Hangman

Sidewalk games

It’s real world microtransactions: Pennies for a chance to take a swing at a LARPer.

I love the idea that you have to unlock the drawings by watching the movies. An arbitrary goal blocked by an arbitrary constraint. But man, if I don’t suddenly want those drawings if only cause they’re “locked.”

I recently wrote a piece for the casual game website Gamezebo about MyTown and Foursquare and the state of real-world game mechanics.

Being there is playing there: Checking in on the emergence of location-based games

Right now most of these games/services revolve around check-in mechanics. And I can totally see why, check-ins are the atomic unit of location-based data–”I’m here.” With Foursquare you simply raise your hand and state your location. MyTown offers some further gameplay beyond your hand-raising with players collecting rent on properties they’ve visited. They may seem overly simple, but these casual mechanics are what’s required to get the average player used to real-world gaming, easing them into more complex and demanding games.

Read the whole article.

I recently gave an hour long webinar on casual game design for the International Game Developers Association. The talk touched on some of the ground I cover in my book Casual Game Design. I also gave a very brief analysis of some of the design decisions that informed our iPhone Gigaputt. The slides provide a visual guide to the ideas illustrated in the talk (though they make much more sense with the audio).

Here’s a link to a recording of the webinar:
http://bit.ly/cEB3aM

In the presentation I try to define casual games and define some defining characteristics of casual play. I also touch on the importance of developing a mental model to explain games before going into the process of being a game designer. After laying this initial groundwork I look at some specific games and the mechanics that comprise the gameplay.

Do you think the characteristics I’ve identified for casual games make sense? Are there others?

Gigaputt, our new golf game has been out for about a month now and has sold decently. We were featured by Apple for a week, which boosted our sales 10 times over. But as many app developers know, the iTunes Store is a giant haystack. It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack. At least a needle is made of different material. This is like finding a strand of hay in a haystack. You can find the ones on top but finding ones in the middle, well that takes some real perseverance and digging.

Here’e the skinny on Gigaputt:

With the flick of a button Gigaputt transforms your neighborhood into an exciting 3-hole mini-golf course, complete with popping manholes, treacherous fire hydrants, and giant coins.

I plan to have a more detailed post-mortem on the design decisions behind Gigaputt available very soon. But in the meantime check out the game. The post-mortem will make a lot more sense if you’ve played!

So how do you justify the purchase of a Sanits t-shirt right now? (Ludicrously expensive I know–but they’re so damn soft!) I love the simple logo. I love old sports team logos. I got an old Hartford Whalers shirt recently only for the way the whale tail fans out into a W. But the Whalers are defunct. The Saints, on the other hand are playing in the Super Bowl for the first-time ever today. So accusations of a jumping on the bandwagon would seem not only justifiable, but called for.

Does it make it any better that I’ve been thinking about buying the shirt for ages? What if I use the financial investment in a shirt as a bet? In this way I come out with a clothing garment, even if I lose and the Colts win. Or should be wearing team paraphernalia strictly limited to long-time fans? Perhaps on this day.

The nature of investment in sports continues to perplex me. After a dismal season rooting for the Giants in which I found myself spun into dour Sunday evening funks by miserable play in a game that I have absolutely no control over, I found myself wondering if rooting for a team is worth it. Over the second half of the season, when it was pretty evident that the Giants would not make the playoffs I found that I could actually watch a football game and enjoy it strictly on aesthetic grounds. But I also found I was more likely to turn the game off halfway through. Without the larger investment of rooting, I found that I couldn’t justify the time spent. The outcome of the game was, in the greater scheme of things just as meaningless (if Caillois is to be believed anyway), but now that fact was more evident and it’s unpleasantness made me yearn for emotional stakes.

Dean Takahashi had a good talk with a number of venture capitalists over at Venture Beat. The most interesting point I thought came from Tim Chang who had this to say:

Gaming 3.0 is about leveraging game mechanics and models to re-invigorate other markets: humans are inherently geared towards addictive behaviors and biases that can be exploited through game mechanics like points, achievements, and leveling up. Gaming + Commerce = Swoopo. Gaming + Music = Red Octane, Harmonix. Gaming + Healthcare = Lumos Labs. Gaming + Local Search/LBS = FourSquare. I often joke that “gaming will rescue us all.” I don’t mean that we all become hardcore WoW players, but that we can utilize game constructs to perhaps revive other industries which no longer monetize as effectively via macro-transaction or advertising.

