Epic
Reliquary @ Basilica Maastricht
“The best players in the world are workers, not players…It is labor, capitalized by a release of new items, skills, and perks that reward efficient performance.”
Work for Fun. An essay by the ever cynical Michael Thomsen on the evil truths of Free to Play.
This was my childhood.
“Great design makes money as an incidental consequence, “not because it’s what it set out to do”
Raph Koster
“If you are making a game for everyone, you are actually making a game for no-one…game that has [no] soul.”
“At some point, you’re just an elitist fuck.”
Gabe Zichermann dismissing the anti-gamification sentiments of Ian Bogost as little more than gaming hipsterdom in Wired’s “The Curse of Cow Clicker”
“Only in a video game are you expected to log a work day slogging through nonsense just to get to the good part.”
—Mitch Krpata on the extreme handholding in Zelda Skyward Sword.
It’s an interesting quandary, tutorials. How do you introduce the great sea of mass market players to your game without horribly insulting — or worse, losing every veteran game player before they even reach level 1?
It’s a huge problem in a mobile space where you have mere minutes to prove your game is worth playing. How do navigate between assuming players know too little … and knowing too much?
What test can we easily conduct — in say a social game — to test whether a player is fluent in the language of games? How do we dynamically tune tutorial difficulty for, say, plowing a field or planting a crop?
The next threat to Tokyo: mutant carp.
