Game Design

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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CGD Podcast Episode 15: “Tharsis” Article and Redefining Elegance

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 …

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