The large chasm between game designers and players is becoming more apparent these days with the rise in instances of emergent gameplay where players have come up with creative unintended solutions to challenges in the game. Peter Molyneux, creator of Populous and other games has even gone so far as to claim that open ended games that encourage emergent gameplay is where game design is heading.
There is good reason why he would think so. The current industry practices that relegate the player to just a user of the game is what is holding game design back. These practices treat the player more as an abstraction and design the game with a poor concept of the player in mind, often relying on demographic research from previous games. A probabilistic approach to plan recognition through Baynesian networks or case based plan recognition where case libraries are constructed by observing gameplay and the possible actions are encoded as a state transition tables, appears to be the main way game designers are imagining their players. The needs and preferences of the player while playing the game, however, have been going largely unnoticed.
To me it appears that player-centered game design is where the future is. Better player modeling along with adaptive technologies will be able to help designers communicate better with players and vice versa. It’s holds the potential to appropriate level of challenge, smooth the learning curve, and enhance the gameplay experience for individual players irrespective of their age, gender or race.
So with this post we’re beginning our foray into player centered game design. While optimistic of the rewards it holds, we’re still not expecting it to be an easy job as heaps of concerns spring to mind. Nonetheless, we’re very excited and our brains are exploding with ideas, which we’ll be sure to blog more about soon.
You may see it [here]. Now, the unique thing about this demo is, that there’s no simulation or premade animation on the flag! The waving of the flag was achieved through code. There’s a neat function running there that procedurally moves the flag mesh directly. Everything apart from the flag is from the default Unity assets library.
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. It was tremendous fun! Of course, since we aren’t exactly physicists, we had our troubling times. I even ended up solving equations in my sleep!