Big Games and Our Games
Patrick Lipo – Hidden Path Development
- Fear of player expectations
- Resources have no meaning
- ‘Stuff’ adds value
- Open world insanity (GTA is like $100M) Breadth in every direction.
So you need to know your “verbs”, “secondary verbs”, and “pillar values”
For example, primary verb is solving puzzles, secondary is managing money. Value placed on lightweight narrative structure to unlock puzzles.
I know he is saying that educational games are tempted to shove content into existing structures, but the example that you can never have the player solve a diff eq to continue is shortsighted. Its all about integration. If the player is doing engineering, the pencil/paper activity is completely in genre!
Interesting scope problem: Vegas. Players are thinking ‘per-room,’ clearing room after room, but then all of a sudden, one random character was not just part of the crowd. It caused the player to start thinking ‘per individual’ and didn’t work.
The big question is: What are the players going to take away after playing?
I’m curious how we can move our cryo design from the regular math gate into the building of an analysis tool based on experimentation – Modding the game (like Jim G talked about)
From Pure entertainment to Playful Learning
UBISOFT – Games for Everyone – Emile LIANG, Peter YANG
Three types of behaviors for our games:
- Have to learn
- Want to learn
- Enjoy Learning
Casual Gaming
Good: expanding the media horizon, challenges industry to think about what people really want, not dumbing everything down
Bad: no consensus, new goldrush so everyone is building and the quality is dropping (that doesn’t make sense to me, more developers is better in my mind. this is how we learn what quality is!)
Misconceptions: casual gaming is for girls, isn’t fun
Creating tension: “You don’t need the sound of chainsaws in the background” but instead give challenge while providing feedback on success for progression and achievement.
Tips:
- NAVER assume you know your audience
- People are not always looking for a ferarri
- Being assessable doesn’t mean treating your audience like a dummy.
- PLAYTEST PLAYTEST PLAYTEST
