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The Coot Theory

For the last year or so I have been fiddling with RSD Game-Maker more than may seem rational. It’s an engine that I first used twenty years ago, and (until recently) last used about five years after that.

Maybe I’m just being a stubborn coot; a big part of my reason for dredging this engine back up again was this idea that although form dictates the shape of design, design transcends the shape of the form.

This engine is super old and cranky and doesn’t do what many people would ask of it. If a person can’t work within that and figure out how to say something relevant, maybe he’s going in there with too many preconceptions. And maybe that’s a sign of a lack of discipline. And maybe that mentality is why so many games are so terrible.

Some of the best games ever made were made with wires and transistors, or with incremental adjustments to hardware little stronger than the Colecovision. There’s something wrong when with the greater the level of technology available to us comes less elegant and sophisticated a basic level of design.

I am being cooty, but there is something real in the “it was better then” mentality. Used to be, everything in a game was there for a reason, because it had to be. There was no room for clutter, and it was hard enough to get a basic idea working that it was unlikely that you were on auto-pilot when you did it.

Once they reach a certain sophistication of representation, old games don’t tend to date the way that games do — because the diminished clutter and assumptions based on things other than precisely what they have to say (be that perceived audience expectations, design trends, or simply decades of experience dictating what a game is supposed to be) means that they still communicate clearly. I mean, if they communicated clearly in the first place. Clearly meaning, through game design alone.

…

Yeah. Anyway. I just wanted to prove a point to myself. If someone else digs it, maybe there’s something to the point. I dunno!

(January 21st, 2012 @ 5:30pm)



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A Year of Tweet Nothings

I have only been using Twitter actively for about a year. Just over a year ago, I got married to the smartest, strangest, most gorgeous creature in the world. As it turns out, these two facts have a good synergy. Here follows roughly a year of 140-character marital moments.

9 Jan 2011 – So for anyone not yet up-to-date, I got married a week ago. And I am posting this via SMS, which is something of a revolution in itself.

24 Jan – I married a liquorice hedgehog.

24 Jan – My wife sleeps in the cheese.

27 Jan – My wife said no beans, so no beans did I get.

24 Mar – I keep noticing that I’m married. Not sure if it feels like waking suddenly or narcolepsy. Either way, it’s a reality shift.

7 Apr – My wife: “What was it? What did you hit me with? It smelled so… clean.”

13 Apr – My wife in the shower: “I-AM-A-RO-BOT-MON-STER! I-AM-A-RO-BOT-MON-STER! TAKE-ME-TO-YOUR-LEADER! AKAKAKAKAKAKAKAK!” Over and over again.

29 Apr – I’m married to a bedraggled fraggle.

9 May – Almost totally screwed up half a day of my wife’s work on her blog. Fixed it, though! Lateral code patching.

13 May – Watching Dinosaur Train with the wife. DINOSAURS! ON TRAINS! Kids have it so great.

16 May – Every time my wife leaves the house, moments later she buzzes or rings for something she’s forgotten. Then she’s back again. And again. Etc.

20 May – Me: “You really are wonderful.” My wife: “I’m thinking about when you’re dead.”

10 Jun – My wife won’t let me put turkey in my shoe.

13 Jun – Wife: “Awho, I stepped on candy.” Me: “Why’d you step on candy?” Wife: “Because I can.” Wife and me, together: “-dy.”

15 Jun – My wife is always like when the ice cream says hello.

16 Jun – Wife on extended hold with the phone company. Customer service can’t get through to customer service. Wow. This is getting amazing.

18 Jun – Ask my wife about “the three biggie pears” and their relationship with porridge.

23 Jun – My wife is sick but she’s sexy. Sicksy.

23 Jun – Was Sonic the Hedgehog especially popular with black people? My wife claims not to know.

4 Jul – My wife just admitted that she has tormented Rosemary’s Baby.

14 Jul – I just threw a fedora and totally hit my wife in the face. Score!

24 Jul – My wife has super smelly hearing.

25 Jul – I feel terrible today. Improving things is the remains of last night’s dinner. My wife made the best chicken ever, all of her own recipe.

4 Oct – Wife: “Why you laugh in my mouth for?”

11 Oct – Wife, singing in the shower to a certain Beatles single: “And when I touch you, you feel creepy inside… I can’t hide! I can’t hide!”

19 Oct – Hey, I just bought this new game console called the Wii. How novel! I’m sure it will be amazing in a few years when developers break it in. [...] Moving in a few days, so haven’t opened any games yet. Basically just set the thing up to make sure my wife has a Mii waiting for her.