It’s definitely something I kept thinking about while writing Casual Game Design. More and more I think the lessons of casual game will make a greater impact outside of the game industry than in it. Now I wish I had chapters in the book looking at the “game” mechanics of things like collecting friends on Facebook or bidding on eBay auctions.

New York University / Interactive Telecommunications Program – Spring 2010
Greg Trefry
gtrefry at iamtheeconomy dot com
646-644-1995
Office Hours: Friday after class, 6-6:30 PM or by appointment
Download Syllabus

Class Description

What happens to games when they escape the boundaries of our tabletops and desktops and TV screens and living rooms? From massively multiplayer online games to networked objects that turn the city into a gigantic game grid, new forms of super-sized gaming are expanding at an alarming rate and opening up vast new spaces in which to play. Whether these games are measured in terms of number of players, geographical dimensions, or temporal scope, they represent a new trend in which the ‘little world” created by a game threatens to swallow up the “real world” in which it is situated. This class is a hands-on workshop focused on the particular design problems of large-scale games. In this class students: develop a foundation of basic game design understanding from which to approach the specific issues particular to big games; analyze existing digital and non-digital large-scale games, taking them apart to understand how they work; as interactive systems; and work on a series of design exercises that explore the social, technological, and creative possibilities of large-scale games.

The class will be broken into three sections: People, Time and Location. The first section People will focus on games that bring together large numbers of players into one game. The second section Time will focus on games that stretch over long periods of time and begin to integrate with our everyday lives. The Location section will examine ways in which games can utilize specific spaces and integrate with the world around us. For the final we will bring all of these ideas together to create games that challenge established notions of gameplay.

Assignments

• Game Presentation on a Big Game
• People Game: a game for a large number of people
• Time Game: a game that spans a large amount of time
• Location Game: a game about a location
• Final Team Project

Expectations

• Attend the class and talk – For every two absences your grade will be lowered one letter grade
• Do all of the reading
• Turn in all assignments on time and complete. For each week your project is late you lose one letter grade.

Grading

15% In-class discussion and weekly blog comments
10% Game Presentation
15% People Game
15% Time Game
15% Location Game
30% Final Project

Class Schedule

January 22 / Class Intro

In Class
What are Big Games
What do people think they are
My expectations for the class

January 29 / Game Design Basics

Readings
- Marc LeBlanc, MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research, http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/pubs/MDA.pdf
- Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop, Chapter 3, pages 49-81

In Class
- Play Poker
- Play Mafia

February 5 / Role-Playing

Readings
- Start playing World of Warcraft
- Waskul, Dennis; Lust, Matt (2004). “Role-Playing and Playing Roles: The Person, Player, and Persona in Fantasy Role-Playing”, http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/pb/thornberry/socy5031/pdfs/waskul_lust_role_playing.pdf

In Class
- Play The Pool

February 12 / People Game Due

Readings
- Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs,” http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

In Class
- We will play each team’s People Game

February 19 / All the Time

Readings
- Play What to Wear, http://apps.facebook.com/what-to-wear/
- Play Parking Wars, http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=31435010008
-Byron Reeves & J. Leighton Read, Total Engagement, selection

In Class
- Hand out water guns to play Assassins over the next week

February 26 / Alternate Realities

Readings
- Jane McGonigal, “This Is Not a Game: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play,” http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagame/paper.pdf (if for some reason the link doesn’t work, Google the paper title. You’ll find it)
- Montola & Waern, “Ethical and Practical Look at Unaware Game Participation,” 2006

March 5 / Time Game Due

In Class
- Teams will introduce players to their game.
- Each game will be played over the following week

March 12 / Everywhere

Readings
- Linda Hughes, “Beyond the rules of the game, Why Are Rooie Rules Nice?,” Game Design Reader, page 504-517
- Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun, Chapters 2-3, pages 12-47
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk on flow, http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

In Class
- Play a Scavenger Hunt
- Play Capture the Flag

March 26 / Location

Readings
- History of Grand Central
- Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html

In Class
- We will all meet at Grand Central by the clock

April 2 / Location Game Due

In Class
- We will play each team’s Location Game

April 9 / Sports

Readings
- E.H. Gombrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty
- Dave Hickey, Air Guitar, “The Heresy of Zone Defense,” pages 155-162

In Class
- Play Touch Football

April 16 / Managing Big Projects

Readings
- Ken Birdwell, “The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life,” http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm
- Rory McGuire, “Paper Burns: Game Design with Agile Methodologies,” http://gamasutra.com/features/20060628/mcguire_01.shtml

April 23 / Playtest Finals

In Class
- We will playtest each team’s game

April 30 / Finals Due

In Class
- We will play each team’s Final Game