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Jose Zagal
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I'm a bit rusty with my fantasy novels of yore - but perhaps there might be something in Howard's Conan? I also never read Vance...which inspired the D&D's magic system. I guess I'm saying that I'm still somewhat skeptical...but from a "surely someone else did this?" point-of-view with no real evidence or examples...
More broadly, I wonder if we can trace the adventurer shop back to configuration options in earlier games? So, the idea that you either have to "configure something" (e.g. choose a configuration of cannons and shot in an "Age of sail" wargame) leading to an abstraction of value/worth of individual options? So, what we would now call a points-purchasing system in a tabletop rpg? (during character creation, you have X points to buy skills at different levels of proficiency).
Bigger question - when did "points for skills/options" become a thing? I know it exists in more modern miniature wargames (e.g. 40K), was it the case for the older (pre-D&D) wargames? Did old wargamers (for balance) "buy" their armies/configuration and did THIS idea lead to the adventurer buying items/equipment?
Playing with Money (1): The Adventurer Shop
If you’re anything like me, you've spent a rather disturbing amount of your life in videogame shops, making purchasing decisions or selling the piles of weapons looted from the corpses of your imaginary enemies. This three-part serial traces game design lineages for videogame money and shops, f...
Ah, I misunderstood your use of structure. I thought you mean t design elements for compelling play over multiple play sessions (e.g. structures to encourage playing different games of Monopoly over time). I think what you're calling structural elements are what I've previously called segmentation of gameplay - how gameplay is organized and structured over time. (pdf here: https://www.eng.utah.edu/~zagal/Papers/Zagal_et_al_Gameplaysegmentation.pdf)
Metagame vs Structure
What is a metagame and how is it different from a game’s structure? The structure of a game is the framework of the design that compels players to keep playing over the long term. There are numerous different game structures, including narrative structures (linear, branching, threaded), geograp...
I'm not really sure I understand your use of "structure" here. Just so I'm clear that I understand your use of the term... a game like monopoly has NO structure, because it has no game design elements for compelling players to play over time? Monopoly obviously has design elements that are compelling such that players want to play again, but there are no "temporal design elements" for multiple-play sessions? (e.g. no "campaign mode", no record of past plays that can influence present and future plays)
Metagame vs Structure
What is a metagame and how is it different from a game’s structure? The structure of a game is the framework of the design that compels players to keep playing over the long term. There are numerous different game structures, including narrative structures (linear, branching, threaded), geograp...
Didn't Ultima IV have a crafting system? I remember you had to mix reagents in order to cast spells. You'd prepare them (and then they were part of your inventory) and you could cast them later.
Game Inventories (3): Diablo and Daggerfall
One key aspect of Minecraft’s inventory practices is absent from all of the examples previously examined: crafting. Indeed, crafting formed no part of Dungeons & Dragons player practices until the 3rd edition in 2000, and none of the early computer role-playing games descending from it feature ...
I'm always surprised by little open recognition there is of D&D's influence on game design. To be fair, I think that it's starting to change/dwindle as new generations of designers appear... also, there's been little academic work on the subject.
The Essence of RPGs (2): Rule-play
In the previous part, I staked my claim for a new understanding of role-playing games as nothing more nor less than the children of TSR’s seminal Dungeons & Dragons. This sounds trivial: but that’s only because it’s easy to underestimate the earth-shattering effect of D&D upon player practices,...
Happy 9th!
Nine
Today is the ninth anniversary of Only a Game – many thanks to everyone who has supported the blog over the years, and especially to those of you who came back during the meta-campaign and helped take us to victory! I am terribly busy at the moment with Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, academic work...
Congratulations!
International Hobo's Chris Bateman joins University of Bolton
After 12 years heading up the creative consultancy brand International Hobo (ihobo), and running one of its constituent consultancies from both the UK and the US, Chris Bateman is stepping down from his role as ‘Creative Overlord’ to accept a position as Consulting Researcher at University of ...
I'm somewhat confused by your assertion that definitions of games are value judgements. It's not that I disagree (we could also call them biases, perspectives, etc.), but aren't you in a sense ignoring the reasons and purposes people have for crafting definitions in the first place? For example, I might want to study a certain thing or make a certain point and craft a definition in order to circumscribe the point I want to make. In other words, there's often a point in creating definitions that's different/beyond "simple" value judgements.
Implicit Game Aesthetics (1): Crawford’s Taxonomy
Whatever we consider games to be, people have incredibly strong opinions about them. I previously claimed that a great many attempts to define games could be interpreted as value judgements asserting a particular aesthetic stance, and in the series of pieces that follow I'll examine a number of...
"Something is seriously wrong with any creative medium that manages to so radically block its own potential."
For some reason I had a double take when I got to this part. It looks like you're equating creative medium with the industry, and in particular with a certain portion of the industry. While I'm grateful that Sony has supported ThatGameCompany, I think it's a bit unfair to argue that "the medium" is the one that's blocking any potential. I think at this point in time, we have more to blame ourselves (the consumers) than anything else (e.g. the recent "we don't like the ending of Mass Effect 3" campaign). The platform holders have lost a lot of that power, the market has grown and changed (allowing for much more diversity), we now have more reasoned/critical/informed discourse about games than ever before.
Journey
This critique contains a few minor spoilers. What happens when you fund a small, ambitious and creative development team for a few years of experimentation? They come back with something beautifully unforgettable like Journey. The most consistently depressing aspect of being interested in the a...
