We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I think one of the problems of teaching game design is that not a lot of people who work in the industry even seem to be that good at it

So, anyone here plays Dota 2? I've been getting into it and currently enjoying the bot practice.

I think one of the problems of teaching game design is that not a lot of people who work in the industry even seem to be that good at it

The cinematic bullshit plaguing a lot of games today doesn't help.

That was actually the trigger for me

When the "Story Design for Computer Games" course turned out to be Film Writing instead

Look, I get that early media leech techniques from established media until they figure out their own shit, and I get that I can't expect academia to be up-to-date. But I would appreciate if the class billed as Story Design was used to teach how to design a story! Game story doesn't need a single goddamned word to be conveyed, and while I imagine they thought they were doing a perfectly fine job of things, it

just

fffffffffffffffffffffffff

I don't think they even talked about the Monomyth

Learned about it in Classic Lit, learned about it in Intro to Game Design

Monomyth in Story Design? pfffffffffffft why would we need to cover the most basic mythological story structure known to exist can't imagine that'll ever be important for designing a story

now go write a quest and make sure it's meaningful

??????????

So, yeah. ACS.

People who are in game design courses or who had them, how much of what was taught was actually about the fundamentals of game design and how much is detail stuff? The person I know who understands how video games work and should work best comes from a background of amateur board game design, and I'm wondering if that is actually better at preparing designers than all the coursework is.

The course I am taking now is split between the first half of the book (before it branches out into genre-specific advice) and prototyping games (mostly in Pygame); it is under the computer science department, so it’s understandable they might want us to work with code a little “close to the metal”, but Pygame seems a bit little obtuse to me. This is under the philosophy that you do not get good at this sort of thing without practice. Some things we are required to get through is menus and splash screens and blitting sprites (again, Pygame) and such, but we also had to write a “pitch doc”. The fact is, a lot of CS degrees are already something like a 5-year courseload compressed into 4, so they have a limited allowance to slip in coursework concentrating on game design alone.

All in all, board game designers do seem to have a better grasp on their field, and I think there is more than one reason for that. One of them is that video games handle the rules of the game for you, but in traditional games, you handle the rules. There’s nothing quite like that for hands-on training. And video games rarely if ever are tested or at least quantified that way—part of it might just be that nobody involved thought of manual intervention, but certain operations in video games are just so complicated (physics calculations, for example) that you would never want to do it by hand. So board game rules have to be something where you understand what you’re doing. Lots of video game rules take place way behind the scenes (like offscreen NPC activity), or are not something the player is expected to think too hard about (like camera controls); moreover, almost nobody goes to a game’s code and takes a good hard stare at those rules, aside from the original developers, whereas to even play a board game you should get out the instruction sheet.

As a result, board games have an imperative to keep things as simple as possible (but no simpler). When you make the rules of play and actions simple enough for people to really get, you can study all sorts of things much more closely. Anyone can get pretty deep into thought about what their next turn should be in Risk, but the only people who really get rules that activate 60 times a second are people who are wayyy into getting an edge, like speedrunners and competitive players.

I think one of the problems of teaching game design is that not a lot of people who work in the industry even seem to be that good at it

Yes, by that “nuts and bolts” statement I really do mean designers are trying to write novels when all we have invented is the alphabet. We can slap together a bunch of game mechanics and try to make them all cohesive and whatnot, but for all the increase in hardware power, we are not seeing a whole lot of advancements or innovation in things like gameplay elements and game engines; just a few here and there, and a lot of incremental improvements or variations on something well understood.

Richard Garriott recently took a bit of heat for (rather inelegantly) stating that there weren’t really that many good game designers around, and there are plenty of people who think he’s not all that hot either (nor the other guys he named), so uh. Yeah. Controversial statement or not, he’s right. That’s where we are.

N.B. this post mayyyy or may not have been posted in the middle of a lecture and mayyyy contain oversights or downright stupid things to say

Yes, by that “nuts and bolts” statement I really do mean designers are trying to write novels when all we have invented is the alphabet. We can slap together a bunch of game mechanics and try to make them all cohesive and whatnot, but for all the increase in hardware power, we are not seeing a whole lot of advancements or innovation in things like gameplay elements and game engines; just a few here and there, and a lot of incremental improvements or variations on something well understood.

That's actually a really good way to talk about what I was trying to hit earlier. A lot of what people in the industry talk about and what you can infer from what is produced indicates a very superficial understanding of design, where some surface elements are merged together until you get something that feels right, with no understanding of what those elements entail or why things should fit together. I've never been in a design class so I'm not sure how different the academics are, though.

