Some neat stuff!

Stumbled upon the website psychologyofgames.com, which I will hyperlink even though you could drag it into your address bar, and in addition to being worth exploring on your own I thought I’d link to a few interesting pieces. And actually, I’ve posted about them before - their Three Reasons We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles article is very good at keeping me from wasting my money!

• Burnout and Crunch is a fantastic piece, and it applies to any kind of work you might be doing - it’s more the psychology of game developers than the psychology of actual games
• Psychological Flow and Fake Plastic Rock is about flow, which I swear I’ve posted about before but can find no record of… if I haven’t, this is a good, easy to understand explanation and it’s written well, too
• Psychological Weight of History is about the weird way we value things, as is this post about the endowment effect
• Jam and Game Reviews is about why we’re bad at rating things based on their different parts, but I’m not totally sure how I feel about his conclusions. If you want a review on whether a game is “good”, as a piece of software with graphics and sounds and stuffs, that’s one thing - and most people could probably write that. If you want a review on whether a game is “fun,” as a thing with stuffs you can do, that’s pretty easy - and anyone could write it. But if you want a critique, on whether a game is “good” as a piece of art that delivers some kind of message, that more or less bypasses the problem with typical game reviews (usually a mix of the first and second options). Sure, you can tell people it looks nice and has fantastic voice acting, but if the same game had wonky graphics it would probably still be worth playing. Harder to appreciate, maybe, but worth playing.

        A follow up to something I posted long, long ago is Procedural Generation and User-Generated Content II: Storylines, AI, and Emergent Gameplay. I didn’t title it, so don’t blame me. While I like the idea of generating random contexts, and I’m sure it is being done already in the games we play. The emergent storylines part, in particular, is very interesting to me from an AI perspective - but also in terms of what the player can be allowed to do in something like a browser-based game where players have to be explicitly allowed to do things. Also, basing the game on text (i.e. most of the browser-based games I’ve played, because games made in Flash are “flash games”) makes it super easy to add mechanics. You want to let the player seduce, or murder, or steal from, or lie to any NPC in the game? Easy, just give them dialogue options. No need to animate it all, or have art, or a button dedicated to doing this action, or show what happens when they succeed or fail.

        All of that being said, I’m dubious about the idea of totally procedural games. It would have to be very, very sophisticated to match the kind of output talented human writers and game designers can come up with. As soon as a player realizes that they’re being sent to [kill] [X] [for Y coins] for the seventeenth time, by some randomly selected character archetype (last time it was a peasant, this time a wizard!) it will all fall apart. Not only that, it would be hard to craft deep and truly meaningful experiences - mature experiences! - without a human hand to guide the complexity.

        Catherine is deep and meaningful by virtue of its subject matter, but then there are games like The Witcher (first and second) that become deep and meaningful through the complexity of the situations they present. Any given quest has various interpretations, based on who you talk to and what you know. So then any procedural generation has to make your gameplay situation, but also add a lot of context in terms of ulterior motives and hidden information unavailable to the player. And then you get into the realm of things that need so much processing power, they have to be generated during development rather than at game time, and that’s cheaper than paying humans but far less dynamic.

        Game AI vs Traditional AI offers interesting insight into AI in games, and why it sometimes seems to lack in the Intelligence department. I don’t have much to add to what’s already there, but if I tell you that it’s an article about how to make players feel like they are The Batman will you be more interested?

        Yeah, I thought you would be.

        Trenches seems like a relatively interesting webcomic project between Penny Arcade and the guy behind PvP, at least as far as a webcomic with five comics can be “interesting.” However, what is very interesting is their Tales From The Trenches that accompany each comic - anonymous stories from people who have worked as game testers. These are fantastic tales of horror, and I highly recommend reading a few. The one you’ll see linked to if you read this the day I post it, titled “Ship It,” is particularly soul-crushing.