It's probably worth mentioning that for many traditional retail purchases, the value proposition is a little different when you consider the resale value of a particular game. So, I might spend $60 today on Game X, play it for 2 weeks, really enjoy it, and then sell my used copy for $40. Social games and digital downloads offer no such possibilities...
Are Videogames Good Value?
Discussions about videogames often hinge on the relative value of the game – what it’s offering to the player and for how much. But when are games good value? What are the criteria for determining the value of a game? One way of considering this is in comparison to other media. A movie, for in...
Software is also increasingly a constraint at the tools/middleware level. What you use to develop your game shapes the end result. Consider for example, the role and impact that, for example, the Unreal Engine has had.
Regarding taxonomies of game generes (or categorizations), they are ALL arbitrary and should never be an end, but rather a means to an end. Ultimately, what we should care about most is how (and in what ways) a particular schema can help based on whatever need we have. So, a taxonomy to help identify game design elements would look very different from one created to help understand the ways that narratives are used in games. Both might have the same games, but they'd be organized very differently!
The Constraint Histories of Digital Games
How could we best recount the history of digital game design? Although genres seem to provide a framework for discussing the progression of various designs, are the categories being applied reflective of actual historical forces, or merely convenient collections of otherwise spuriously connect...
Oh, another thing...
Greyhawk was also an agglomeration of different people's campaign worlds/creations/areas... For example, "Blackmoor" (Dave Arneson's world) was later integrated into Blackmoor. The Lendore Isles (aka Spindrift Isles) came from Len Lakofka's campaign.
I would presume that books such as Monster Manual were put together from formal/informal contributions from early players and DM's... I recall that being (officially) the case with the Fiend Folio? (man, I wish I had the books with me to check...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmoor_(Greyhawk)#Blackmoor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lendore_Isles
Monster Manuals
I was invited by Jon Cogburn to submit a chapter to the new collection of essays combining Dungeons & Dragons with philosophy, but my chapter wildly overran. Here’s a segment I had to cut. What do Dungeons and Dragons monsters have to teach us about fiction and prop theory? What the character s...
Oh, another thing... is Cogburn's book out yet? It sounds really interesting...
Monster Manuals
I was invited by Jon Cogburn to submit a chapter to the new collection of essays combining Dungeons & Dragons with philosophy, but my chapter wildly overran. Here’s a segment I had to cut. What do Dungeons and Dragons monsters have to teach us about fiction and prop theory? What the character s...
"Yet there has always been somewhere an "omnibus world" where everything coexists - I think this used to be Forgotten Realms, but I have no idea what the situation is these days! :)"
The closest to a full-blown "omnibus" might have been Greyhawk, but only because it was well-known that it was Gygax's campaign world. (Forgotten Realm's was Ed Greenwood's) I guess Forgotten Realms is the current "core" world, but mostly because it's been in print for so long?
Now that I think about it, perhaps the D&D world (not AD&D) was the closest? I don't remember what the world was called...but they had all those Gazetteer books for it in the mid to late 80s.. Mysteria? The world (or at least parts of the world) were explicitly referenced in many of the D&D rulebooks and I think all the D&D modules were set in that world as well (as opposed to many "generic" AD&D modules that weren't, unless they had the appropriate logo...)
Monster Manuals
I was invited by Jon Cogburn to submit a chapter to the new collection of essays combining Dungeons & Dragons with philosophy, but my chapter wildly overran. Here’s a segment I had to cut. What do Dungeons and Dragons monsters have to teach us about fiction and prop theory? What the character s...
"for the Monster Manual is also a bestiary of the fictional worlds of Dungeons & Dragons itself."
I think that the main reason why D&D was afforded such latitude, in your terms is because it wasn't sold, perceived, and marketed as a "world". D&D was essentially a bunch of rules. It wasn't until later (due to other companies creating "unauthorized" accessories) that TSR realized that it made a lot of financial sense to produce pre-packaged "campaign worlds" (e.g. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, etc.). In the early days, there was no common world at all, it was assumed that each dungeon master would create their own...perhaps loosely based on whatever fantasy worlds they liked or enjoyed.
Interestingly, as the pre-packaged campaign worlds became more popular (and economically successful) they began to differentiate themselves from each other more strongly in terms of their monsters (and other things, of course!). I recall having the sense of there being some controversy/excitement when Dragonlance came out due to the new monsters that only existed in Dragonlance as well as some of the important changes made to others... (what, no orcs?!)
Monster Manuals
I was invited by Jon Cogburn to submit a chapter to the new collection of essays combining Dungeons & Dragons with philosophy, but my chapter wildly overran. Here’s a segment I had to cut. What do Dungeons and Dragons monsters have to teach us about fiction and prop theory? What the character s...
Hi,
A colleague of mine and I have been doing some work using natural language processing techniques to analyze large bodies of game-related text. A lot of this seems related to what you're asking about. So far we have one published article on this:
http://facsrv.cs.depaul.edu/~jzagal/Papers/Zagal_and_Tomuro-Aesthetics_of_Gameplay.pdf
There's another (that looks at sentiment analysis) but it's currently under review. I can send you a draft copy if you're interested.
Jose Zagal
What You Like and Dislike in Games
What words do we use to discuss what we like and dislike about games? The words people use in specific contexts reveals something about their relationship with that aspect of life, and this is true of games as much as anything else. What words would you use to describe what you like or dislike...
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