{"id":138,"date":"2009-07-10T14:21:26","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T21:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=138"},"modified":"2009-07-10T14:22:21","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T21:22:21","slug":"gaming-made-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/gaming-made-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming Made Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

The writers of Rock Paper Shotgun<\/a> just finished a series<\/a> on what games made them gamers. For the final installment<\/a>, they asked developers and other critics to contribute their own stories. I wrote one up although my examples tend to show how I became a designer, not necessarily a gamer:<\/p>\n

Legacy of the Ancients: <\/strong>Although heavily influenced by the Ultima series, LotA was a lot more accessible and had an interesting twist \u2013 no experience points! A few quests rewarded the player with better attributes, and equipment of could be upgraded, but I never had to wander the wilderness gathering up XP from hapless monsters. After slogging through all of Bard\u2019s Tale over a period of months, playing LotA was a revelation to me. The focus was on exploration and adventure, not grinding, so much so that as soon as I beat it, I sat back down and finished it again in under eight hours. I learned from LotA that we don\u2019t need to make players \u201cearn\u201d their fun with camouflaged treadmills.
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\nSeven Cities of Gold: <\/strong>I was a Spanish conquistador discovering the New World \u2013 except it wasn\u2019t the Earth that we already know. Instead it was a new one, randomly generated inside my computer \u2013 different enough to surprise but similar enough to feel real. Further, the suggestive allure of my Commodore 64 spinning for multiple minutes creating new continents and mountain ranges and river valleys was immense. It was the future, and I knew it. I learned from Seven Cities that the best game content didn\u2019t need to be hand-written.<\/p>\n

Adventure Construction Set: <\/strong>I finally got to make a world of my own! Too bad it\u2019s locked away on a floppy somewhere in my parent\u2019s basement, but the experience of building my own little game definitely made me dream of doing it for real someday. More importantly, ACS showed me the value of a data-driven design \u2013 new games could be built entirely on top of a fixed code-base. The design space was defined by which parameters could be altered, which raises an interesting question I am still trying to answer about who it the primary author of a game \u2013 the programmer who exposes the variables or the designer who fills them in?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The writers of Rock Paper Shotgun just finished a series on what games made them gamers. For the final installment, they asked developers and other critics to contribute their own stories. I wrote one up although my examples tend to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-2e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}