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

Revision as of 04:36, 26 March 2011 by Checker (talk | contribs)

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.
    Howtomakethings.png
  • 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.
    Usertesting.png
  • 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 answered questions for longer than the actual lecture!

I spent some time talking about my aesthetic goals for SpyParty, including:

  • perception vs. deception & performance
  • attention as a resource
  • consequential decisions with partial information
  • deduction vs. intuition
  • analysis paralysis vs. extinct by instinct
  • extreme asymmetry

Lessmore.png

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.

Rtfm.jpg

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:

Fredott.gif
This page was last edited on 11 August 2011, at 02:02.