A disturbing thought occurred to me a couple of nights ago as I was slowly but surely falling in the domain of sleep: Could it be true that many indie games are seriously harmed by their designers thinking too much about the profit gain logics?

I’ve played web-based MMO rpgs and strategy games occasionally, usually in streaks. The other night I started a campaign of Imperia Online. The game is very basic turn-based (or time-based) strategy / kingdom management game, with lots of optimizing, number-crunching and prioriting to do. Basically you build resource building facilities to be able to produce your fighting forces and keep the production up as going to war is gonna eat a lot of those forces. So, in a few words, lots of fun for your war-monging geeky engineer type, right?

Despite the appealing (if not so much innovative) concept I gave up the game pretty quickly. The reason was Read the rest of this entry »

Interaction Design is different for games than for other types of software. In regular software it is the ease of use, the path with minimum hurdles on the way to the end, that is the goal for interaction designers. In games, the goal is not necessarily to get to the end result in as short time as possible, but keep the player’s interaction with the game (and other players) as enjoyable as possible throughout the whole experience. This requires a different approach and therefore the traditional guidelines for software usability apply only marginally.

As a result there have been many attempts to list, categorize and capture the rules for game usability. One such effort is Interaction Design Patterns, an on-going project of Eelke Folmer, assistant Professor at the Univ. of Nevada and a game and software engineering scholar. Read the rest of this entry »