Break the Rules of a Game to Improve it

In The Well-Played Game, Bernard DeKoven advocates a fundamental adjustment in players' attitudes towards the rules of a game: You're not changing the game for the sake of changing it. You're changing it for the sake of finding a game that works. Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want to change a game and how we go about it, a remarkable thing happens to us: We become the authorities. No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it,...

 Games Allow for Low-Cost Failure

What Prensky and Gee had realized early on was that game designers had lowered the cost of failure so players would take risks. They'd figured out that well-designed problem solving that gives players a second chance and a way to share their successes is almost irresistibly attractive. In just a few years, game designers had discovered the principles of deep and pleasurable learning that it had taken educators more than a century to apply in schools. Game studios had hit upon "profoundly good...

 Schools Can Blame Factors Other Than Teachers, Game Devel...

Most teachers work very hard, of course, and all of them want kids to succeed. But when kids don't learn what's been laid out for them, schools typically look for answers in the things that are going wrong in children's lives: poverty, trauma, bad parenting, poor nutrition, disability, sleep deprivation, lousy study skills. All of these are real problems that can have a tangible effect on kids' ability to learn, research shows. But if players fail at commercial video games, game designers can...

 A good game keeps you at the edge of your ability

As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels. This variety and intensity of feedback is the most important difference between digital and nondigital games. In computer and video games, the interactive loop is satisfyingly...

 Real Life NPCs are Boring

Let's start off with my likes for this title: First, the graphics are really good. I really felt immersed in the environment and quaint little neighborhood in the first level. I know other games have pretty good graphics, but Going Outside: You Know, Real Life? takes it to another level, because when you look closely at an object, instead of seeing blurry pixels, the developers made a point to add really fine details. The levels in this game are huge; there's plenty of areas to explore and lo...

 Video Games are Work Made Fun

As you all know, games are about choices. Sid Meier famously defined games as "a series of interesting choices." And choice is the most fundamental expression of Will. How can an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of Will, be used to transcend Will itself? You might as well try to smother a flame with oxygen. Game designers are taught that the ideal player experience is something called flow. Flow is that magical stat...