Re: An Engineer's View of Game Design

PizaZ,

I try to understand what's going on around me and summarize it in a
compact mental model that will help me act, decide and create. If the
model is compact, I will be able to pass it to people that have not
been playing games for 10 years, so that they will have an
understanding of this stuff. These are mine, but there are many other
motivations. My motivation is not to "mechanize" game design, and
nobody sane has this goal. The crucial idea of my model is the cycle,
not the obvious phases of it.

Creativity and gameplay experience are implict in my model. I didn't
point them out because I thought that it's obvious. Novelty in the
cycle, which contributes to rewards, makes challenges attractive, and
gives the opportunity to learning while acting, is achieved by
creative engineering. Gameplay experience is just another word for
"reward".

My model is based around the psychology of decision-action-reward
cycle in gamers. Game designers are decision-action-reward engineers
(some of them are creative), but this sounds too unromantic so they
prefer to say that what they do is art.

You are right in stressing the general study of the history of games.
I liked your examples. On the other hand, both games and films that
require a thorough knowledge of the history, are not particularly
appealing for the mass public. Such sophisticated films are shown at
festivals to selected high-brow audiences who have spent a lot of time
reading books and watching films. As much as I enjoy a twisty article
that's going to activate my whole brain in pursuit of comprehension, I
respect and support a solid simple little article that's going to tell
the same substance to a school child without that prior knowledge.

As for learning and tediousness, I disagree with you. Tediousness is a
way of punishing the player (you got killed, play again for 30
minutes), it's a way of letting him get rid of the endorphines from
his bloodflow so that they can burst to new heights during the next
cut scene (delayed reward), and it's a chancey way of increasing the
perception of game value (I spent ?50 on a game that I finished in one
evening! Yuk!). Tediousness that doesn't perform one of these roles is
a mistake. Not all games provide the full range of learning and
reward, but this doesn't invalidate the model.

Your ideas for threads are good. I'm looking forward to reading your
notes on the subjects.

Aleks