Ideation and Game Designers

There's a common refrain from many successful game designers when it comes to the topic of ideas. You've probably heard it before. It takes several forms including "Ideas are cheap." "Ideas are worthless, it's all about execution." "No one's interested in your game idea." "Game design isn't about ideas." The list goes on. Game designers as pundits are often pretty down on ideas. As a researcher, I've been trying to puzzle out exactly why this is...

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Game Genres: What've you got?

I'm building a list of genres for video games, or possibly for digital games. Either way I'm trying to start at the top level by focusing on the big conventions that organize around pillar verbs or core mechanics. to clarify I'm making a tool for thinking about game genre for design. It focuses on the pillar verbs that are intentionally built into games via core mechanics rather than the emergent verbs that best characterize the player experience. I have the highest regard for understandings of games focused on the player experience. After all, I've already spent a bunch of time studying players myself, and more importantly every designerworth their salt knows that players are highly unpredictable creatures, and at the end of the day there's no telling exactly what they'll make of your game.* In fact, that's exactly why this list is focused on choices that the designer makes. Here are the top level genres thus far:

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AC: Revelations first thoughts (spoiler alert)

I'll keep this short. As noted, this post includes spoilers. They are not plot spoilers. Mostly, they focus on the absolute failure and tragedy of game design which is the tower defense minigame in Assassin's Creed: Revelations.

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Moving Leadership at Play online

I've been talking about moving my dissertation online for a number of months. I even cleared it with my participants a while back, and a few of them were rather excited by the prospect. At this point I still haven't gotten past creating a page on this site (currently hidden) where I will begin the work of editing the text to improve the parts I don't like, and reformatting it for online readability...

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ongoing

There is a space.

Inside of it is an unknown construct.

It metastasizes, and other spaces become involved.

Next thing you know, all kinds of parts are spinning in different directions.

...moving on.