I gave a talk at UC Berkeley called Design, Games, & Game Design (feat. SpyParty). It was for the UC Berkeley School of Information's Design Futures Lecture Series, and I was invited by the excellent Elizabeth Goodman.
The talk was a mix of general design stuff, game design stuff, and SpyParty design stuff. Among other things...
- I talked about the basic design → build → test loop, and how I don't think you can separate out the design and build steps if you're making something deep and new and (especially) interactive. I mentioned how Valve doesn't hire single-discipline designers for this reason.
- I went over three kinds of user tests, depth testing, kleenex testing, and focus testing, and how you should never do the last one of those.
- I talked about Metrics Fetishism again; since this was a Design talk, it seemed appropriate.
- I claimed games are at about 1905 in terms of the history of film, making anologies between current games and deep and important works like The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach and The Little Train Robbery (aka. The Great Train Robbery 2: This Time With Kids!)
- I lauded Ico's hand holding mechanic, again.
- I whipped out the Korean characters for Gosu, 고수.
- I answered questions for longer than the actual lecture!
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I spent some time talking about my aesthetic goals for SpyParty, including:
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And, I talked more about the Blizzard-inspired Depth-first, Accessibility-later development model I'm following, including forcing people to read the four-page instruction manual before they can play.
Here are the synced audio and slides, with 40 minutes of Q&A at the end:
And, because one cannot get enough of Fred Ott's Sneeze:
