Cooperation and Engagement

Extremely insightful lecture by Matt Leacock, game designer of the co-op board game, Pandemic.

I especially found interesting how he approaches iteration and he seems very well read in game design theory.
Also, his visualisation of Mihaly Csikszentmihlyi's Flow principal is very well presented.

Beyond the Game

I've recently watched Beyond the Game, a documentary about the competitive Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos scene in Asia.
It's very interesting, especially the fact that they compete at a high level and train like professional chess players.

But the difference is that chess is an open game system, the "algorithms" & mechanics of the game are exposed and played in a physical space.
But Warcraft runs in a total virtual plane were the game mechanics are somewhat hidden, I know, as a player, that there's a certain randomization on almost every damage hit but I don't see it being run, I only see the result exposed by the visual feedback layer.

A dice roll in a video game compared to one done with a real dice and thrown by an human hand will always have a certain degree of suspicious development because we don't see the actual process but only the result.

That's why I find it very fascinating that some will want to develop mastery of a video game when at the end, complete understanding of the system & control over it can be subtly manipulated by the makers of the system, especially in the context a lot of competitive gaming do not actually freeze to a specific build of the game but do take into account the developer's patches.

Metrics in social games…

I’ve been reading some articles on the use of metrics in social gaming, like this short one from Gamasutra.

This is something I’m going to add to my online game framework I’m currently developing. The project’s name is P.O.G.E. (Persistent Online Game Engine).

It’s basically a framework build in PHP and Lua which I’m going to use to construct a new online game which will use different aspects of social gaming, MMO & augmented reality.

I said to myself, I’m spending all this time building tools why not share them with indie game community and so I’m going to release my framework under an open source license.

For the metric & stats aspect, it would be interesting to integrate it to the game engine, it’s data that could be used to modify the behavior of the game or add more dynamics between the “game master” or game A.I. and the players.