brkl

I think that's a good idea. It would make a lot of sense to organize the OP entirely differently. Perhaps I will do that in the far-flung future. Anyway, I've updated it. I like Bogost's idea of procedural rhetoric (I have linked to his book), although he's not the most astute in applying it, IMO. He criticized Gone Home in a manner which to me meant he missed his own point of procedural rhetoric. EDIT: Actually, I'm going to do a thing and just copy Tom Bissell's Bookshelf-section to the OP because it's ridiculous(ly good). Go read Homo Ludens, it's pretty out there.

Isn't it "Lords management"?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/21/cart-life-no-longer-on-steam-now-open-source/#more-196579 YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS

You should objectively score the interviews.

It still kills me that they had that whole passage of time conceit for the game, yet a character spends the entire game living in a mansion chock full of corpses he never bothers to clean up.

After fighting with aperson in the Reading about games -thread, I can't not quote Rules of Play because it ties so directly into this. A section discusses "The Anatomy of Choice" in a game, dividing each choice to five phases: 1. What happened before the player was given the choice? (internal event) 2. How is the possibility of choice conveyed to the player? (external event) 3. How did the player make the choice? (internal event) 4. What is the result of the choice? How will it affect future choices? (internal event) 5. How is the result of the choice conveyed to the player? (external event) Chasing a "cinematic" experience in a game can lead to not conveying players that they are making a choice and what its result is (the external events) because it disrupts the aesthetic. The Walking Dead is a lot smarter in this because it's not ashamed of being a game, so emphasizes instead of hiding the choices as well as their results.

Toblix, did you FRAPS succesfully frap all that?

So is this happening or what?

It's some Windows 8.1 issue or something. So if you're mouse is all weird (you'll know it), try seta in_mouse "-1" in the config file or I don't even exactly know in the console, maybe just in_mouse "-1".

No, I don't have any more energy to spare. Like I said, you aren't even referring to any term they actually use in more than passing reference. Rules of Play is perfectly plain in its wording so that criticism is baseless.

Ah, okay. The index didn't have that working and it's barely mentioned in the book. I could only find it through Google Books. If you had talked about the action > outcome unit, I'd have caught on. 'Molecule' is a metaphor they use for it: That works for your point as well. You can separate iron molecules from other iron molecules, but if you split a hammer in two it's not useful for driving nails. Quoting directly from the book: So unitary choices are not very meaningful, but meaning emerges from how the outcomes of previous choices affect the following choices. They go on to dissect the unit into five stages which can be used to analyse situations in any game. I'd forgotten that bit, so thanks for that, as it's potentially quite useful for me. But the reason people go through the trouble of defining terms in books such as this is not to own them but to clarify how the terms are used in the work. There's a massive amount of terms that have different meanings in different fields. At least when I read about theories regarding learning and such, practically all books define the terms they use even if they are not introducing those terms. That's actually very useful, since few writers seem to conceptualize those terms in exactly the same way.

What on Earth are choice molecules and why should people talk about them? I really can't follow your argument. That article cites Rules of Play numerous times. If your metric for the books success is that it should have transformed how everyone makes games, that's just absurd. I already quoted the back of the book, its target audience is not limited to game designers. It seems to have influenced people who have read it quite a bit since they are keen backing up their arguments using the book.

Whether Juul's dictionary is good or not is completely beside the point. I have not read it.

My finding that interesting should not be all that surprising considering the forum in which this thread is located. Are works only worth reading if they prove to be historically influential on discourse regarding gaming? There are many reasons why that could be. The field is fresh and on unstable cultural standing so there are no obvious classics. In any case, it seems Rules of Play gets cited plenty. I don't see how you could know the things you state as facts and I find those absolute statements rather obnoxious. For example, here's someone referring to Rules of Play extensively: http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/ That's Jesper Juul, the author of Half-Real which you recommended earlier. Half-Real also refers to Rules of Play.

DeepFace!

What you said was this: Rules of Play is not that kind of a book. If that was its purpose, the book wouldn't be a holistic discussion of what games are and how they are made. A "how to make a game" book would likely focus on some sort of game and not discuss sports and board games between the same covers. It does discuss game design as that's obviously pretty salient, but also everything else that quote includes and you choose to ignore. Your view is needlessly cynical and solipsistic. Perhaps it's not what you are looking for, but it serves me excellently and I doubt I'm alone in that. I find the book to be meticulously researched and well argued. The framework it presents is useful for looking at gaming from several angles, not limiting itself to just the rules, just the experience or just game culture. Do you have any criticism that relates to what the work actually is and not what you would wish it to be?

I had to do set in_mouse "-1" Otherwise the mouse was all weird.

The book is not what you think it is, aperson. It's not fair to presume it's "Make a Fun Game Today" manual and criticize it based on that. It's a 700-page textbook with a very wide scope for people who need that. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rules-play

It's very quiet in comparison.

Heh, I see aperson already performed a drive-by shooting of this book. Anyway, I recommend it highly. Including the bit aperson hates. It's about how different definitions of games don't really agree with one another at all. If you aren't interested in reading that, the book has a table of contents.

The book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman is an absolute marvel if you want proper analysis of how games work and what their place is in human culture. It covers games from a number of perspectives. I can't recommend it enough.

Hmm, I'm having a devil of a time actually getting my thesis written, have for years and I bloody love the subject. The hardest thing is just honing your methods -- not research methods, methods of getting yourself to sit down and just do the work. Even though I remember how much I love the feeling of progress, it's very hard to work at that instead of shirking the responsibility somehow.

What's this? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296948465/jetgetters-fighter-jet-hijacking-multiplayer-shoot

Hey, spoilers!