26 Oct – My wife’s got so much moxie, she gave me some.

28 Oct – My wife is afflicted by psychosomatic hay.

6 Nov – Wife: “Why you always trying to scare me for, right when I’m trying to sleep and eat turkey burgers?”

13 Nov – People always stare at us on the street. Or me. Today a man in a playground craned his neck as we walked past. Didn’t try to hide it. [...] He almost fell backwards, tracking me with his head. “Do you know him?” wife asked. Very much no.

23 Nov – My wife’s job is to feed me cheese.

23 Nov – “I’m not a disaster area! A disaster zone, maybe.” -wife

25 Nov – There is a certain period in one’s life when one may dance through the living room with one’s wife, eating pie, and singing about butter.

10 Dec – My wife controls the horizontal. My wife controls the vertical.

12 Dec – Wife: “Pizza Pages, Pizza pages, open up your Pizza Pages / Come and watch Bill Cosby eat a pencil…”

24 Dec – Wife: “Are you tweeting something bad about me, twit-face?”

26 Dec – Eggs over easy on toast with cheese / That’s what my wife is gonna
have to eat (Repeat)

26 Dec – My wife asked why I was being dastardly, to which I replied, “Why not?”

26 Dec – Wife: “That’s being real-time! You can’t be real-time tweeting me!”

28 Dec – If my wife were a mollusk, she would be a scallop.

30 Dec – Tomorrow is my first anniversary as a married man. Much has happened, as quickly as time seems to escape me. There is so much more to do.

Bonus 2012 material:

1 Jan 2012 – My wife found a Nerd in her pants. Then she ate it. I think I married Liz Lemon.

12 Jan – Wife: “You’re a foot-and-mouth lizard! That’s a thing! I saw it on the
news before!”

16 Jan – My wife insists that people no longer punch each other in the nose. Is
this true?

16 Jan – Wife, angrily: “And don’t make a pun about sofas!” [long pause; then,
giggling:] “I just made a pun about sofas in my head. It was funny.”

(January 18th, 2012 @ 12:58pm)



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The Principles of Game Design, #6

The worst thing a game can do is assume the player has nothing better to do than play a game.

If you’re not enriching the player’s life, you are stealing the player’s time and replacing it with emptiness. This is not only socially irresponsible; it has the side effect of burn-out. Eventually the player will notice how little he is getting from the medium, and will cease to participate.

Just assume that the player has a life that does not revolve around jumping through your hoops, and they won’t necessarily do everything you tell them to just because they’re holding a controller. If you’ve got something to say, figure out how brief and rich you can make it.

(January 12th, 2012 @ 12:59am)



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The Principles of Game Design, #5

A valuable item doesn’t make things possible; it makes them easier.

Locks and keys are the clumsiest of obstacles, and they take many forms. If it is impossible to enter a dungeon without a wand that can burn the surrounding bushes, and the wand serves little purpose other than to permit the player access, then it is little but a key. A key holds no practical value; its value is symbolic of a current lack of hindrance — and in its subtext, it speaks to the player of helplessness in the face of an arbitrary and contrived world, built to impede the player rather than to provide opportunities to explore and learn.

The items that become treasures are those that expand the player’s horizons by allowing the player to transcend the routine and inhabit the world on a higher level. They don’t unlock basic functions so much as they provide a better way of doing things. Much as a good home appliance relieves a person from the burdens of daily maintenance, Link’s recorder relieves the player from having to continually walk familiar terrain. His magic key means no more worrying about keys. His wand means no more worrying about sword beams. Add the magic book, and no more fussing with candles either.

Perhaps the greatest treasure in a recent game, Gordon Freeman’s gravity gun makes everything in the world both tactile and potentially useful.

Unlike previous Gradius games, in Gradius V losing your power-ups is a setback rather than a death sentence. All it means is that you have to be more careful. Likewise gaining power-ups means that you can relax and better appreciate the game’s nuances, but beyond that insight the player misses nothing crucial by failing or refusing to upgrade.

There is a place for locked doors, both literal and functional — but think about why you’re using them.

(January 10th, 2012 @ 10:51pm)



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The Principles of Game Design, #4

Every piece of a game’s method must reflect the game’s object, unless that contrast is part of the game’s object.

A game’s method is defined as the manner in which a game conducts itself — the rules, actions, and objects that comprise play, and the way that they interact. A game’s object is the overall idea that the game serves to communicate. Whether or not the designer has considered the game’s message, by the act of playing the player will receive one.

Every action is a verb, and every object is a noun. The game tells a story by the manner in which every action happens to every object. Therefore everything that you ask the player to do, however minor, is a part of the message that you are communicating to the player. Taken as a whole, the most common behaviors over the course of play define the perspective that the game communicates to the player.

(January 10th, 2012 @ 1:29pm)



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