Gaming Archives — Kevin Rothermel

Getting from Modern War to the Future of Video Games

September 2, 2013 by Kevin

Gamasutra ran a really great interview with the creatives working on the latest Splinter Cell. Centered around balancing realism with ethics and controversial gameplay, it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

But I thought this point about the challenge of using a constantly changing medium to bring about emotion in users was salient for the day job…

At the same time, I’m hoping that we’re going to get to a point where we can touch people the same way Journey touched me, with a game like Splinter Cell or a game like Assassin’s Creed where the graphics are realistic and it’s true humans that are telling me a story — I can be touched that way and be in control, and it’s not just a game forcing an emotion on me, but just me through my decisions, living those emotions as strongly, or even more strongly, than in a non-interactive medium.

RD: Also, remember we’re constantly trying to hit a moving target here. If you look at every other storytelling medium, it has been stable for at least a hundred years. Filmmaking, the language has likely stayed the same since George Méliès. Theater has largely stayed the same since Shakespeare. Books, since Gutenberg. And there’s been time to iterate and perfect the craft and perfect the ways of communicating this material.

And you look at what we’re doing. The hardware is constantly changing. What can we do when the hardware is constantly changing — we’re constantly evolving and trying to simultaneously maximize the potential of the tools that we have to play with while telling these stories. And because you’re trying to hit a moving target, you’re going to have a hit and miss ratio.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of the games that people are pointing to as stirring these deeper emotions have been ones that have not been necessarily bleeding edge, that were built as more of a stable technology, things like Passage, for example. Those are games where the technology and the sandbox was clearly defined, and that allowed a, for lack of a better way of putting it, an ability to concentrate on just one aspect of creating something that was more emotionally moving, because there was a place where you knew that you could aim.

With what we’re doing, with these advances in technology, with the new consoles, we’re trying to do that, but at the same time, we don’t know at any given moment the tools we have to do it with, and when you don’t know the tools that are in your kit, you don’t know what you’re going to be able to build with it.

Via Gamasutra

Katie Salen on the Power of Game-Based Learning

August 5, 2013 by Kevin

I’ve written a lot about Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn and Institute of Play. But given that I’m still not hearing about her work outside of academic and gaming circles, I’m starting to think that maybe you’re not listening. So put that post about native advertising or social CRM down and watch this video:

Sid Meier on Game Design: Find the Fun

July 9, 2013 by Kevin

We’re all so smart and strategic that we’re not doing enough of this anymore…

“Sid’s never had to write a design document, because instead of debating with you about some new feature he wants to implement, he’ll just go home and at night he’ll implement it,” Solomon said. “And then tomorrow when he comes in he’ll say, ‘Okay, now play this new feature.’ And you’ll play, and then you can have a real conversation about the game, instead of looking at some design document.”

“‘Find the fun’—that’s Sid’s phrase,” said Reynolds. “Essentially, you have to make something in order to have any chance of finding the fun. Fun wasn’t going to be found on a piece of paper, at least fun in terms of a video game.”

The Limits of Videogame Interaction: The Fat Pipe-Thin Pipe Problem

October 11, 2012 by Kevin

Sure it sounds pornographic, but I think it’s an interesting idea that can apply throughout experience design of almost any kind.

“Stated simply, the FPTP problem is an issue of discrepancy between the bandwidth a game uses to communicate to the player and the bandwidth the player has to communicate back. A game’s capacity to output rich, nuanced information exceeds that of film or television, yet a player’s capacity to reply with equivalently rich and nuanced statements is massively constrained by our input devices and our game designs. In a sense, from the perspective of a game, players would appear to suffer from some extreme form of autism; our inputs suggest that we take the game’s output at such a literal surface level that we appear to either not understand or not receive all the cues the game gives us.”

(Via Edge Online )