The Quote-Unquote blog features interviews with indie-game-developers – almost a must read for everyone. Much of things to learn and explore. For example Adam Atomic says about the polishing of games something, that I think is really well said:

“If prototyping is the process of experiments and accidents and exploration, then polishing is the process of analyzing whether each of those experiments or accidents helped or hindered this particular game. We can visualize a prototype as a 2D sine wave. The crests are areas of the game that stick out in a bad way, that need to be sanded down or chopped off entirely. The troughs are areas of the game that are incomplete or under-explored, and need to be filled in with interesting things. The end result is that instead of a wobbly sine wave, we have a nice smooth surface.”

Gamification is on debate. There are arguments towards and against them. Here I pick a great text, that warn about the dangers of gamification. It argues, that gamification is mostly about extrinsic motivation – but the more valuable motivation is the intrinsic, that comes from within.

In a 1973 study on motivation, Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett found that children who expected (and were given) a reward of a gold star and a ribbon for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward. Similar studies with college students have shown that people who are not offered a reward will work longer and harder on a given puzzle than people who are offered a reward.

This thought is not mentioned in the text, but is somehow at hand: while gamification can be a nice tool for things like Groupon, it somehow makes the problems in the global monetary system more than obvious. Because the game-rules can be so much stronger than anything else. Whether you fit into it or not.

I think this is especially interesting in a play(ful), game-designers context. Because it is also a little bit about getting stuff done vs. playful behaviour. I can only encourage you to read this text. In the end I figured out, that gamification is/can be really about EVERYTHING that is. Really a mind-opener in some ways that leaves some perplexing thoughts behind. (via)

Here is the link to a talk from Maxis Creative Director Stone Librande who made one game for his kids every year in the last 15 years. He shows the games, explains his design goals and foremost, the design lessions learned from making this games and playing them with his kids.

A highly recommended talk for people, who want to peek into the art and craft of making games. There are good lessions also for game design veterans, for example, that items could be as important as goals.

A new episode of the legendary “Games Cuture Circle” taken from live-footage from Berlin. This show got the topic “Reality” and is all about games and the thing we call “Reality”. It’s about media theory, games, layers of gaming, augmented reality and stuff like that. Enjoy. Here is the permalink to the video-site.

Participants:

• Julian Oliver (Artist)
• Greg Trefry (Game designer)
• Claudia Becker (Media researcher at Vilèm Flusser Archive)
• Kristoffer Gansing (Artistic director of Transmediale)

Dear Esther looks like a very interesting, upcoming gaming experience. That game has an interesting story in its creation. Originally started by Dan Pinchbeck in 2007 as a mod in the context of a research-project at the University of Portsmouth the game hit some serious audience. It also won the best world/story award at the IndieCade festival in 2009. So there was clear evidence, that Dear Esther got the potential, to become a successful title on the market. And that is how the game became the 4th funded title of the Indie Fund – a collective that funds and invests in unique indie games.

Indie Fund about titles like Dear Esther: “While Indie Fund is looking for unique gems that exemplify the indie spirit, it is not a charity, and the funding partners hope that they don’t lose their investments. (…) the time is right to find out just how commercially viable such offbeat titles really are.” (quoted from Gamasutra).

Creative Indiegames like Dear Esther are fundable, because there are small teams working on the title, not teams that are like 20 or 100 members big. Original indiegames can make enough money, to refund, but do not necessarily be real million sellers. This is why this could be the right time with the right opportunities for getting big in being indie. Let’s look forward to it! (via)

Parallel to the Gamescom 2011 and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Europe 2011, the Cologne Game Lab will host an event of the special kind: The Notgames Fest is an exhibition and a “play together” of so called “Notgames”. Games, that are more expressions by itself than systems of set rules. There is a call for submissions! You can submit your works until the 10. July 2011. The event is curated by Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn), who came up with the original Notgames Manifesto.

Event is on the 15. / 16 August 2011. Feel free to join the Notgames Expo Facebook-Group about this event.

What is art all about in the era of highly available access to information and cultural artifacts? How does the role of creation and artist will change? How is art integrated into culture in the future? Questions like this stand in the middle of this 22 minute documentary, including lots and lots of footage and interviews with some people from the present, taken during the Transmediale Berlin 2011. Find the list of the participants, including the links to the artists websites at the Vimeo-page. (via)