Great directory of Game Design essays
Click here to see a bunch: Lost Garden Blog.
I was surprised to hear recently that Seattle and LA are considered the big hotbeds for video game design. Cool :) I’ve always known that with Nintendo, XBox, Valve (which is located in the same building as me!), Popcap, and others, that we had a lot of talent here.
Anyway, recently I’ve become very interested in game design as a systematic approach to creating "fun" within applications. I’m mostly interested in how these design processes could be applied to websites in order to make them more fun. It’s interesting to me that after all these years of photo-sharing, you’d get a site like Flickr that’d come out and people would describe it as fun, or like a game, or whatever.
The game community’s emphasis on rapid prototyping, user testing for "fun," designing in mechanics like uncertainty, pacing, etc., all have a huge appeal for me. I think as the Internet moves from task-oriented websites to more and more entertainment, these mechanics will be very useful to understand.
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