Raph_Koster

which leads to

https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/15/a-vision-exercise/

and its critique counterpart:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/

and crucially, the observation in here that you can start with either end -- the experience you want or the systems -- but you gotta make them meet in the middle.

These days, game design is generally taught as "decide on your experience, and fit systems into that." But I favor being open to starting from either end, and also in general think that focusing so strongly on the experience has a LOT of dev pitfalls:"

https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/rules-of-the-...

Lastly -- starting at this end is just as artistic as starting from a chord progression, a cool synth sound, a color palette, or a piece of wood with interesting grain. Just as with any other craft-centric view on things, it's fine to start at a formal or an experiential end -- both are artistic.

FWIW, I have an MFA. :)

Adding more stuff in general may very well make something harder to play, but it has more to do with how many of the added things are simultaneously visible. We can go back to the old 7+/-2 rules of thumb on that one.

Candy Crush is Hard in a math sense. So are Battleship, Minesweeper, Pipes, Othello... they are all easy to play. They are fun because they are Hard in a math sense.

Dark Souls is not hard in a math sense, meaning it is not formally complex. It is hard to play mostly because it is a reaction and timing game that presents very difficult challenges, and the ambiguity comes from mastering signals and reactions.

Civilization is complicated, and almost certainly Hard in a math sense. But it has solid onboarding and is not that hard to play.

Dwarf Fortress is complex AND complicated, and has no onboarding, and a ton of stuff in it, and is both Hard and hard. DF is built out of a ton of separate Hard game atoms.

But you don't like those sorts of problems as much (or don't want them in that moment). Which is fine. No game works for everyone the same way.

(There is also an offhand remark in the article about gamemakers being failed moviemakers... ;) )

That is referencing the "game grammar" effort undertaken by myself, Dan Cook, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and many others. It is very specifically about arriving at a notation system for gameplay logic.

The original talk from 2005 is here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/a-grammar-of-...

The principles in this talk went on to be used by the field of computational modeling of games, AI game generators, and also used in training AI game players.

But the images ARE from the many many presentations I have given on game design, which can be found here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/

Many of the links are to those presentations, and many of them are deep dives on single sentences in the article.

You seem to be assuming I have a reductive definition of game, when the definition given in the article is basically "anything people choose to play." See https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/ which is linked in there.

I strongly disagree with lumping "intelligence" into the question though, so I am with you on that.

2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them." If you look at some of the ones I examine in this talk: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... you'll see they are often what seems very simple!

But they are also not gameplay, obviously.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam... https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/26/narrative-isnt-usually...

...and maybe https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popula... since you dislike QTE's. :)

In Theory of Fun, I phrased this as "everything has patterns, but if you are not equipped to see the pattern, it becomes noise, and therefore boring."

But it's the same underlying point.

The science on this evolves pretty regularly, but dopamine specifically currently seems to be tied most strongly to prediction processes matching what actually ends up happening, and therefore curiosity, etc.

The "richly interpretable" bit comes from Biederman & Vessel's research on it; for our purposes here we can basically summarize it as "easily predictable situations versus more complex ones result in different dopamine responses."

From the neuropsych side, this is very related to Predictive Processing; Deterding has a good article on that here. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9363017/ It also has a wealth of links that can lead you deeper into the subject.

As far as "OK and?" it comes down to this:

- make games that people can predict easily, and it'll be less fun in the "hard fun" sense

- and that is true of stories too!

- and that doesn't mean there aren't other sorts of enjoyment (which are covered in several images and links there) -- and as it happens, those are mappable to particular endorphins too!

- So it's not that game designers should try using endorphins as a tool, but rather that there's a wealth of science in a half-dozen different fields that backs up what this article is saying.

Bottom line: "dopamine" isn't a useful tool. Knowing those four types of fun and what elicits them absolutely is. Knowing they really do map to specific human sensations is. And following some links deeper into the topic will lead you very specific techniques you can use to elicit these different reactions predictably.

But repeated challenges does not equal grind. Grind typically means repeating already mastered challenges over and over.

The answer on inferring relationships between flavors of fun, and good colalteral fun activities, is in number 11. :D

2. This article also does not say that fun equals repeated challenges. The closest thing in there is that fun is about prediction. Even the definition of "mastery" that the article sets forth is pretty explicitly about every type of cognitive challenge you meet in life.

3. This article does not imply that stories cannot be fun. In fact, I specifically pointed out that stories that you are unsure where they are going, and stories with more interpretability are more likely to be fun that predictable ones. If you follow the links in the article, you will see

4. I don't exclusively work in the MMORPG space. I have worked in tabletop, puzzle, trivia, casual, and single-player RPGs.

Quora has answers on on the tech stack in this thread: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-technology-stack-driving-...

Reddit has answers on the rendering engine here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/d3cd2v/anyone_know...

I contributed replies to both, but there's further detail from others.

There are piles of Ultima Online postmortem materials on my website, https://www.raphkoster.com -- and those and more are collected in my book "Postmortems."

You may want to check here regarding that particular article/video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749793

Meridian 59 launched with 250 player capacity. UO launched with around 2800.

That said, the big difference is that crafting in WoW at launch, and for many years thereafter, was very much an adjunct to the primary game of combat. You cannot level up in WoW without combat.

In UO, combat was not a requirement. You could play the entire time, and become rich and powerful, just as a tailor, or whatever.

Richard's recollection is flawed on this (he wasn't close enough to the tech to know why it failed).

Reason #1: the closed loop fell victim to hoarding, particularly because the advancement system encouraged the production of goods with no value, as explicated in great detail in Zach Booth Simpson's detailed paper on "The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online."

Slides: https://studylib.net/doc/9778818/the-in-game-economics-of-ul...

Paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20090207141813/https://www.mine-...

Reason #2: the cost of pathfinding for the searches was too great. The Sims later solved this by having the agents in a very similar system use simple hillclimbing, with resources broadcast into a map.