This is a pretty cool animation of Dan Pink's talk on motivation at the RSA. (I didn't make it, just linking it here). I think he also did a similar talk at TED; and if you haven't read Drive yet, you should.

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A connection I think worth making here is that, in terms of game design…

One way I like to come up with new ideas is by adding arbitrary constraints to an existing well known design and seeing what the consequences would be. For example, what would an FPS look like if you weren't allowed to have weapons? If you go down that line of thinking it raises a lot of obvious qu…

I'm sitting in a coffee shop and there's this guy sitting behind me having a very heated discussion with an older woman about whether reality is subjective, and if there are temporary realities, and the word "dichotomy" keeps getting thrown around a lot though I'm not sure if either of them knows w…

One thing I've come to believe is that it's better to generate a lot of bad ideas rather than try to wait for a couple of good ones. This might be obvious to other people, but it was counter intuitive realization to me when I first considered it, so I thought I'd explore it a bit.

A common belief is…

I decided to make an iPhone app last night because I couldn't sleep.



You can drag the sunglasses onto David Caruso's face and it'll play the ">CSI: Miami theme song!!

I'm not saying it's the greatest iPhone app ever, but I mean, I think it's at least in the top five.

Yikes, is it already the middle of the week? I should be getting the rest of my GDC coverage up soon -- the Game Career Summit might be of particular note to people looking to break into the industry, it was packed with some pretty good advice which I'll be posting soon. I was slightly bummed beca…

I think Ben Cousin's talk yesterday was simultaneously the most important talk of the conference and also not very well attended. Judging by the attendance and some of the questions, I don't think what he was saying was popular, but I do think he has a lot of well reasoned points worth considering.…

I went to Chris Hecker's talk last night, entitled "Achievements Considered Harmful(?)"

It included this juicy quote:

Quote:
If you're intentionally making dull games with variable ratio extrinsic motivators, you have my pity.

OHHHH! Oh no he DIDNT. He did NOT just say that! *snaps fingers while wigg…

One of the recurring themes I'm noticing with this GDC is that the "Mainstream" doesn't seem so mainstream anymore. I have to be careful with terminology here -- by mainstream I mean the sort of game you see on the cover of gaming mags, i.e., the sort of game that traditionally appeals to "hardcor…

I just got back from Mark Skaggs' talk on how Zynga goes about creating successful social games.

The gist of it is to collect metrics on everything important that players do. Skagg's refers to this as "developing a metric's mindset." In order to answer questions, you should assume you don't know th…