Dan Cook recently posted slides from talk he gave about creating a “princess rescuing application“– and they’re annotated with his notes, so they’re quite intelligible.

His basic premise is that games are all about fun through learning.  So, why does learning an application have to be such a banging-your-head-against-the-wall experience?  He references his previous work on the learning process within a game: how people learn what the game is teaching.  He provides some great recommendations for “first steps” in moving application design in this direction, such as encouraging more exploratory learning in applications (i.e. it’s okay to fail a few times), and using an inventory system to diminish the negative impact of those 90% of app features that only 10% of the audience uses.

It’s still a very early work– there are few examples of applications attempting these strategies, and there’s a whole lot left to figure out.  It’s still well worth reading, for the insights into both app and game design.  (What does a tutorial screen teach?  It teaches you to click “OK”.)  I’ve been thinking about the material for a few days, now, and I’m going to go back and re-read his Chemistry of Game Design article.

  Fable 2 incorporates a few Animal Crossing-style elements: shops you own continue to make money while you’re not playing.  Unfortunately, you make money a lot faster while you are playing.  This, like most of Fable 2’s choices, is a moral decision: do you make more money faster, and destroy the earth in the process?  Or do you sacrifice your personal gain for the good of the planet (and your electrical bill)?

Like every other evil decision in Fable 2, this has a simple decision.  Leave your XBox on, and use the extra cash to buy organic vegetables– which, upon consumption, increase your purity score.  Guilt alleviated!

Players already plan on using the controller to overcome in-game challenges.

While most of the industry heaps pop-up on top of overlay in search of the perfect tutorial to help your mother/grandfather/spouse play their latest game, I’d like to step in with a reminder.  The person who is most likely to be playing your game doesn’t need your shoehorned tutorial, and you’re just pissing them off.

How concerned are you that I won’t be able to figure out to press A to activate something?  And if I need to hit something, don’t you think I’ll figure out in a hurry if it’s A, X, Y, B, or trigger?  And– this is by far the worst offender– do you really need to stick a pop-up in my face to tell me that the right stick moves the camera?  Look: I figured out the nearest game store, I heard about your game from someone, I dropped 60 bucks in addition to the entrance fee for the console of my choice.  Do you think I’ve done all this without ever having played a game before?

Let me guess: you picked up some guy off the street and ran him through your focus test.  After he figured out that the controller wasn’t a necklace, he made some comment like, “Hmm… I can’t figure out what the attack button is.  Crap… oh, wait, it’s X!  Awesome!  Die, rat!”  Your take-home from this was that you need to have a bunch of text (or even voice-acted dialog) telling the player about the attack button.  (Your other take-home?  Rats are AWESOME introductory enemies.)

Fun may involve learning, but learning isn’t sufficient.  (Raph Koster elaborated on this recently, in a post discussing fun in games, class, and sex.)  The fun doesn’t kick in until you’re using the tools the game gives you, pushing your boundaries, learning the new patterns the game is throwing your way.  If that’s when the fun starts, don’t you want to get each player to that point as quickly as possible?  And since players may be coming into your game with different levels of skill, doesn’t the beginning of the game need to be self-paced?

Halo 3’s tutorials are a pretty good example of how to do things properly.  Early in the game, you’re presented with a ledge you need to jump over.  If you jump over it– fantastic! You’ve already figured out the jump button.  If not, pretty soon the game will display a text overlay telling you that A is the jump button.  This is far less obtrusive than most games and, tellingly, more likely to be helpful– Halo’s much more likely to be someone’s first FPS than a lower-selling niche title.

Why all this antipathy towards tutorials?  I’m knee-deep in Fable 2 right now, and loving it.  Yet the first hour or so almost put me to sleep, even though, as far as tutorials go, it was really more elaborate and well-done than most I’ve seen.  They tried to hide everything under backstory exposition, but look– I just bought the game, I want to get in the action now.  And now that I’ve turned tutorials off in the menu, my screen’s still covered with tons of UI hints.  I know you want your game to be accessible, but who’s the audience that doesn’t understand the A button 10 hours into the game?

Via this article about the demise of NBA Street, Peter Moore (at EA now for those not keeping track) said this about EA Sports’ new direction:

If Wii Sports has taught us anything, it’s that people will sit there and play big head tennis all day long. We need to be able to tap into that audience.

This bodes well (if you make a living by savagely tearing down games).

Hey, I’m not seeing enough about World of Goo.  Perhaps you remember the Experimental Gameplay Project, which started a couple years back when a few students made a new game every week.  They came up with some pretty fun gameplay demos, and now one of them (Tower of Goo) has been turned into a full-fledged game, World of Goo.

It’s fun, it’s different, there’s a free demo you can download and check out in just a few minutes.  No excuses!

Update: Oh, by the way: I bought it a couple days ago and am definitely digging it.

When I heard that Bungie was still on the hook for another Halo, I thought it’d be a major title– turns out it’s just Halo: Recon.  They also mention Recon being finished “in a couple of months”.  They’ve been making noise about getting away from Halo for a while now, and it looks like they found a pretty effective way to do it.  Good for them– but of course it means they need to have a damned good second IP.  Can they become a Blizzard-level studio?  (No pressure, guys.)

If you’re interested in gold farming, MMO economies, RMT (real-money trading), and microtransaction models in virtual worlds, these are a few recent blog posts by prominent MMO developers that go into awesome depth on their own systems.  Free information this good isn’t easy to come by, so check it out.  Shockingly, even the comments on the posts are good.

Matt Mihaly (created some popular microtransaction MUDs; is working on a browser-playable MMO) started off the discussion in February by talking about the dual-currency system they use successfully in Iron Realms’ text-based games. In short, the dual-currency system allows your non-paying users to indirectly drive demand for your for-pay virtual goods (while not pissing off either paying or non-paying users).

Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad; recently worked on a canceled MMO at NCSoft and is now also working on a browser-playable MMO) recently wrote a response with a very similar system he developed independently. His goal was the sharp reduction of unauthorized gold selling (since that’s money you, the developer, could be getting by selling the gold yourself).

Finally, Matt responded with his plan for another dual-currency system in the upcoming Earth Eternal.  He walks through some theorizing about what will happen when gold farmers try to sell to the Earth Eternal audience.  (Iron Realms is small enough that it hasn’t had to deal with the problem.)  It all sounds good, but it’ll be fun to see what happens when theory meets practice.

As rumored, Nintendo announced a new DS today.  It’s like the old DS, but they’ve replaced the GBA port with an SD port.  (Step 1: shut down Lik-Sang and flashable cartridges.  Step 2: switch to a writeable media.)

More exciting, they’ve added a 0.3 megapixel camera!  I had my industry sources send me an early DSi, and I took a picture of my house with it:

No stealing my hideaway key!