Game Design and Social Networking

I thought I'd write up the lecture we had the Wednesday we broke up, seeing as I took plenty of notes, and as it was cool and interesting.
The lecture was given by Guy Parsons, who currently develops online communities and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). More on those later.

At university, we have the time and freedom to create new things. We can take risks that we might not be able to take were we in employment, and we can create small games that might be a commercial flop, because it doesn't matter.
Guy gave a few examples of small games that push the boundaries like this. There are some links in his corresponding blog post.
A lot of them looked pretty cool. Toblo was designed by students and has a physics engine that allows players to use the environment as weapons. One multiplayer game let users create maps in MS paint and then import them into the game world. There was even a way to use Excel spreadsheets as a game engine.

Building up a community around your game was a factor that Guy mentioned several times. If you have a loyal following, albeit a small one, it bring a lot of benefits. You keep your game new and interesting, both from your fans bringing in new players and from user generated content. You have an eager audience for anything new you might produce, and you can also use the visitors to generate income, either through charging for the game itself or through advertising.

Games should draw inspiration from anything and everything. Start with something you perhaps wouldn't associate with games, like a fine artist. An Escher inspired game called Echochrome is currently in development for the PSP and PS3, with the environment changing shape as you rotate the camera, allowing you to continue across the terrain. It's crazy stuff.
The bold and memorable art style of Team Fortress 2 is a good example of casting a wider net for inspiration. The Valve team were influenced by 1920s illustrations: here are some of their reference images with notations from their slide deck about the design process behind TF2. The slide show itself is a really interesting read, and goes into loads of mathematical shader detail. The 'fan reaction' section is quite fun, with loads of different game dev teams cosplaying as the TF2 classes.
These weren't actually in the lecture as Guy hadn't managed to find the images, but he later put them up on his blog:

An important thing to remember when coming up with a new idea for a game is that EVERYTHING is a game. This is nicely illustrated by Chore Wars, an online game where you compete against your housemates to see who can do the most chores and therefore earn the most points. If you can attach a score to it, anything becomes a game. Another example given was a website where you could download goals to aim for when running.
More examples of cool little games:
squidi.net - currently has 300 different types of game mechanics
Defcon - those who were at Gamecity will have probably seen this one. Basically it's the doom screen from every movie where there's a terrible war and the nukes are going off and everybody dies. You can't really win
Desktop tower defence - the popular Tower Defence custom game from Warcraft 3, but in flash game format set on a desktop
Kingdom of Loathing- An RPG that takes nothing about itself seriously. I saw some Kingdom of Loathing graffiti once in a toilet in Camden. A good example of the hardcore nature of KoL fans.
Bejewelled - A casual game where you have to line up 3 or more gemstones of the same type to get them to disappear. Casual games are tipped to be the next big thing, and this is a very popular one
Peggle - Another popular casual game
Scrabulous - Facebook application which is a Scrabble clone. Scrabble are sueing the creators for copyright infringement
Line Rider - The little dude will ski down the line you draw
Audiosurf - If you've been anywhere near Joel in the last couple of weeks you'll know about this game. It's like a cross between Guitar Hero and a racing game, and it can use any song in your library to generate a race track. It's available to buy on Steam.

A relatively new and immersive type of game is the ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. ARGs present a game scenario which ties in closely with real life. There may be blogs, social networking profiles for characters, coded websites, real world location drops, and even interactions with actors posing as characters within the game scenario. The players of the ARG must work together to solve what is going on in the scenario, so the sense of community is strong.
Guy described it as for people who like stalking other people on the internet, only not as sinister.

The conclusions from the lecture were these:

• University is a time where you have 3 years with no commercial constraints, and is a perfect time for experimentalism, innovation and creativity. If you come up with an idea, prototype it.

• Inspiration comes from everywhere - life is a game. Pay attention to everyday life and draw inspiration from it. Because you're pretending, that makes it fun.

Oh, and here's Guy's Blog.