisdom.

Updated August 15, 2021: Ironically, Felipe Pepe has since deleted this article from Medium. However, it was cross-posted to Gamasutra and is still available there.

What makes a good RPG dungeon?

A look at 10 great video game dungeons

Good dungeon design isn’t universal - it depends on what verbs are available to the player, what the UI is like, and what the game’s core loops involve. Here, Felipe Pepe illustrates this by taking a look at several great dungeons and what makes them great in their respective contexts.

Game Design Dirty Little Secrets – GD Keys

Three years ago, the designer Jennifer Scheurle started a very interesting Twitter thread on “brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling“. In this thread, she invited designers to share the design secrets they have used, which should not be seen by the players in order to trigger specific behaviors, feelings, or reactions while experiencing their games.

Many games deliberately mislead players in subtle ways to create a better experience. This write-up takes a close look at several examples and discusses why they work. Some key takeaways are (1) the perception of fairness is more important than actual fairness (2) fail states break flow.

The chicanery of Penguin Cretins

Valve maintains its signature silence as wayward developers code-swap games on Steam, leaving users frustrated and confused

This story starts with a game in Steam’s Early Access being completely replaced by a different game, but it opens a lot of questions about the nature of ownership and fair dealing in an age of digital delivery, automatic updates, and games as a service. When it’s commonplace for games to change after they’ve already been paid for, where is the line? Aside from the preservation question, how do you allow games to grow and improve while stopping bad faith consumer-exploiting changes?

Frankly, I expected this to be more of a problem - ads were being patched into high-profile games over a decade ago. I can only assume that nobody’s wanted to risk triggering consumer rights investigations and legislation here, so the steps taken have been pretty small.

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.