Gameplay: the Missing Ingredient In Most Games 308
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly has an article discussing the direction the games industry has taken over the past several years. Gaming has become more of a business, and in doing so, become more of a science as well. When maximizing revenue is a primary concern, development studios try to reduce successful game designs to individual elements, then naively seek to add those elements to whatever game they're working on, like throwing spices into a stew. Kelly points out that indie developers who are willing to experiment often succeed because they understand something more fundamental about games: fun. Quoting: 'The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus "Notch" Persson) didn't just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn't just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That's why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies. The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that's how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players.'"
Re:No silly (Score:5, Informative)
Gameplay is what happens when you play the game.
Duh.
Sure but the article was about that there should also be more to a game than just "doing stuff".
Asseditry (Score:2, Informative)
Making sure, or delete the second "is".
Re:No silly (Score:2, Informative)
ProSiebenSat.1 Eu publisher (the fuck sort of name they chose?)
FYI thats a concatenation of two german (crappy) television channels (operated by the same company).
The sort of crap channel only the barely educated idiots will watch voluntarily.
Re:No silly (Score:5, Informative)
"ProSiebenSat.1" is just the concatenation of the identifying parts of the names of two TV companies which merged: "Pro Sieben Media AG" and "Sat.1 SatellitenFernsehen GmbH" ("Satellitenfernsehen" is just German for "satellite TV"; "AG" and "GmbH" are the legal type of the corresponding company). Those again were named after their main (German) TV channels: Pro 7 ("Sieben" is the German word for "seven") and SAT.1.