“ArenaNet game designer Daniel Achterman will share general guidelines and best practices he’s picked up over the years for crafting and tuning game systems.
My name is Daniel Achterman, and I’m a game designer. I’ve been doing gameplay and system design in a variety of genres for about 8 years, mostly RPGs, at companies like Gas Powered Games and ArenaNet…”
“Substantial resources are being committed to the development of so-called ‘serious’ video games as interventions for health issues. Health educators and others with an agenda for educating young people are well aware that this group buys video games and spends a lot of time playing them. Games therefore seem to have promise as a vehicle for…”
“Foldit is a revolutionary crowdsourcing computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research…With all the things proteins do to keep our bodies functioning and healthy, they can be involved in disease in many different ways. The more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins we can design to combat the disease-related proteins and cure the diseases. Below, we list three diseases that represent different ways that proteins can be involved in disease.” – Foldit
“Every time I talk or write about ecology as a tool or merely an inspiration for hermeneutic approaches to cultural artifacts, I feel like I need to start off with a confession: I am no hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist. Not only do I have serious doubts about the compatibility of hardcore environmentalism and dyed wool, I find it hard to subscribe to any sort of Ism, doctrine, or universal approach. And still, with all the relativism of the comparatist whose only creed is that there are always two (or more) ways of looking at any matter, I have become deeply fascinated with ecocriticism lately. “
“This article examines the role of weather in games, from both a gameplay and a wider ecological perspective. While weather is usually introduced merely as decoration, the author argues that more direct effects on gameplay would make games both more realistic and ecologically savvy. While some progress has been made in certain areas (wind blowing on the grass, rippling water, rain or storms affecting planes in flight simulators), there is still much room improvement and challenges for aspiring game developers and graphics artists.” – Abstract
“GDC Vault is a trove of in-depth design, technical and inspirational talks and slides from the influencers of the game development industry, taken from over 20 years of the worldwide Game Developers Conferences. Unlock thousands of hours of 8,000+ videos, audio files, and synced presentations from speakers and panels carefully selected by the GDC advisory board. GDC Vault content includes a broad spectrum of talks about videogame development across over 200 tracks that is easily filtered using tags, categories, upgraded search and recommended videos.” – GDC Vault
“According to Roger Caillois, play is ‘an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money.’ In spite of this–or because of it–play constitutes an essential element of human social and spiritual development. In this classic study, Caillois defines play as a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure space, isolated and protected from the rest of life…”
“”Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready. Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere…”
“Game development has exploded over the last few years, and now it seems like everyone is making a video game. You’ve got big studios full of hundreds of people. You’ve got small teams making incredible games. There are more people in independent game development than ever. This is an amazing thing, because everyone brings their unique experience and sensibilities to game design…”