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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CGD Podcast Episode 32: Contests of Understanding, and Questioning Gun Worship in Games

Hello everyone! A new episode, finally. This one is a distinct two-parter, coming in at about 45 minutes. I first talk about how games are better described as contests of understanding rather than contests of decisions. The “decisions” aspect of games tends to actually be a bit over-stated. The second thing I talk about is …

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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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CGD Podcast Ep. 31 – permadeath, structure, the death of game design writing, and more

Hello everyone. Today I’m talking about a new article I read about permadeath/grinding, as well as what I perceive as the death, or at least curving off of, the world of game design writing. I also read and responded to a Frank Lantz quote (now on the Dinofarm Forums!) on the topic of structure in …

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CGD Podcast Episode 30 – Deepities, a new Frank Lantz article, and updates

In this episode I discuss the concept of deepities and how it applies to game design writing. I also discuss a new Frank Lantz article on Ian Bogost‘s new book—an article that, it seems to me, pushes against progress in game design in some ways. (Don’t forget to check out episodes 23 and 24 where …

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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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