A sort of illustration of what I mean is take an example of an online shooting game, and for a lot of people when it comes to saying what they want designed or trying to critique, they'll just leave it as "I hate sniper rifles, we should take those out" or "we should add experience points so people can earn new outfits, that can be fun". But I feel it should be more examined in the sense of "this aspect of play promotes and encourages this behavior, which isn't fun, so it should be changed to [x]."

It might not just be board game experience, though, for that guy, because he's also pretty good at analysis of literature/shows and getting at why certain parts work and gets exasperated when most people leave their review as "I liked this part and that part" and no deeper. Since literary analysis is such an old field compared to game design, that might be more equipped to train people to think this way, maybe?

That's another weird thing. There hasn't been any game analysis. You'd think that'd be obvious, right? "Here is a game that does some things well and some things not well; here's why they work and how they could be better." Except of course the latter part would be posed as a question.

But they don't do that! I think I've mentioned Extra Credits before (maybe that was on the Other Forum), and their episodes on Journey are exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. They pull off The Monomyth perfectly without any dialogue, which is one thing, but on top of that they clearly have an idea of what they want the player to feel, to get out of the experience, and design around that!

On Journey, and How Bitchin' It Is from a Design Perspective (contains actual spoilers):

SpoilerShow

Journey was clearly intended to promote a bond between strangers, and they figured out some really clever ways to make the players subconsciously want to bond within the context of the game.

If you stay within hug-range of your partner, you regenerate Scarf. If you sing such that your partner is encompassed, they regenerate Scarf. These two mechanics reinforce the whole idea of camaraderie and, purely from a mechanical standpoint, help you to bond with your partner. You subconsciously create this connection wherein you want to stay close, you want to "talk" and it makes this... Legitimate Emotional Investment. One time a dude sat down in front of an approaching enemy; I figured he was disconnecting, right? Still tried to coax him out of the way. (I ended up getting smacked in the face and partnerless. Serves me right playing at 3AM, I guess.)

These are then modified later on, most notably on the mountain. You start freezing up, right? But staying close still regenerates Scarf faster than the cold can leech it away, so something you've been doing for efficiency throughout the game (assuming you knew it was a thing) become this... huddling for warmth. Literally how I was thinking of it by that point. And then as you ascend, you can't sing as loud. Oh, okay, because the air is thinner, I thought to myself. That was an actual thought I had. But aside from immersion (which, really, I can think of plenty of games that would just forget to do this), it further disincentivizes getting separated, and reinforces the feeling when you fall behind and they can't hear that you've fallen behind. That is a horrifying feel.

A game made me feel feelings. I can't even begin to explain how Holy Shit that was at the time, and how much it really shouldn't be in future.

The short of it: Journey, from a design perspective, is p. f'n bitchin', and people need to be figuring out how they can use existant games to teach how to design games.

The obvious argument is that there aren't really "classic" games which exemplify- no, that's dumb, stop trying to make that argument. The sooner you find games that are even kind of maybe classic-ish, you need to start teaching people about them so that we can have "classics" faster. The whole idea of a "classic" work is kind of dumb on the whole, anyway: it implies some dead guy did everything better than anyone else ever can, has, or will. Basically: film analysis is a thing, lit analysis is a thing, television analysis is a thing; game analysis needs to be a thing.


what's that, this is a games thread

nope sorry too busy bein' mad at academia

Unpopular opinion time: The so-called Monomyth is an overdone crutch and was never intended as a prescriptive formula but as a descriptive analysis to begin with. It can be a good launching point or lens to analyze through, but it should not define your story or else you’re just re-writing Star Wars, and frankly we saw exactly how good an idea that is as early as 1997.

Though, it can’t be that unpopular an opinion, since I searched some key terms on Google and have found articles I’ve never seen describing it this way.

As for game analysis, I think there are plenty of people doing that, despite the limited vocabulary it has to work with. Unfortunately. There are so many people doing it who clearly have no business doing it; more than enough complete charlatans to go around. Just thinking back on some of the ones I’ve read makes me nauseous; I don’t think I can finish this paragraph right now, so I won’t. Oh wait! Even worse, when you get to talking to some of these people you can find out how terrible some of them are as functioning human beings and it’s clear why they are doing this instead of anything else. At least it’s better than a life of crime, I guess.

*angry huff*

Also, as long as I’m being unpleasant here, I don’t see a lot of problems with Extra Credits’ content, but videos always try my patience because they go at their own slow pace and not my pace and it never really gets as in-depth as text can (strike 1), and I cannot stand the narrator’s voice because I have magical ears hypersensitive to those frequencies I just caaaan’t (strike 2). Other than that, though, every time I’ve taken the time out of my day to watch an episode I don’t really regret it. Yes, we just need more people who can think deeply and articulate quite like that. A lot more good people like these. Not bad people like those ggrrRRRRrrrr ARF ARF

It might not just be board game experience, though, for that guy, because he's also pretty good at analysis of literature/shows and getting at why certain parts work and gets exasperated when most people leave their review as "I liked this part and that part" and no deeper. Since literary analysis is such an old field compared to game design, that might be more equipped to train people to think this way, maybe?

