Players Making Decisions
First book I've read on this subject, and it proved to be a really useful reading. It has a lot of well-based content (both empirically and with external cases) for developing a game from ideas to cash flow. Most areas are covered, both 101 and mid-level problems/possible solutions.
Another great surprise was the references; I relied a lot on them. Most chapters give consistent sources to referenced studies, I've read a lot of them, from game feel to economy, I've spent 20~30% reading external studies.
My (not so structured) notes from the book: - A philomath is a lover of learning (didn't know this one!) - Their real goal was not the one perfect pot, but better and better pots. - Products that are identical to their competitors are called commodities. - Rigid definitions hurt multidisciplinary fields. - If you make something clever and someone calls it "not a game", you still made something. - Best problem statements should get down to the concrete design goal. - Although students answered the same as the other participants in this exercise, the difference between them and the professionals is that the design professionals were willing to come back with better answers later. Professionals tend to keep digging away at the idea until they have explored all of its facets. And, as a result, they can choose from a deep list of ideas. Students, however, tend to stop at the first idea. - Waterfall definition: A better allusion might have been to black holes (loved this one). - The idea can be great, but unless you also have the resources to implement and iterate it, it risks weighing down the rest of the project. - Test proctor prompts the user to narrate everything they are doing, thinking and feeling as they test. - Do not try to solve problems during the playtest; only identify and understand the problem. - When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. - You should take all possible steps to avoid introducing bias. - Your job is not to make sure they have fun, but to see where or if they have fun. - You can't hear your playtesters' thoughts, so take steps to make sure they talk aloud. - Game designers have far more ideas than they have time to implement. - Include early mini-payoffs/climaxes so players become interested while learning the game. - Designers overestimate what the player skills are in the short run and underestimate in the long run. - Always underestimate what the player will be able to understand instinctually early in the game. - Flow is the state in between frustration and boredom that drives player motivation. - Every player has a different tolerance for how much experimentation she'll endure prior to reaching her goals before she simply quits. - ... lists eight different kinds of meaning for "fun" word - mechanics lead to runtime player behavior known as dynamics, which in turn result in player emotions - the young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions - each verb must relate to something a player does to affect the state of the game within the game rules - money changing hands is only one type of cost. Any limited resource can be a cost. - designer uses progression because he feels he needs to reward the players explicitly - a puzzle is fun and it has a right answer (break this wall) - Variable interval is great for slow and steady engagement. - Fixed interval is largely effective only for engagement around the interval points. - Fixed ratio is great for a burst of engagement. - Variable ratio is great for lots of engagement. - Extinction occurs when a reward no longer generates the anticipated behavior. - construct in constructivism means that each individual learner is constantly constructing new models of knowledge based on what they already know - cognitive load is the measure of how much information a player can manage at once - unless they were being rewarded for it, they no longer wanted to draw! - for most players, the only thing a global leaderboard manages to tell you is that you suck - scarcity makes us value things more and motivates us to acquire - intrinsic motivation is the motivation to do something as its own end - the three desires in the self-determination theory that help predict human motivation are: autonomy, mastery and relatedness - attribution error is the tendency to assign dispositional factors to the actions of others and situational factors to your own actions - they are not liars (for this reason, at least); they just are not in a position to be able to view the thing fairly - endowment effect: it states that you value something more that is in your possession - people are more sensitive to losses than gains - items that are well-understood are easier to remember - use images and words for the best retention - humans make impressions of people after less than a tenth of a second - determine purpose, desired scope, connected systems - no one ever closed a deal by having clever transitions - text that is too small or too low-contrast for an audience member - company logo or template cruft on every slide - risk comes from not knowing what you are doing - are the rules needed to understand how this game would work effectively communicated? - is there an interesting hook for the game that is effectively communicated? this should be given early! - create separate artifacts for your presentation notes, for the data and graphics shown to the audience, and for the audience to take home - projects made without crunch had higher scores on both subjective outcomes - revenues in the game industry are pareto-distributed - to err and err and err again, but less and less - celebrate the things that are great instead of pointing out the things that are not