My main disagreements with Jesse Schell’s lecture:

1. Right now external rewards are an ‘ooh shiny’ within culture.  We have struck some gold with the vein of behavioral psychology, and now everyone is rushing in believe there is gold enough for eternity in there somewhere.  The mind is being cracked open like some blue ocean market.  If there’s anything we know about these things it’s that they saturate.  With each further achievement system that latches on to our daily lives, the rewards become less and less novel.  After enough of them, the benefits will settle down into the background noise of our daily motivations.  Like any drug, the brain develops a tolerance.  Assuming his dystopian vision comes to pass, those reward system will be background noise – expected within any new system or promotion, but not a bullet point feature.  When opening up a new airline company, saying that you have offer frequent flier miles isn’t going to turn any heads.  We’ve dealt with reward structures that have turned background before, and like other drugs, there will need to be an escalation to get any attention.
2. The escalation won’t be more of the same.  Eventually while spelunking in the brain, something new will come along – another ‘ooh shiny’ that will no doubt be the topic of some future ominous keynote.  If anything, external reward schemes aren’t the future, they’re the emerging present.  If we put all our best minds on sapping this gold vein for all its worth, no one will ever find that minerals like uranium might have their value.
3. Many good game designers ARE working on the problem right now and to say that they aren’t present in the field is a bit insulting.  What’s important is that we push the discourse in the direction that benefits both games AND society as a whole.  We as game designers have the power to prevent this rat-and-pellet scenario by pushing the persuasive envelope in the right direction.  There will be no shortage of marketers cum game designers willing to tweak the spreadsheet pivot a bit more.
4. Reward structures are only ONE of the many neural motivators for gaming, and while the most basic and exploitable with our current understanding, they do not represent the true power of games.  If anything we’ve learned from the last decade or two of ludology it’s that games and learning are inexplicably linked – creating reward mechanisms that are devoid of learning and the introduction of new elements seems backwards.  In the old ‘depth and breadth’ game design metric, achievement systems for brushing your teeth have neither – the entire ruleset is one item long and mastery is immediate.  Sure the ‘game’ is in taking advantage of the system as a whole, not just the teeth part, but without learning and mastery how soon will it get stale?  Most facebook games lose my interest after a short while for this reason – I feel I’ve learned everything there is to learn and the rest is just rote repetition.  We’ve fought to elevate this (to some notable successes) within the Free to play and MMO arenas.  Why does he think our future is to give up these efforts and succumb to age old formulas?

I have a lot of respect for Mr. Schell, but I can’t see this one as much more than fear mongering – stirring the pot.  Based on the amount of ‘check this out’ and ‘awesome video’ tweets and the general lack of criticism, I can’t say he’s succeeded.  In summing up, I think the trend is exactly as he put it – but this is a short term trend (really just the last two years) in a long term history of games.  Remember with Full Motion Video was the future of games?  Virtual Reality?  Hyperbole is dangerous, but the exercise of it for sake of argument is good in that it gets people thinking.  Just because the current trend is moving in this one direction does not invalidate all other work and studies that have come before regarding future predictions.

Source: Matter Feast

• 3 Source – Silicon, Germanium, Diamond, Supercarbons, Rare Crystals and Metals (1cm2)
• 2 Source – Carbon-based Life, Petrocarbons, Fossils, Ferrous Metals, Graphite, Coal, Soot (10cm2)
• 1 Source – Anything Else (100cm2)

Abilities

Differential 3

Synthesize

Consume

Kinesis

Sculpt

Source: Wu Wei

Abilities:

Shadowstep 5

Imbalance

Disrupt

Divide Heaven

Phantom Recourse

Empty Mind

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhpn5xkg_44g9fpxwsj

The game becomes more usable and coherent as you go along.

Normally it makes sense to introduce concepts to the player in a nice smooth logarithmic/sigmoid fashion to optimize learning.  A game begins as simple as it can and adds complexity after enough time to digest the previous mechanics has passed, limiting the amount of instantaneous new mechanics.  However, with Little King’s story, nearly every time a new feature was added (especially in the early stages of the game)… I felt like it was a convenience issue or it was long overdue.

Each time a feature was added it didn’t feel so much like a new thing to learn, but a shortcut to a boring or frustratingly impossible task previously.  It feels as if they started with the final game and removed interface and features until they arrived at the beginning.  Some may feel this is a sound design methodology, but I do not.  The beginning experience is the most cruicial to the game – it can be looked at as a subtractive version of the game’s concepts, but it should be just as compelling as later play.  On examining this I noticed even I noticed some conflicting viewpoints on this issue, even within myself.

On one side, the beginning should be representative of the gameplay, pure and enjoyable in its own right.  This is especially true of casual games and seems to come from the casual game part of my brain.  The idea is that there is no immediate ‘end’ which you are going to, you are enjoying the gameplay as it is and as it progresses.  To me, this is the very zen-like concept that attracts me to more mechanics-based and casual games to begin with.

On the flip side, if you’ve designed a game that has a degree of complexity to it, you can’t give it all up at once.  So, like any good school – you introduce a problem, then a skill, and then test for application (designers take note: it’s more effective to introduce the problem before the skill than the other way around).  This method leads to a very ‘tutorialish’ beginning, especially if condensed together (skill-skill-skill-game vs skill-game-game-skill-game-game).

Neither side is wrong, but there’s definitely some nuances in the approach that make it worth exploring further.  As much as I do truly enjoy Little King’s Story, I did feel like I was playing through about 5 hours of a mediocre / frustrating / aimless game to get to a more polished, enjoyable game later – and I didn’t even know that was going to pan out that way through the first 5 hours (not quite like begrudgingly sitting through tutorials).

Regardless of the design method with respect to the beginning (additive or subtractive), one should never skip polishing the beginning and examining it from a ‘what if this were all it was’ viewpoint.