I'm Ash, and I'm a gamer. Which should be fairly obvious by this point, but it never hurts to make it blatant. In addition to being a gamer, I'm an engineer. What is not obvious is that this means I have a tendency, when I get my hands on a game, be they tabletop, LARP, boardgames, or video games, to take it apart piece-by-piece to see how it works. This is not new.
I've been writing LARPs for about the past 8 years. If we want to be technical, the first game I wrote was actually a board game for a school project that was a combination of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit (that was actually playable) when I was 10. I currently have two tabletop systems I'm in the process of developing and an attempt at expanding a d20 system using the 3.5 SRD (under the OGL) that's stuck in a perpetual state of limbo. And while I can claim no credit for designing a video game (yet), I have been playing them since I was 3, and they are fair game for dissection.
That's what's going on here. We're going to take games I've written and games I haven't written and use them as case studies and examples. We're going to go through game mechanics and design philosophies and practices to see what works, what does not, and why. If I'm lucky, we're going to get knee-deep in theory, from writing to psychology to mathematics. I have a few topics already planned out, and am always open to suggestions.
And since this is me claiming no great wisdom beyond my own experiences, this is my invitation to all of you to share your own thoughts and ideas. Together, we're going to reverse-engineer some games and figure out how to make them stronger, faster, better! We have the technology! Okay, maybe not the faster bit.
Faster is totally valid! If you can play the same game, do just as much thinking within the game but spend less time figuring out the rules or waiting for other people then you win!
ReplyDeleteWell, that's totally true. I was thinking more of "if we make games too fast, they don't last as long". Which is another problem in and of itself in a lot of cases. With the prices of AAA titles being what they are, getting only 5 hours of play from a $60 game is going to make someone unhappy.
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