Game Design

Riot is thinking about input/output randomness in League of Legends

For the past five years or so, I’ve been talking about the input/output randomness concepts, and why they’re so important for game design. While I wasn’t the one who coined the terms—that honor goes to the great fellows at the Ludology Podcast—some Googling around shows that no one has talked about the concepts, or developed …

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Improving Go (Not Really)

My official position is that you can’t really “improve” Go. There might be something in there worth salvaging, but you can’t just tweak some rules and make Go better. That’s not because Go is so great, but because tweaking rules on an existing system like that tends to create vastly horrible results. With that said, …

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Minimize calculation (in games worth playing)

This is a short follow-up to my article, “Uncapped Look-Ahead and the Information Horizon“, in which I proposed the concept of an information horizon: the distance between the current turn, and the point at which information becomes known to a player (usually, but not always, this means that it has become “public information”). A simpler …

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Why League of Legends Is The World’s Greatest Game

In 2003, I was a very serious WarCraft III player. If I recall correctly, I have over 5,000 one-on-one ladder matches logged on my Battle.net account. I watched replays every day and even did some highly amateurish commentaries myself. It’s interesting to note that some of my first-ever “internet game design articles” were WarCraft III …

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