{"id":793,"date":"2014-04-27T13:49:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-27T20:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=793"},"modified":"2014-04-27T13:54:41","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T20:54:41","slug":"on-the-vault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/on-the-vault\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Vault"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was very pleased to hear that the GDC folks\u00a0posted\u00a0my 2014 talk for free on the Vault, so everyone can watch it now<\/a>. I was actually quite surprised during the talk that my content only lasted 40 minutes – I had well over 100 slides, and the presentation\u00a0was a much expanded version of my 15-minute mini-talk\u00a0from PRACTICE<\/a>. The downside is\u00a0that I incorrectly thought that\u00a0I wouldn’t have the time to address games that run counter to transparency, including\u00a0dynamic ones such as\u00a0Europa Universalis<\/em> or Out of the Park<\/i>. The upside is\u00a0that plenty of people brought up this omission in the Q&A, and I did the best I could on the spot to clarify the value of transparency for different types of games. (I’d point to my answer to Randy Smith –\u00a0who helped design Thief<\/em>‘s arrow grammar! –\u00a0at\u00a0the 49:00 mark.)<\/p>\n

Basically, games like\u00a0EU<\/em>\u00a0are so complex that it’s almost impossible for them to have a transparent rule system because the explanations would probably have to be done as algorithms. Nonetheless, for dynamic, rules-driven games, transparency is still a goal to reach towards; in\u00a0Crusader Kings 2<\/em>, the characters’ attitudes towards the player character are\u00a0broken down in explicit detail (“Long Reign: +8, Liege is Just: +10, Desires Duchy of\u00a0Ostlandet: -20”) to open\u00a0a window into a\u00a0very complicated algorithm. For\u00a0Civ 4<\/em>, we similarly exposed the diplomatic AI by detailing all the factors that determine a specific ruler’s attitude towards the player, which increased\u00a0player comfort significantly. I mentioned that system in the talk, but what I failed to mention is that the designers of\u00a0Civ 5<\/em> tried to move back to a more opaque system by hiding these numerical values but had to patch it back in because players felt too lost dealing with the AI. Ultimately, transparency is a specific game design aesthetic that may\u00a0not right for all games, especially ones which value mystery, discovery, and perhaps even player frustration, but if a game is meant to be\u00a0dynamic<\/em> and\u00a0replayable<\/em>, then transparency is a very important goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was very pleased to hear that the GDC folks\u00a0posted\u00a0my 2014 talk for free on the Vault, so everyone can watch it now. I was actually quite surprised during the talk that my content only lasted 40 minutes – I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/memoir-dice.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-cN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}