See, I think a key thing that lots of aspiring game designers lack is a multidisciplinary view of things. A typical game design student, as my personal anecdotal observation, seems to have a hard time finding influences outside of games, computers, popular entertainment, and the like and—while I do not mean to get into identity politics or over-generalize, two of those things those awful, awful game analyzing schmucks do to tick me off—thinking outside the teenage male nerd/dudebro box.

This is a real shame; even if this student only has one other passion in life, that’s stuff that can be imported into the field in ways nobody else can provide. That’s not to say this prospective game designer can’t just live in a vacuum or bubble and be great at designing games, motivated completely intrinsically; it’s just that that’s already such a common plan, and the chances of being the one person who’s going to outshine everyone else doing that are slim.

And then of course, you see that fraction of who are constantly dropping whoppers like “only FPS matters” and stuff. Now these... these are the reasons we have jokes about them working jobs where they can literally drop Whoppers.

Alright, please don't quote this for anybody. I don't normally do this.

Tenya Wanya Teens, an upcoming game from Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi and wife Asuka Sakai. “A coming-of-age tale about love, hygiene, monsters and finding discarded erotic magazines in the woods.” It comes with two controllers that look like this:

We interrupt your previously scheduled programming to bring you more programming: email in Minecraft! Eagle Time Village has now been thrust firmly into the digital age. Or, at least, will be once I get this off my singleplayer testing map and onto the server.



It's not on the server yet, but it's fully functional and will be soon! The network topology is simple and relies on nodes that openly relay incoming messages in order to make expanding the range as simple as adding a new node. The email database is managed by a server computer (nicknamed "Faith") and clients just need a copy of the client code to be able to access it.

Did you just reinvent the internet in Minecraft?

What was the server number again? I kind of have literally never gotten on yet.

192.69.207.13:25565

Oh, right, I think the right mod doesn't work on the Mac version. I don't have access to a PC this week.

DW20 works /fine/ on a Mac!

except for the constant FTB crashing

Did you just reinvent the internet in Minecraft?

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

:D

That Minecraft thing is amazing. Makes me want the update for Minecraft to come sooner (unless it's already out?)

That Minecraft thing is amazing. Makes me want the update for Minecraft to come sooner (unless it's already out?)

This was actually done using a mod called ComputerCraft...computers aren't actually in the next update. :[ Tons of other cool stuff is, though! And assuming you're referring to v1.5, yes, the update is live!

I know it's a mod, but anyway. Good to hear the update is live.

psst

hey

any Dark Souls PC players in here

I wanna kick some ass and take some names

Hayter... NOT... Snake?
*gape*

psst

hey

any Dark Souls PC players in here

I wanna kick some ass and take some names

wat rings u got bitch

P.S. if you've got anyone from SL 85-124-ish I'm gonna be trying to take out the 4kids on a NG+, I could use some help with that. It's in the name of darkwraithing! Gotta get dat Kaathe

psst

hey

any Dark Souls PC players in here

I wanna kick some ass and take some names

wat rings u got bitch

P.S. if you've got anyone from SL 85-124-ish I'm gonna be trying to take out the 4kids on a NG+, I could use some help with that. It's in the name of darkwraithing! Gotta get dat Kaathe

Was this even words

I'm retting a TN99 on som when HWR goes CT4. But let me know if any of your R33 are FG'd and I'll nob a P for it.

SpoilerShow

this is temporarily an absurd vg jargon thread

psst

hey

any Dark Souls PC players in here

I wanna kick some ass and take some names

wat rings u got bitch

P.S. if you've got anyone from SL 85-124-ish I'm gonna be trying to take out the 4kids on a NG+, I could use some help with that. It's in the name of darkwraithing! Gotta get dat Kaathe

Was this even words

Oops, sorry! I forgot people who don't play the game would read that, as dumb as it sounds.

"wat rings u got bitch" = A minor meme within the Dark Souls community. May or may not be comprehensible to Red; I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all.
"SL" = Soul Level, or your character's level. Players must be within a specific range of each other's SL in order to do co-op.
"4kids" = The 4 Kings, a boss known for being particularly nasty, especially in...
"NG+" = New Game+. Pumps up all enemy health and damage output.
"darkwraithing" = Being a member of a Covenant (a group in the game designed by the developers that grants you special items) called the Darkwraiths who invade other worlds for the purposes of PvP.
"Kaathe" = Ingame NPC who allows you to join the Darkwraiths. You have to beat the 4 Kings at a specific point in the game to get to him.