Design, Games, and Game Design (feat. SpyParty)

I gave a talk at UC Berkeley called Design, Games, & Game Design (feat. SpyParty). It was for the UC Berkeley School of Information's Design Futures Lecture Series, and I was invited by the excellent Elizabeth Goodman.

The talk was a mix of general design stuff, game design stuff, and SpyParty design stuff. Among other things...

• I talked about the basic design → build → test loop, and how I don't think you can separate out the design and build steps if you're making something deep and new and (especially) interactive. I mentioned how Valve doesn't hire single-discipline designers for this reason.
  
• I went over three kinds of user tests, depth testing, kleenex testing, and focus testing, and how you should never do the last one of those.
  
• I talked about Metrics Fetishism again; since this was a Design talk, it seemed appropriate.
• I claimed games are at about 1905 in terms of the history of film, making anologies between current games and deep and important works like The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach and The Little Train Robbery (aka. The Great Train Robbery 2: This Time With Kids!)
• I lauded Ico's hand holding mechanic, again.
• I whipped out the Korean characters for Gosu, 고수.
• I outlined two approaches to creating games with more emotional depth: top-down and bottom-up, and I discussed why I think bottom-up is a better approach. Games need to be able to communicate with players using a wider and deeper set of emotions. Just like film and music communicate emotionally in completely different ways, but are both incredibly deep, I think games will be as different from other art and entertainment forms as they are from each other, but we have a long way to go.
  
• I answered questions for longer than the actual lecture!

I also spent some time talking about my aesthetic goals for SpyParty, which include: perception vs. deception & performance attention as a resource consequential decisions with partial information deduction vs. intuition analysis paralysis vs. extinct by instinct extreme asymmetry intense focus on player-skills about human behavior

And, I talked more about the Blizzard-inspired Depth-first, Accessibility-later development model I'm following, including forcing people to read the four-page instruction manual before they can play.

Here are the synced audio and slides, with 40 minutes of Q&A at the end:

Welp, the web service I was using for the slide syncing died, so I'll have to redo it on youtube I guess.

Here are the raw ppt and mp3.

Also, Tom Curtis was there and wrote about the lecture at Gamasutra.

And, because one cannot get enough of Fred Ott's Sneeze: