Why You Shouldn't Design Games Through Analytics

An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly writes at TechCrunch about a trend many gamers have noticed over the past decade: designers increasingly relying on statistics — and only statistics — to inform their design decisions. You know the type; the ones who'll change the background color if they think it'll eke out a few more players, or the ones who'll scrap interesting game mechanics in favor of making the game more easily understandable to a broader market. Naturally, this leads to homogenization and boring games. Kelly says, 'Obsessed with measuring everything and therefore defining all of their problems in numerical terms, social game makers have come to believe that those numbers are all there is, and this is why they cannot permit themselves to invent. Like TV people, they are effectively in search of that one number that will explain fun to them. There must, they reason, be some combination of LTV and ARPU and DAU and so on that captures fun, like hunting for the Higgs boson. It must be out there somewhere. ... Unlike every other major game revolution (arcade, console, PC, casual, MMO, etc.), social game developers have proved consistently unable to understand that fun is dynamic in this way. ... They are hunting for the fun boson, but it does not exist.'"

Comments

Re:The goal often isn't fun

[niftydude]

Yes, an intelligent person would seek to find reasons why his beliefs diverge from reality. But you are no such person.

As would be expected of someone not so intelligent, you can't tell the difference between bias and reality.

tldr; you're making shit up thinking it makes you match your self perceived notion of being 'intelligent'. It doesn't. Quite the opposite in fact.

Most of your post is made up of personal attacks against me. Why are you so angry dude?

That would explain why the movies not aimed at that demographic fails...

If you are going to accuse someone of being not so intelligent, then you should try to make sure that the grammar in the rest of your post is correct. Otherwise you run the risk of sounding like a sputtering, petulant twelve year old. Hint: the sentence of yours that I quoted above has too many instances of the letter S.

The good news is that when you achieve maturity, your hormonal levels will balance out, and you won't feel this rage quite so strongly.

I generally hate to be a grammar nazi, and would have preferred to criticize the facts and arguments in your post, but unfortunately there weren't any.

I hope this reply was condescending enough, I want you to have a clear understanding of the level of esteem I hold you in.