The Development of Braid 27
Gamasutra sat down with Jonathan Blow, creator of the successful independent game Braid. He talks about going through the three-year-plus development cycle as a one-man team, and how his concept of the game changed as he worked on it. He also discusses what he feels is the difference between "natural rewards" and "artificial rewards."
"... for the most part, when you're playing Tetris, you're enjoying it because you enjoy fitting the blocks together. Whereas when you play World of Warcraft — and what I'm about to say is a generalization, since different players enjoy different things, obviously — a lot of the appeal of playing World of Warcraft is not in the core gameplay mechanic, because it's boring, a lot of the time. ... I think what keeps them in there is, at first, the level ding, because it's very addictive to get that. 'Okay, I've got more gold. Whatever.' And eventually, they've made this huge time investment and they've got a character there and they know what that level ding feels like and the next one is pretty far off, but they can get there! And it's not any better, because this is like number 67. It's got to be better than 66!"
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Call Mr. Blow, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Blow!
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Mr. Blow is a loser and I think he's a boozer.
So you better make that call to the Blow King!
Simplifying WoW (Score:2, Interesting)
He doesn't really seem to understand what drives people on WoW...
In earlier levels, yes, leveling up is the *big thing*; however, at higher levels, the questing becomes more involved and people play to read the lore and, more importantly, get better armor or weapons or a flying mount. Anyway, leveling up cannot be what keeps players there; that wouldn't explain why so many people play at endgame.
I think it's more of an ego thing. Having better weapons/armor, being in a top raiding guild, or being the best
Re:Simplifying WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting new stuff is a form of "leveling up", especially when you know (from FAQs etc) what gear you're trying to get and how. In this context (giving player a so called artificial reward) there really is no difference.
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Actually, a much smaller fraction of people are in high-end raiding guilds than what most people realize (think about the numbers...2-4 big guilds per server vs. the rest of the players...anyone not in the top tier guilds that wants to be in them is usually in a 2nd tier guild which is still a very small fraction of the total playerbase). It seems larger, because people in those guilds are often more vocal (partly due to the ego thing) than people that are not.
What parobably keeps the largest majority of p
Context Typo (Score:2)
"Those artificial rewards, even though I have not played those games in quite a while , are still important to me, and I feel a sense of accomplishment"
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Actually, Blow's been involved in the online gaming scene for over a decade.
Although WoW's success is certainly too complex of an issue to ascribe to one or two factors, replayability, and the entire "team" dynamic appear to be two of the most important. Leveling up comes far far after that.
Blow's first project [wulfram.com] is actually still alive over 10 years after its original release.
Re:Simplifying WoW (Score:5, Informative)
All the best gear and consequent social esteem comes from random drops. Because the drops are random, your best strategy is to spend as much time as possible killing as many things as you can to increase your chances of getting rewarded. Since these drops give social esteem, for a lot of people the payoff is high enough to be worth a significant investment in time.
It's basically the same kind of thing that causes people to spend hours in front of slot machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning [wikipedia.org]
And ya, I had roommates in college who only ever played WoW. They were losers desperate for all the esteem they could get.
Social Rewards (Score:2)
This is the kind of thought that is almost true, yet subtly totally wrong, like what someone who had read about or seen the game would come up with.
The best gear and status in the game does not come from "random drops". That category is called "World Drops", and it is the lowest end of the upper end tier loot. It might be purple, but no one takes it seriously Sort of like how a Mini-Cooper is technically a BMW but at under $20k is the entry-level one.
No, the very best gear in the game comes from two sources
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People thought my post was overrated; I don't know how much you agree with me, but I will make an additional point:
Having raided in WoW myself, a lot of motivation was to top the damage or healing meters, to show one to be the "best". Despite what people say, WoW does have skill involved (even knowing when to spam a spell and knowing who to attack and when are important, and thus skill and intelligence are involved) and there are clearly some players that are better and some that are worse.
The social aspec
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Actually this is a very important article... (Score:2, Interesting)
...I don't know this guy or this game, but the idea of independent production of games (1 guy etc) or things like animation is perhaps one of the most important and interesting IT concepts around, yet is hardly ever exploited and perhaps, and I'm not sure Slashdot know this, but it remains one of the most taboo topics around the established industries for these things.
I mean obviously time is a factor, no one will disagree with that but there's a huge interest in this, yet very people have ever brought anyt
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What? (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't see how someone who has received so much acclaim for his game design can completely miss the boat on a VERY popular game.
I've actually never played WoW (just don't have the time), but I imagine that the experience is much like Diablo on a grander scale. The enjoyment in a game like Diablo was far more complex than leveling up. The biggest driver for me was the social aspect of the game (playing together online, seeing how friends/others used resources to develop their character, etc).
I understand th
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
And he's 100% correct. How many people are playing Spore right now more because they shelled 50 bucks into it and want to get their money's worth than because it is actually fun? How many people would have been done with the game at the tribal stage if it was free? The motivation for playing is that 50 bucks represents time you invested to earn... well 50 bucks.
And he clearly explains the social aspect - if you want a social aspect, there are certainly a lot of alternatives. Its there, and it makes it better, but it still doesnt change the fact its mostly menial tasks and if you want a good social aspect like teamplay, there, as an AVERAGE relative to time spent playing, are much better games for doing that.
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...and yet, this does not explain why people continue to play strategy games, whether real-time or turn-based...against the computer.
Civ4, when it came out, cost the same as Spore...yet there is no on-line gratification like in a MMORPg and all that.
Doesn't exactly hit on the "one more turn!!!" psychology, but tries to only say that the social aspect of it in MMORPG is what makes them work, and probably the same stimulus-reward tricks that casinos exploit to their advantage rather adeptly...
I discovered a game development gem of WOW (Score:2, Informative)
It reminds me of Asheron's Call 1 with server wide messages when you did something big. Everyone on the server got to see your character's name. It made the person who got it more famous, and it makes people who saw it think to
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I couldn't disagree more, having played... well, lets just say that when I type /played, I have to sit down and think hard about my decisions in life.
When you have 39 other players with you (24 or less in more recent dungeons), there's no real thrill of discovery or chance. There's loot in that dungeon, you know what it is, you know (usually) when it's likely to drop. It's not fun at all; it's just spending your dkp and getting your salary for all that work. Alone, though, you've gotten something totally
Wait a second... (Score:1, Insightful)
So, people are driven by virtual materialism, as if the real world equivalent isn't already our generation's soma.
How depressing is that?
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What the hell is wrong with virtual materialism? Real-world materialism is arguably a problem because it causes waste, both of production resources and materials. What possible problem is there with wanting to flaunt a few silly bits on a server somewhere? If you want to argue that it's inane and empty, sure, that's at least a possibly valid point. But equating it to real-life materialism makes it painfully clear that you don't understand the issue you're parroting in the slightest, and are instead just
Karma Whore - Single Page (Score:1)
Ad free, single page...
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3786/jonathan_blow_the_path_to_braid.php?print=1 [gamasutra.com]
Yeah, I know, I know... how is the web going to survive without ads, my servers are down, karma whore... who cares, I just don't want to click Next six times.
I don't think so (Score:3, Insightful)