Verbs from the edge – Project Horseshoe
Positively influencing the art, science, and business of game design| Project Horseshoe
NOTE: This topic was proposed on site at Project Horseshoe 2019, and became a workgroup. Topic: Curate practical vocabulary and tools for designing for a large meaningfully diverse possibility space.| Project Horseshoe
THIS TOPIC MERGES TWO PREVIOUSLY PROPOSED TOPICS. BOTH AUTHORS OF THOSE TWO TOPICS HAVE AGREED TO THE FOLLOWING. With the growing dominance of free-to-play games, and games-as-a-service, more and more games are meant to be played for years instead of hours. But classic storytelling techniques are difficult to implement and maintain in live games. It […]| Project Horseshoe
17-button controllers (e.g. XBox One, Dual Shock, or Stadia Controllers) are dominant in the console space, strongly present in PC, and largely absent (currently) in mobile. They’re arguably the most iconic identifier of gaming as a broad activity. When one has mastered their use, they make possible the mapping of a broad range of simulations […]| Project Horseshoe
Two wildly different genres — AAA open world games and mixed reality content games — are circling around different design problems that may share a common solution. As open worlds get bigger and bigger, they demand huge amounts of time and resources dedicated to level design, art production, narrative production, and testing. Designers restricted to […]| Project Horseshoe
After a long period of convergent evolution in game interfaces, the introduction of the Wii and the iPhone in quick succession sparked a cambrian explosion in game interfaces that’s continued over the last dozen or so years, in touchscreens, accelerometers, motion tracking, VR, AR — not to mention the rich ecosystem of unique sculptural interfaces […]| Project Horseshoe
We’ve all seen them- certain themes, ideas, promises that pull players in and won’t let go. Guillermo del Toro, Miyazaki, Neil Gaimon, Monte Cook all create worlds that are familiar but fresh, enticing you into staying to see what’s over the next hill or around the next corner. I’m interested in what we can do […]| Project Horseshoe
Anticipation is everywhere. We constantly are driven by it in unsuspecting ways. When you feel your phone buzz – is that a text? Who is it? Is it important? When you are listening to a song and that favorite part is about to come on. Why is that exciting? When we played hide and seek as […]| Project Horseshoe
In recent years we’ve seen new technologies emerge in and around the games scene. From AR, MR and VR to new areas of AI. These new forms of technology open up new avenues for what games can be. New creators outside of games are looking to us, the game creators, to bring interactivity and joy […]| Project Horseshoe
I buy art and music for my games. There are loads of ready-made assets out there (even if you don’t use the Unity engine). Why can’t I buy stories and dialog for my videogame projects in the same way? What process, tool, or marketplace would need to happen to make this a reality?| Project Horseshoe
Design is a relatively new discipline, filled with people without formal training in the job, and I have observed that many design directors have built processes from first principles, while a handful of studios have rolled out design processes they’ve thrashed out themselves, to varied success. Unlike engineering, writing, art or production there isn’t a […]| Project Horseshoe
Mastery, or the building of skill, is one of the core intrinsic motivators called out by SDT and while many games seek to simulate mastery (RPG progression systems, etc.) games that seek to or require that the player build real skill have very niche appeal (with a few notable exceptions.) We have a better understanding […]| Project Horseshoe
‘Traditional’ games, particularly RPGs, have lapped digital games in terms of mechanics, sophistication, and even ease and approachability. I’d like to partake in a workgroup that considers the kinds of player agency, resolution systems, and expression systems that have emerged in the traditional games space, and forge ideas about which systems can be imported into […]| Project Horseshoe
The challenge: Many service-based games last for years, which necessitates a content treadmill to keep players fed and happy. However, many common progression systems borrow from RPGs and MMOs and involve leveling up in linear fashion. Players grind up to some max cap, at which point the numbers have started to break down. Such games […]| Project Horseshoe
I hesitate to submit this topic because of my profound ignorance. In the past, this lack of personal experience can lead to a group that BSs for the weekend and then has to do huge amounts of research afterwards in order to salvage some sort of publishable result. The big question What are the key […]| Project Horseshoe
Dance 10 XP, Looks 3 XP. In Search of the Interactive Musical If you love the magic of musical theatre and are a video game designer, then you’ve probably spent some time thinking about this largely untapped creative territory for interactive design. Though interactive stories and interactive live theatre are starting to be better understood […]| Project Horseshoe
Everlasting. Best practices for narrative design in free-to-play mobile games as a service. There are shelf-loads of books on how to write stories for film and television, and the number of books on writing for video games is quickly catching up. But most video game narrative design how-to’s – from tumescent tomes to twerpy twitter […]| Project Horseshoe
This relatively new genre of “Legacy” board games (Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy, Gloomhaven, etc.) is a pretty fascinating design space, and it seems like there is a lot more that could be explored here beyond what has been done already. Digital games with Legacy-type gameplay that modify their own rules/data/code permanently? Board games that add […]| Project Horseshoe
It seems that videogame experimentation (especially in terms of UI/UX) has become exclusively the realm of college students. This makes me sad; kids can chase their muse and build wildly impractical installation UIs, but it’s all a big resume, and once they get a job in the industry, they’ll be much more constrained within the […]| Project Horseshoe
Player to player trade in games has gotten a bad reputation; it’s risky, hard to balance, and opens the door to community and CS issues that are hard to mitigate. And yet, it is an incredibly enriching and engaging player experience. I love player to player trade and hate to see it’s decline especially as […]| Project Horseshoe
It’s easy to find a list of things developers shouldn’t do when it comes to player feedback; don’t just listen to the loud voices on Reddit, don’t get defensive, don’t feed the trolls, don’t trust player proposed solutions, don’t be too reactive, etc. All of that is fine advice I guess, but I feel like […]| Project Horseshoe
