I am the first poster again.

First poster, more like worst poster

Zing!

Be nice or I'm pulling over right now!

That was teh lame.

congratulations!!!

So if I apply this system to adventure games it seems that there are way too long periods of low reward activity and almost only expected rewards (since you set out to solve a given puzzle there are almost no unexpected rewards).

I like the conclusion that new grafics are also thought of as a reward factor. To me adventure games rewards are not only "solving the puzzle" but seeing a neat animation for the solution/progress you just achived. (but I am a special case for that matter, I think)

Very interesting read, eventhough I am far from being a game designer.

@POMIF: Want a cookie?

I thought we'd been using graphics as reward factors for awhile now? But mainly for dating sims (I guess the motivating factor here is pretty strong).

And here I was thinking designing games was easy.

No, no, no... That's why confused designers start out designing a next generation horror adventure game and end up with Yet Another FPS, albeit with scary elements.
[/tongue-in-cheek]

"Adventure Games (oh yeah, don't have to worry about those anymore)"

I think.. I think... I think I'm going to cry

I'm with Ron on this one.  Games are so non-linear, that any attempt to notate a game that uses a linear representation seems doomed to fail.

The best notation of a game seems to be the game itself.

Yeah, we still don't have the facilities to describe an interactive story as well as we can define, say, the plot of a movie or a book.

I never got into the whole RPG/LARP scene, but can't help but think that the computer should act as some sort of dungeon master, adapting to the different situations created by the player, creating puzzles and sub-plots on the fly, while ensuring that the planned story arc is maintained (or perhaps even creating a tight plot as the game progresses).

wow, what a great idea. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that? it will be so easy to do, now that you've given the world this great idea.

Of course! In the fine tradition of scientific discovery I think up radical and innovative ideas, post them in the comments section of someone's blog and they just happen. It works that way. Can't be arsed with tackling World Peace or a Cure for Cancer at the moment, but make sure you bookmark LJ's recent comments page for when I do!

Setting a standard might be interesting. I think especially for the big corps who would like to see things more alike so they can compare better between similar projects. But, since a design document is inherently a linear affair, I think there'll always be a good dose of handpuppeteering involved. But hey, isn't that fun as well?

So the real question is, Ron, what do you have against handpuppeteering?

The way movie scripts are standardized (even down to the font) is totally awesome. The focus is on the words, not how it's laid out, and everyone almost always understands what the author means. Great for big corporations and everyone else.

Whoops, movie tangent. I don't know how (if) this applies to game design docs.

@Ogni: I agree that adventure games reward you with animation, dialogue and plot progression, as well as the "solving the puzzle" buzz.

I'm currently playing through Kameo on my 360 (not an adventure game in the classic sense, but still classed as one) and it's interesting that the designers have added many arcade game and platform game style rewards along with the classic puzzle solving. In fact, many of the "modern" adventure games (which are glorified platform games in my eyes) do something similar. Beyond: Good and Evil is another good example of this.

I'm not quite sure whether I like this progression in genre or not!

Unfortunately, the modern gamer is much like the modern consumer in that it is assumed we have a concentration span of about 1 second. I guess designers feel they have to keep us more interested than just hanging on for the next puzzle solution or plot twist.

Sorry, gone a bit off topic here, but what I'm trying to say is that design documentation must be fairly difficult when designers are trying to sell an idea as being appealing to as wider audience as possible!

My biggest complaint with the model proposed is that its very one-dimensional. Not only is its depiction a simple string, but the thing is measuring is basically dopamine release, which is only the most obvious aspect of the player experience.

This guy critiques it much better than I do: (http://projectperko.blogspot.com/2006/01/languages-marching-on.html)

One ring to unite them all...

So, Danc's model is not really good for notating up games.  It's a method for getting feedback on a game so you can tweak it.  I understand there are better methods in use at, like, Microsoft's secret game research cave.

Koster's model is much better for game design.  It has all the same problems of working with interactive media, but it's not just measuring reward schedules.

-Wuh Fuh
(my first post here lol!)

We need a whole genre/trend of parody games making fun of all the crap we got fed for the past 10 years! bring out the anti-hero mockup poking fun at hardasses brainless thugs we're forced to control in cold emotionless 3D environments!

A few years back games were a parody of bad, b rated cinema, now cinema is a parody of real bad videogames, we got to switch back something in the right order in the first place!

insert mindless "controversial" violence here

Especially the whole violence experience, let's all make fun of this by creating aggressively-marketed educational games instead, thus the bigger brained hero will be the "badass" instead of the bigger gun carrying homicidal maniac on steroids. We deserve a better experience than that!

Wow, I don't care.

good for shoot 'em ups I suppose

A new (or, one at all) for game design will not solve the innovation crisis we are having at the moment.  
For one, a methodology is a poor substitute for common sense and too often use as such.
Secondly, I have too much faith in game designers to think the reason we are having 'wanna-be-movie-game-on-rails' is because they don't have a good notation to put down their ideas.

That kind of annotation seems useful for finetuning gameplay. It'd be great if you could import data from QA testers into a program that averages them out and converts them into these graphs.

The solution to writing for non-linear games (a problem mentioned above) already exists though: write your design doc in hypertext.

I'm using a wiki for a game right now, not necesserily for the collaborative environment it provides (that's a plus), but because of how easy it is to split the design doc into many small pages that are linked together. It allows you to zoom in and zoom out at will, and people on the team are more likely to read the stuff they need to know because it's not hidden on page onehundredandsomething of a massive design doc that's probably outdated anyway because the newer version didn't get distributed.

The wiki format has also probably doubled my productivity. I tend to stare less at empty pages or mull on single paragraphs or pages. Instead I just enter ideas quickly knowing I can always smooth them out later (or revert to an earlier version).

I'm not working on an adventure game, so I don't have any experience using a wiki for setting up elaborate stories, but I will definitely try it out if I get to work on a story game in the future.

Oh, can I see? Can I see? Please, can I see?

i play monkey island series 1-4(i know you didnt make last 2 but still guybrush is cool!) your games own!! you are cool!

Look above me - a three headed cheerleader!

Stranger. I think you it the nail on the head. A creative game designer could gradually make "smart" the thing that is cool rather than the scum bag criminal that runs around shooting people.

Wow! No comments! Me thinks they protest too much.

Right now i'm studying Software Engineering, strange to say it since i'm not really doing that right now... and i'll have the exam tomorrow :D
but... during my study i found out that a good combination of graphic and text is optimal, and that the "values" and the "functions" are mostly empirically chosen.