Professional Meeting at Raven Software on 7/28/09

Open at 7:05

It’s official; ALL Game Developers in Wisconsin are affiliated with the IGDA

Josh Compton- Motivating Player Action

∙ Remember nobody HAS to play your game

∙ Forget about money, you want a share of waking hours

∙ To compete, you could spend on Audiovisuals

∙ Good- Pushes the envelope

∙ Bad- If you can buy, I can buy

Ways to motivate the player

Coin-Op

∙ You either play the game or walk away

∙ Good-Small amount of time and money

∙ Bad-Stories have been told over and over again

Motivate with Nationalism

∙ Good-You can sell a zillion WWII games

∙ Bad-All the games have been done a zillion times before

Motivate with Famous People

∙ Licenses have been used to guarantee awfulness

∙ That poses a Question: Where have all the Good Books gone?

∙ No more good books are becoming movies, or good books becoming Games

Is fun the only motivation for a game?

∙ Game is a loaded word, but Americans love a happy ending, most deliver a happy ending

Can we get past Game=fun?

∙Auteurs with the use of obscure sciences were game makers

Right Hand meet Left Hand

∙ Do Designers and Programmers really understand each other?

∙ Writers you get blame too

Complex Choice Spectrum

∙ Postulate: The more detailed the message, the more constrained choices

What to do?

∙ Design for Narrative, not Tech achievements

∙ Realize your choice is ever expanding

Manveer Heir-Designing ethical choices in games

∙ The Question: What would you do in this situation?

∙ If you can, read The Ethics of Computer Gaming by Miguel Sicart

Why Ethical Dilemmas?

∙ Create more meaningful experiences

Ethics vs. morals

∙ Good vs. Evil, Duty vs. Values

Open Ethical Designs

System Design: Players effect game change

World Designs: Players effect around them

Closed Ethical Designs

Subtracting Design: Player knows the weight of their decisions, but has to decipher effect outside game

Mirroring Design: Relationship between Player and Character

∙ Dilemmas=Open Design

∙ Closed Designs rely on authorship but Open Designs are harder to design

∙ Designer gives black and White, but that isn’t a reflection of the world. The world is Gray

∙ Bioshock: The little sisters become not a moral choice, but a strategy for playing the game

∙ Star Wars: Needs more ambiguity, you never play the internal struggle of Luke

How to Reach Potential

Narrative

∙ Emotionally invest the player in the game world

∙ The narrative must be in line with the ludic (gameplay) elements of the game

Consequences

∙ Need to impact the player and the game, don’t minimize them

∙ Player needs to understand link between choices and consequences

Obstacles

∙ Can make the player stop or slow down

∙ Can push player down a new path; PATH’S DON’T HAVE TO BE EQUAL!!!!

Train by Brenda Brathwaite

This game requires players to move 60 pegs (people) to the end of a track as quickly as possible, but the pegs don’t fit nicely into the train, so you jam them in. Along the way you draw cards that either delay or accelerate you.

When you get to the end you turn over a destination card to where the train went, And it occurs to you, you’re not transporting people to vacation, you’re transporting them to a concentration camp.

Permanence

The player always has to live with the same choice, unless they start a new game

Take the Tenpenny Tower example from Fallout 3; you are given a choice by the human residents to kill the ghouls that want to get in, to kill all humans by the ghouls, or to create peace between them so they can live together.

Consequences: You can either kill the humans or kill the ghouls; You negotiate peace, the humans die

Anything you do, someone dies

Make the Players feel EMOTION!!!!!