WSSG Design Academy. Action Adventure Level Design: Kung Fu Zombie Killer. [This is the second part of a three-part series of articles by veteran designer and Lara Croft/Tomb Raider creator Toby Gard, dealing with level design in action adventure games. Part 1 described Level Flow Diagrams, which act as the core of the level brief provided to a team by the leads. Part 2 describes a process of expanding that brief into a detailed level plan of the awesomely named Kung Fu Zombie Killer.] This stage of the process is most often carried out by a cross-discipline team of designers, artists and coders, who will expand the level brief into a detailed level plan, but this process can equally be the next step that an individual designer takes when designing a level solo.
Delegation and teamwork are vital given the scale of modern console development. Without them, leads become bottlenecks that slow development and sap motivation. The current trend is towards agile development whereby scrums are given ownership of individual problems. The psychology goes this way: 1. 2. Games Research Journals - digrastudents.org. Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types (And Why It Doesn't Apply to Everything) Richard Bartle co-created MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), the text-based precursor to today's MMORPGs, while studying at Essex University.
He ended up formulating the theory that all MUD players could be broken down into four main types: killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This theory has since been used in all sorts of game design situations where it doesn't apply - let's look at what exactly it does tell us. MUD is a text-based adventure game (no graphics at all, only text) that had the then-unique attribute of being able to be played alongside other human players.
It was one of the first online persistent worlds created, and you can still grab a MUD client today, connect to a server and play. It's a simplified version of pen and paper role-playing games in that the player has to imagine the world according to the information the Game Master (the server and the writer of the game, in this case) provides. Summary of Bartle's player types. Bartle calls it a bandwagon. Ludology.org (Gonzalo Frasca) G. Frasca 1999: Ludology meets Narratology. Serious Play Conference. L’histoire des jeux vidéo : sexe, drogue et armes à feu. Olivier Mauco, docteur en science politique, s’attaque dans cet ouvrage aux questions politiques et morales qui font souvent l'objet de controverses dans l’industrie du jeu vidéo.
Sa position de consultant et de game designer, mais également de joueur, lui confère une place de choix pour traiter de ces problématiques : l’auteur, à la manière des « aca-fans » est impliqué et distancié dans sa recherche. Cette analyse diachronique et évolutive de l’histoire politique des jeux vidéo en France se place du côté des industries créatives, des récepteurs, mais également des médias (généralistes et spécialisés). Ce triple terrain permet de confronter les points de vue et de dessiner les contours de mise en place de régulations, et des enjeux sous-jacents qui ne sont pas toujours dans l’intérêt des joueurs. Dès l’apparition et la commercialisation des premiers jeux vidéo et des consoles de salon, la publicité a joué un rôle dans la perception par le grand public de ces produits de divertissement. GCgRnFgASAKi6tOGznp4 Affective Ludology Flow and Immersino in a First Person Shooter Measurement of Player Experience. Ludology. Dice Tower Network Podcast: Ludology | The Dice Tower.
Ludology Episode 79: The Magic Circle | Ludology. United StatesCambridgeMassachusetts A really excellent episode with some of the most interesting ideas about games that there are. The discussion of the sociologist who studied children playing marbles raised a few ideas. I remember about a research which focused on children teaching children to play games: they noted that the kid who is teaching the game sometimes cheats the new kids, but they only do that after they are pretty sure the new kid has learned the basic rules.
It's not fun to cheat if the other kid doesn't even know the rules, it's like saying "let's play this game... I win! Wasn't that fun? " This made me think that there various different ways which people understand the role of players in keeping the rules of the game which would influence what games would work in those contexts. A different standard would be that each of us is responsible for 'policing' our own self, and making sure we don't cheat. Just a thought. Ludology. The Ludologist – My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a ludologist [Noun. Video Game Researcher]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
These are some comments from my keynote at Rutger’s Extending Play conference in 2016, co-presenting with Shaka McGlotten. Hasn’t our sense of play suddenly become quite dark? There is a change in our primary conceptions of playing, and game-playing. In Brian Sutton-Smith’s Ambiguity of play, he lists 7 common rhetorics of play, meaning 7 common ways in which play is framed. When the field of game studies began, we probably used four quite positive rhetorics of play: Rhetoric of play as progress.Rhetoric of play as fate.Rhetoric of play as power.Rhetoric of play as identity.Rhetoric of play as the imaginary.Rhetoric of the self.Rhetoric of play as frivolous.
This is not surprising. We emphasized learning (play as progress), playing with identity, we emphasized the positive creations of the imaginary, and we emphasized the me-time of playing (the self). But now it seems we are in a darker place. We no longer talk about smart mobs, just mobs. Paper1 JBF. Markku Eskelinen:The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory.
The power of cybertext theory in this context stems from the fact that even the state-of-the-art literary theories of today are ultimately based on literary objects that are static, determinate, intransient and random access with impersonal perspective, no links and utilising only the interpretative user function.
To this one special type of object cybertext theory adds 575 rather fresh alternatives capable of undermining and shaking many basic assumptions and presuppositions derived from the print era.[2] Ludology gives us a perspective and a paradigm from which to approach the interactivity or ergodicity of literary works without any hype of the new versus the old, as interactivity has always been dominant in games. In short, in literature we may have to configure in order to be able to interpret, but in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation (Eskelinen 2001a). 1.
Figure 1. 2. 3. 4. Dynamics. Caillois. Aarseth ergodic ch1 1997.