We Break Games
So night before last I joined a few other game designers in the Los Angeles area to see about setting up a sort of Game Play and Design group. The results were very positive. The five of us are going to meet regularly, playing lots of different games with an eye for breaking them apart and seeing how the pieces work together. We’ll be doing the same with our own designs. I’m very much looking forward to this, especially the understanding that play is inextricably connected to design and vice-versa; there is such a temptation to design in a vacuum, making “the perfect game” and then having people play it. No such nonsense here! We get to use a little tool called empiricism, perhaps you’ve heard of it.
We start in on the game-breaking next week — I am so jazzed.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Cool. Make sure to put up casualty reports on her e:)
- Christian
January 20th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Awesome!
I’ll be in Lancaster in February — but only on weekdays, and only for like 3. So I was all going to be like ‘we must get together’ and then I realized that with people having lives it might not work.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Looks like we’re meeting weeknights, though. If you could get to LA, we can probably have a “guest NPC”. On the other hand, if you’re really and truly free, I’ve got vacation days and you-me-Laura-(Mo?) might hang out.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
No Mo, just me.
I’m coming down the 16th, then going to Salt Lake for my brother’s marriage on the 17th, and will be back the 19th, and be in Lancaster till the 21st, at which point I’ll be coming home. So it’d be like all of one day that I’d have any chance of doing anything.
January 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I’m jealous– Kuei con 3 hours to the north, your game play and design 4 hours to the south– I’m surrounded by a movement that’s just getting together, and it’s all a little far away. Congratulations on making it happen.
January 21st, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Dude, that’s what you get for living in Bakersfield.
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:08 am
Very awesome. I look forward to seeing what comes of this madness.
Are you planning to do mainly published games? Games in development? Other people’s games in development? Combinations of those?
January 23rd, 2006 at 12:52 pm
The lot of us have publishing aspirations ranging the gamut; we’re also going to be playing others’ games and taking them apart to inform our own designs.