Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Watching Jesse Schell’s DICE2010 presentation about recent trends in game development – which took as its subject matter the unexpected popularity of Facebook’s “social” games and the external reward boom (unlocks, achievements, increased focus on the “score” for gaming generally) – I started to have a think about our Gaming Made Me series. I don’t think there were many mentions in there of “I just got hooked on the points system,” and I wondered if that would be different if we did it again in ten years time, or just with a wider net of people. Moreover, it got me thinking about some of the reasons why some gamers were horrified by the picture Schell painted.

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I seem to be reading a lot about these topics at the moment, so I’ll post this for the RPS community mindmeld. Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of entertainment and technology, Jesse Schell, speaking at DICE 2010, says that game design is all very well, but fantasy and neat game design takes a back seat to “busting through to reality”. The thing that is most valuable to games now, he argues, is where the connect with reality, or what we perceive to be reality. The bottom line is that everything is becoming a game. He takes a while to spool up, but take a look. (If you get a vague feeling of horror and dread towards the end, I think that’s okay.)
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