Since this issue is big right now, I’ll just weigh in.

Negative-Sum

Forget about money for a second and focus on the physical reality.

Used game trading is a massively negative-sum economic activity. All those trading shops have to be built and staffed. People have to travel there and back. People have to spend mental effort to hunt around for games at low prices in an opaque market.

Simply transmitting all the games over the Internet, with a universal and transparent pricing model, would be massively less costly in real wealth, physical resources and human time.

Twisting Design

Second, note how much used games twist design goals. I don’t like having to muck around with my design to make it monetizable, or freemium, or to make it into a long grind so people won’t trade it in.

Freely-traded used games mean that long-grind games like WoW bring 100% of the profits to the developer (since there is no trading), while short-but-awesome games like Portal and BioShock bring only a small fraction of the profits to the developer (since huge numbers of copies will be traded around, suppressing demand for the new copies). The end result is huge economic pressure away from short, rich games towards all this other stuff.

I’d rather the only pressures game designers were worried about was making a better game. Because this economic twisting effect is seriously affecting how we design our games, and not in a good way. I want more short, rich games.

We Already Live Without It

Funny thing is, we’ve had a trade-less online distribution system for years. It’s called Steam, and it works very well.

And Steam sales demonstrate quite clearly how low new (though not just-released) game prices can go in a transparent market that’s not being flooded by dirty dusty scratched copies of games from a store on the corner.

There’s no reason to make a console phone home every 24 hours, like the Xbox One does. But I really do wish game trading would go away. I think we’d all benefit in the end.

This article is a written version of a talk I delivered at Ottawa International Game Conference on June 1 2013.

I recently published a game design book called Designing Games. If you’re interested in learning design analysis and day-to-day process skills, check it out at Amazon or O’Reilly.

There’s an old dream in game design. It drives the design of games like SimCity, Dwarf Fortress, Tropico, The Sims, and Prison Architect. I like to call it the Simulation Dream.

In 1996, Starr Long, the associate producer of Ultima Online, talked about the game before release:

“Nearly everything in the world, from grass to goblins, has a purpose, and not just as cannon fodder either. The ‘virtual ecology’ affects nearly every aspect of the game world, from the very small to the very large. If the rabbit population suddenly drops (because some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves may have to find different food sources (e.g., deer). When the deer population drops as a result, the local dragon, unable to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities.”

That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive.

But these dreams shattered. After its release, Richard Garriott said of Ultima Online:

Continue reading →

I’ll be webcasting my Drunk Design talk with O’Reilly tomorrow. Check it out here.

This post has more comments on its Gamasutra version.

We usually think of game design as a process of creation where a designer conceives a game in their mind and projects it into the world. In this article, I propose an alternative metaphor. What if design isn’t a process of creation at all? What if it is a process of exploration?

The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story The Library of Babel describes a universe that consists of nothing but a gigantic library. This library contains all possible 410-page books. This means that somewhere in its near-infinite stacks one can find a book holding every combination of characters that can fill a 410 pages. It holds a book that is 410 pages of nothing but the letter a. It also contains a book that is all a’s except the last letter, which is b. And so on through every combination of letters. Continue reading →

I recently spoke at the Ottawa Dirty Rectangles game design group. My topic was how game designers’ emotions affect the design process, how we ignore our emotions because we’re all geeks, and how to notice them and deal with them.

My book dropped today. It’s a real, physical thing.

It……. is…… done.

Final copy finished at O’Reilly. Now it’s just time for distribution, exactly three years minus one week since I started writing.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out, in large ways and small.

Release date: February 21.

See the Amazon page here.

In some alternate universe, video games are called each of these things.

What did games become in those realities? Does everyone think they should be “fun”? Are there Congressional hearings about how they’re corrupting the youth? Are they thought of as undignified and unsophisticated? Are they violent, sexual, creative, for the young, the old, the smart, the stupid, men, women, the rich, the poor?

• Video games
• Software toys
• Interactive stories
• Experience engines
• Emotion tweakers
• Boxed worlds
• Borrowed lives
• Button movies
• Computational choose-your-own-adventures
• Emergence systems
• Software contests
• Screen sports
• Digital wars
• Electric entertainers
• Machine players
• Livable stories
• Funware
• Feelware
• Loveware
• Digital parties
• Generated shows

How many assumptions spring from a name?

I just signed a book publishing deal with O’Reilly Media.

Look for my game design book out sometime in 2013.

I wrote an article-length and somewhat contrary response to an article on Gamasutra by Tess Jones.

Check out the article and my response here.