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 …
This week I had a great conversation with NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz about randomness and general game design philosophy. We meant to get to three other topics – execution, reading and improvisation, but not all-that-surprisingly, we never got there in the 70+ minutes of this episode. Mentioned in this episode: Frank’s “Against Design” …
CGD Podcast Episode 23 – “On Games At the Games”, A Conversation with Frank Lantz Read More »
What does it mean for a game to involve a lot of “mind games”? Can you really make “reads” off of an opponent and predict what he’s going to do? What’s the difference between “reading the opponent” and “a lucky guess”? This episode explores these questions, discussing games like Poker, Street Fighter, Rock Paper Scissors, …
CGD Podcast Episode 22: Mind Games and Reading the Opponent Read More »
In this episode, I first discuss a new article on Gamasutra that discusses Zach Gage’s new highly random (and proud of it!) game, Tharsis. For more on my positions on randomness, I would check out this article or this video. In the second half, I talk about a new, more specific definition for “elegance” as …
CGD Podcast Episode 15: “Tharsis” Article and Redefining Elegance Read More »
I write a lot about how bad output randomness is for games, but today I want to write about a problem common in many deterministic games – specifically ones that lack hidden information. Why doesn’t everyone just play chess, if it’s so great? The answer is that chess, or other ancient abstracts like Go and …
For thousands of years, we’ve relied on randomness of various kinds to help our interactive systems work. While there will always be a place for randomness of all sorts in some kinds of interactive systems, I believe the current assumptions with regard to randomness in strategy games are largely wrong. The major point I’d like …
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