Proper use of behavioral data, telemetry, and BI are a normal part of many designers work but when training new designers or experienced designers using data for the first time I can find no solid resources that layout how designers should use data, what data ethics looks like in games, or what types of data […]| Project Horseshoe
More and more games are being designed to be played for years instead of hours. These living games often have designs and production constraints that make narrative designs that borrow heavily from film and television difficult to implement and maintain. I am disappointed when I see developers and players conclude that this means that these […]| Project Horseshoe
The proposed workgroup examines experience goals and design strategies for games that contribute to a meaningful life by way of drawing on Existential psychotherapy and depth psychology (e.g. myth and ritual). I am particularly interested in designing for “psychological resonance”, a principle described by clinical psychologist Erik Goodwyn, who exstentisvely researched the use of ritual […]| Project Horseshoe
Following on the wild success of last year’s “Constructing Emergence,” I’ve continued thinking about how to put some of the ideas we explored into practice. In particular I’d like to examine examples of how to use component interaction matrices most effectively, the optimal proportion of directly connected components in such a matrix (if there is […]| Project Horseshoe
In the last year, we’ve seen the publication of the Trust Spectrum, and broad discussion of the ph2016 paper Game design patterns that facilitate strangers becoming Friends. But both of these papers, rightfully, take a hands-off approach to defining design best practices for motivating players to play together. Friendship and trust are a challenging frame […]| Project Horseshoe
Here’s a Subversive Game Design Concept that might have some legs — RPG game systems are built on a conceptual foundation of colonization without consequence. Systems that enable players to explore, exploit, refine, industrialize, and extract value from the world, either natural or social, are often the basis for our crafting systems & tech trees. […]| Project Horseshoe
This is one of those things that strikes me as an unsolved problem in game design. As Raph said in his book, players tend to gravitate towards game exploits even at the cost of their own fun. The solutions that prevent player exploits also tend to punish players for the horrendous sin of actually trying […]| Project Horseshoe
This topic is a mission to uncover unknown unknowns in the game genre space. Probably? primarily research oriented, this could be executed in two phases: 1) mapping systems in the world, 2) comparing this map to games that are made. For the purposes of argument, we could call a system underrepresented if it does not […]| Project Horseshoe
Challenging players appropriately varies enormously depending on the type of game you’re making. With the rise of games that are deliberately hard enough to force player engagement with all of the game systems (Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Cuphead), challenge as a selling point for a game has never been […]| Project Horseshoe
A few Horseshoes ago, Crystin Cox sparked this topic by mentioning how income inequality appears inevitably in games with trade. Add trade and 6 months down the road, you’ve got an inherent power dynamic that warps every economic and social system in the game. A subtle issue, admittedly, but we are all familiar with how […]| Project Horseshoe
Since their inception, MMOs have been focused on scale. Massively is right in the name! And we have expended large amounts of creative and technological energy creating larger and larger simulations to support bigger and bigger groups of players. We love to design large, interconnected mechanics, and global scale systems. Managing and shaping big systems […]| Project Horseshoe
“How to design games for kids” is a well-tread topic in the game industry (both industries, actually, digital and tabletop). There are two areas of this that seem to be unsolved problems that I’d like to move the needle on, though. First is that kids grow up. Most games are designed for a specific developmental […]| Project Horseshoe
Two years ago, I was running a project to explore innovation in mobile gaming. I had the great good fortune to work with Raph Koster, Sean Vesce, and others. Our design focus areas were: Colocated play with phones (YDKJ, SpaceTeam, “couch co-op for phones”) Design that supported true human connection between the players, based on […]| Project Horseshoe
Once upon a time, we could sell a game for $50 in a box. Within that box, we could strive to craft the most fun experience possible that $50 could buy. Those days are largely gone now. As the entertainment landscape gets more crowded, larger budget games stand out the best, and they demand a bigger […]| Project Horseshoe
The game industry can be a wonderful place, but it can also be harsh. Each year, we lose more skilled veterans to burnout, frustration, or plain old poor treatment. The games we make have a very human cost. While each of us can individually try to make our own personal bubbles of excellence, realistically, game […]| Project Horseshoe
In our current game project we are running into the following problem: we’ve added fairly abstract mechanics to deal with ‘skill tests’ in our action RPG. The dev team is very happy with the mechanics as it allows us to express a wide variety of situations that are hard to represent otherwise.Especially because it allows […]| Project Horseshoe
If I had the rest of my life, what game would I make, for ME? None of us want to waste the time we have on this mudball. We all want to make Art that has a lasting impression on this world. I’ve had a few moments with peers to muse about the “greatest possible […]| Project Horseshoe
In 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and DW Griffith formed their own movie studio, United Artists. The goal was to better control their creative interests, and also to keep more of the revenue generated by their creative efforts. Although the effort was ultimately a failure, with the principals selling out in the 1950s, […]| Project Horseshoe
Emergent gameplay holds a lot of fascination for many people, and yet we have a difficult time nailing down what it is — much less how to reliably create it. There are a lot of descriptions and attempts at definitions of emergence, but they’re often incompatible and fairly ad hoc in nature. As a quick and […]| Project Horseshoe
Positively influencing the art, science, and business of game design| Project Horseshoe
Overview| www.projecthorseshoe.com
