Not sure how many Brazilian readers I have, but I am going to speaking next week at the SBGames Conference in Sao Leopoldo. Latin America is one area that is usually off the radar for game developers, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the games market down there. I know Civ always had a sizable fan community in Brazil although I’m not sure how many of those fans actually bought legit copies of the game. As the PC gaming industry moves from boxed retail to online distribution, it’ll be interesting to see if these forgotten markets like Latin America, Russia, India, the Middle East, or even Africa become more important.

Gameplay is a word.

I have written a lot about game design over the years, and I have finally gotten sick of seeing the red squiggly little lines in Word show up every time I type “gameplay” – the closest thing we have to defining the essence of our art.

Here’s a list of words that don’t get the red squiggle from Microsoft:

plot
story
quest
character
dialogue
movies
graphics
polygons
textures
resolution
monsters
bosses
weapons
shields
spells
lives
victory
defeat
rewards
levels
cheats
walkthroughs
Xbox

…but no gameplay. Or replayability either. Hmmm…

Christopher Kline, lead programmer of Bioshock, just gave an excellent post-mortem on the project at a Montreal IGDA event. I always find it interesting to hear about design decisions which seem obvious from the outside but took multiple iterations to get right internally. Namely, the Little Sister characters started out as sea slugs and only ended up as young girls after a number of rewrites. Obviously, we feel a lot less empathy for slugs than children, and the game’s central moral choice – to harvest or to save the Little Sisters – would be a lot less meaningful without that empathy.

So, how did they start so far off the mark with the sea slugs? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the players would have a whole different game inside their heads once they are making a decision about a fellow human being? This question is key to understanding why good game design is so difficult. When you build a game from scratch, nothing is obvious. Games are only as good as the number of times your team can go through the design-implement-feedback loop. The sooner you start – and the wider a net you cast for play testers – the better.

Btw, does anyone know how I can embed this video without having it stick to the left margin?