1. Some Thoughts on Game Design by Andrew Glassner Game Design Arcade Puzzle Strategy Story

2. Some Thoughts on Game Design Interactivity is just a game quality… Game quality is not correlated to interaction quality… Interactivity vs. Participation  +Constant engagement is a plus  -but not if meaningless a rat isn’t having fun interacting with game maze to get cheese  -ATM is interactive, but not fun experience (does not belong in a game)  +can’t teleport in real world but we should provide this in games I prefer participatory or competitive experiences

3. Needless Demands  Creating interaction by forcing player to carry out mandatory actions is ok, until the reach the point to where they are tedious and repetitive  A game should offer the fastest and easiest possible way to do everything unless there is some entertaining or informative reason to prevent it.  Deliberate deception is an artificial roadblock p6 Player Profiling  Don’t trick players into providing a personality description.  Branching narratives try to deduce personality to create responsive story and builds profile of player, but it is difficult for a game to characterize personality. Some Thoughts on Game Design

4. Randomness can make a game more interesting by adding random elements to the game.  Better if there are some intentions behind the variations. Multiple Choice Conversations  Today’s Technology is a very long way from creating programs that can understand an arbitrary question.

5. http://alicebot.org/

6. Adds questions about personality type in the conversation and to determine your personality type.

7. Things to avoid in design Don’t keep’em guessing with unclear choices p9 Repeat Painlessly Having the player go through a process several times in order to achieve a goal. Developer may have spent a lot of time creating an entertaining passage that they want you to see all the details and get a lot of mileage out of. This can be frustrating to users  What games can you think of that have painful repeats?  What new options do they have in games to prevent this?  What could we do to help users get to the next step of the game and skip already played portions?

8. Spackled Interaction??  You can spot spackled interaction by asking yourself whether the game designer and the interaction designer ever needed to speak to one another. Horribly designed Remotes  How does this happen? Spackling Interaction can be created by alternating cut-scenes and interactive periods p11 Things to avoid in design