Welcome to your Sunday reservoir of interesting writing about video games. Grab your reading jacket, a cup of coffee and get ready to exercise the brain.
Above 49: Instancing Emotion
Nels Anderson acknowleges the emotional pull that fosters camaraderie in Left 4 Dead and ensures its co-operative play works.
Gamasutra: Kill Polygon, Kill: Violence, Psychology, and Video Games
Michael Thomsen examines why we enjoy video game violence and the abstraction of war.
Groping The Elephant: The fallacy of choice
Justin Keverne asserts that the lack of player choice in Uncharted 2 is one of its chief strengths.
Magical Wasteland: The Way to a Man’s Heart
Matthew Burns chews upon the many ways in which food appears in games, as mechanic, metaphor and collectible.
RedKingsDream: IKEA, and the logic of videogame design
Daniel Golding discovers the link between furniture showroom layout and level design flow.
Mr Waffle
Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:02 PMReading the IKEA article. This point shows why Valve are the best game designers today:
“Take this one, given at GDC 08, where Wolpaw takes responsibility for the interviewer (Brandon Sheffield) being unaware he had to click to respawn after dying: “No, again, it’s playtesting. We failed you.””
Valve games just WORK. They playtest the damn things to make sure it’s never too obscure, never too unfair. I wish other developers (read: JAPAN) would actually consider this, instead of going by the motto of “we’ll make the player do what WE want”, which results in frustration and “WTF WERE THEY THINKING?” moments.
url404
Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 2:22 PMOnce again on the IKEA article, I came across this earlier in the week.
Somebody has written a FAQ for the game that is IKEA. It’s admittedly for the NTSC version but most of it can be applied to the PAL localisation:
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/how_to/the_nonexpert_ikea.php