Designing Games for the Wage Slave
Stuart Walpole, at GameDev.net, offers
some observations and advice on designing computer games for people who can't afford to spend 20 hours meticulously re-tracing long series of moves in order to pick that one, correct 700th step that avoids the Orc's hammer:
"I can afford to buy any game I like; but I rarely have the opportunity to play them."
This sentence embodies the sad reality that has hamstringed my gaming hobby since becoming an unwilling maze-dweller in the rat race of full-time employment. Four years ago, when not otherwise distracted by the mundanities of dodging college work or chores, I could (and did) devote countless hours to the challenges and pleasures of digital worlds. My funding was limited, but I took pride in completing every game, every cover disk demo that I purchased. I reveled in replayability, gloried in gameplay depth, marveled at multiplayer. Life was good.
Making a game
just complicated enough to be interesting and compelling is tricky (like most forms of serial narrative), and one person's engrossing, extended concentration is often another person's mindless scutwork. Some interesting comments include,
Being lost is *not* fun. Pixel hunting is *not* fun. Wandering around a level looking for an obscurely hidden key is *not* fun. Not even knowing what they key *looks* like is *not* fun. Keep me aware of my objectives, and provide a decent method of pointing me towards them. The glowing aura in "Bloodrayne" and three-dimensional pointers in "Grand Theft Auto III", while contrived, certainly kept the player heading in the right direction.
There are some interesting comments on the piece at
/. (although navigating commentary threads on slashdot sometimes seems to require just as much committment and time as playing EverQuest...).
[via
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Posted by johndan at July 28, 2004 09:58 AM
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