GameDevBlog

Richard Garfield & Skaff Elias Demoing Schizoid At PAX

Richard and Skaff will be around a fair amount of the time at PAX - if you come to the PAX 10 booth (Exhibition hall 4EF) before 6 PM there's a good chance you'll see at least one of us there.  But they're guaranteed to be there between 2 and 3 PM on Sunday, so that's the time to show up if you want to meet them for sure.

Chatterbox show was pretty cool

http://www.chatterboxgameshow.com/archives/Show239_08-26-2008.mp3

I really enjoyed talking to those guys - they know their stuff, having a design background themselves.  They got really far in Schizoid and they clearly "get it" - they had some well-reasoned nitpicks which we talked about...I'm working on a post-mortem for Gamasutra right now that covers some of the same things.

Chatterbox Tonight, PAX This Weekend

I'm going to do an interview on Chatterbox Video Game Radio tonight, talking about Schizoid and I'm not sure what else - it's going to be live, as I understand it, so tune in and listen to me make a fool of myself.  That's at 9 PM. 

And this weekend is PAX - I'm not sure when I'm going to be there;  I hope to be there a lot;  Bill's going to be there every minute he can spare.  There's a PAX 10 booth and that's where you'll usually be able to find us.  Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias will be there too, and when I know what time for sure I'll post it.

No Wonder Movie Licenses Are So Succesful

My three year old daughter saw the Wall-E billboard on the Xbox and said, "I want to play the Wall-E and Eva game."  I tried to convince her that it probably wasn't very good, as it's a movie license game and movie license games are rarely good, but she was insistent.  And when we downloaded it and it didn't run (there's some problem with my Xbox hard-drive;  other games/demos had the same issue - it's funny when the sidebar comes out that suggests I wipe the disk with a soft cloth) she seemed accepting at first but then, a couple days later, repeated, "I want to play the Wall-E and Eva game."

Three years old!  We get 'em young.

Happiness Leaderboards

Hugh's comment got me following links, and I discovered these:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

There's a bunch of tests there, that ask you questions like, "You are enthusiastic about your work.  Strongly agree/ agree/ neutral/ etc."  The funny thing is, once you take the tests, they show your results relative to everyone else - in a sense, providing happiness leaderboards.  I was shocked to find out my happiness is apparently below average - perhaps others are cheating?  I guess I'm going to have to start some kind of happiness training regimen - that's the power of leaderboards for you.  I was fine with my current level of happiness before...

 

Good At A Game, Good At Life?

Just read Iain M. Banks' *The Player of Games*, a science fiction novel in which a far-flung space empire is formed around a particularly gnarly and complex game that they believe simulates reality to such an extent that if you're successful at the game, you're successful at life.  In the book, it's actually self-fulfilling prophecy, as people get promotions, etc., based on their performance in the game, but it made me wonder:  is there really a game that correlates with success?

Tricky question - how do you define "success", anyway? 

For a moment, let's adopt our materialistic western cliche view that success is money and power:  if that's success, than chess, for example, is not this game.  Success at chess does not equal success at life.  In fact, I think there's an expression:  "Good at chess, bad at life."  Forget where I heard that.

Still, the game would probably be a thinking game.  Though maybe not - I've seen one study (I think it was in *Freakonomics*) that showed that intelligence was not all that strongly correlated with success;  possibly because intelligent people tend to play it safe, and the successful are more foolish ones who lucked into a windfall.

So what about luck?  *The Player of Games* points out that luck is built into reality, right at the quantum level, and any "mature" game therefore should have an element of luck if it's like life.  Knowing and calculating odds does seem like a valuable life skill.  This also disqualifies chess.  (Unless you talk about the luck of having your synapses fire optimally during the match, in which case all games have luck.)

So how about Texas Hold 'Em?  I'm thinking of the time that Ray Muzyka won the poker tournament at DICE a few years back - he's successful at both life and poker, looks like.  Could that be the game?

But wouldn't such a game also have diplomacy?  Can't get very far in life without that, right?  Luck, strategy, diplomacy - starts to sound a lot like Risk.  Could that be the game?

Maybe it would even have hierarchy, like Asheron's Call or something.  Could the game be an MMORPG?

What do you guys think?

And - for a bonus question - let's toss the idea of success being money and power - and say it's happiness.  What game is it then?

Video Interview with Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias

Over on the Wizards of the Coast website, Richard and Skaff discussing Schizoid:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/arcana/1647