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Ask Gaming [Designer, Professor, Gadfly] Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost is a professor of game theory at Georgia Tech, a game designer, a prolific writer, an entrepreneur, and a bit of a prankster. These roles which sometimes overlap, notably in his surprise success satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker, which you can think of as the Anti-Zynga. Wired has a fresh article up about Bogost (which cleverly embeds a sort of micro version of Cow Clicker). It also mentions another game — my favorite of his projects — that should be on the mind of every TSA employee, the 2009 release Jetset. Ask Ian about clicking cows, being an academic provocateur as well as a participant in the world of gaming, and breaking into the world of social gaming. (Please break unrelated questions into multiple comments.)
And offers much more feedback.
I lead an enthusiastic clan of RuneScape players, and they tend to have a pretty broad interest in gaming and game development. As the lead programmer/IT guy for the clan, I'm frequently asked about programming and how to go about doing it.
I'm considering setting up a fairly basic "mafia wars" type of game for them to expand and update, coded in python/html5 and running on google app engine for simplicity's sake. Python has a huge amount of self learning resources out there, and putting a python project on GAE is my go-to method for getting a project up and running quickly.
Should I encourage them to move into building a facebook app, or should I encourage them to keep it a standalone website?
On the one hand facebook gives better potential for expanding their user base, but on the other there's the 30% fee for using facebook credits and their horrible API documentation. While I want to keep things as straightforward as possible for them, I would like to see their game accumulate a decent number of players so they can show it off.
What do you think of AAA studios exploring more moral grey areas (e.g. hostage shooting airport level in COD:MW2) as a form of procedural rhetoric? Do you think players' natural tendencies of (in this case) non-violence toward innocents is solidified or shaken by simulating such acts?
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
I just want to point out that Cow Clicker was made as a response to the shitty flash games that you're talking about. And amazingly, sadly, and happily became rather successful, despite it being a simple, transparent version of everything that's "wrong" with shitty flash games. That should tell you something about how we judge game design.
The summary needs to be fixed, game theory is not the study of video games. (Bogost doesn't describe himself as a "professor of game theory", whoever wrote the summary does)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
Could someone please tell me whether or not this is meant to be a piss-take?
[FUCK BETA]