games design
Design Students Enter LittleBigPlanet Game Jam
9:20AM Stuart Houghton | Students at the prestigious Parsons The New School For Design in New York will be taking part in a LittleBigPlanet design-o-thon. On September 21 & 22, 120 students will split into teams of 5 and play the game solidly for 24 hours, creating one level per team. Those that survive will have their efforts judged by Parsons faculty and Media Molecule. The winning level will be included in a special section of the game. It’ll be interesting to see how proper designers go about knocking up a game level — will they emphasise the fun , or just go for something elegantly laid out? Parsons Students Conduct LittleBigPlanet Game Jam [Gamasutra] More »
Dangling the Carrot: the ‘Loot Theory’
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Gamers can be a finicky bunch, moving from title to title in search of novelty — what does it take to keep players motivated and hanging around? Loot, says an essay over at High Dynamic Range Lying — that’s right, the collective ‘we’ are a bunch of donkeys chasing elusive, just-out-of-our-reach carrots around. I’ll buy it as a generalization, since I’ve spent extra hours obsessively going after rare prizes in some of my beloved RPGs, which have the art of loot baiting down to a science: More »
