Play Forever #UFO50
18.04.2025 20:50
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Play Forever #UFO50
Yeah, that's a good point. People play a game once or twice and then attempt to extrapolate how skillful a game is -- but it's very hard to make that assessment with a small sample size. Luck makes the issue worse, since playing a lucky game well means a better win %, not a guaranteed win.
If the opportunity arises, I'd love to 😀
I'll be showing off Hot Streak at this GDC event, Wednesday morning!
Tbf getting full enjoyment from a high luck & high skill game requires almost a cognitive dissonance... You must try super hard to win, exercising your skill, but also not care much about the final outcome, which may be dashed by luck. (This is also the personality type I most want to play with.)
Richard Garfield's been explaining how luck & skill are not opposites for well over a decade, but I still encounter designers & players who haven't internalized this lesson. I suspect it's the number one reason people tend to underrate the amount of strategy in lighter games.
ooh, interested 👀
Can I choose option 3, Keyforge?
Not sure, but I don't think this clarification would be as necessary for a video game. But in the physical card game space, procedural generation is both a less common term and a less common practice, so people are more likely to see generated cards & assume they know how the trick is done.
Oh man, yeah I checked out your bio & I can only imagine
Yeah... as I was writing the post, I debated adding "LLM" or "generative"...but I do kinda think the battle is being lost so I submitted to using the more colloquial "modern AI", just because I felt the type of person my post is aimed at would best understand that. 🤷
I'm working on a procedurally generated physical card game that I'll probably start posting more about. Unfortunately, things have reached a point where I have to make clear that "procedurally generated" does NOT mean "uses modern AI". Just old school programming techniques & lots of human effort.
I caught about half of it when it aired live, but I finally went back and rewatched the whole Mini & Max speedrun from Cherry Rush. Really cool stuff! www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvfP...
I don't mean noisiness pejoratively at all, but it's a fair critique.
I'm not sure "breadth" relates to what I'm talking about, though. I guess I'd have to better understand what you mean by that term.
To be fair to those players, I think a lot of them genuinely just enjoy noise and fiddling with a lot of moving parts. Which is all well and good! That's totally valid and a big appeal of board games. This preference only bothers me when it veers into a sense of smugness or superiority.
I think a lot board gamers underestimate the depth of light games and overestimate the depth of heavy games. More moving parts does not necessarily mean a game has more strategy. It often just means there's more noisiness obscuring the impact of your decisions.
Really nice article by @gengelstein.bsky.social on one of the most fundamental tools of game design. I'm constantly doing these kinds of EV calculations while designing, at both early and late stages of the process. gametek.substack.com/p/great-expe...
At GDC this year, I'll be one of several people giving a microtalk at this session:
schedule.gdconf.com/session/game...
The larger topic is "Games about Games" but my talk will be about game collections in particular.
Having a good time working on some things of my own over here, but also wouldn't mind taking on a couple of bite-sized BGM/SFX gigs this year. If you've got a cool project going and would like an off-beat soundscape feel free to reach out. 🏌️♀️
Always 2. Also the current tournament format is the off leash variant, though that changes every season.
Been immersing myself in competitive Spots on BGA lately (currently holding 10th place in a longrunning tournament that began with 172 players). It's been great seeing how well the game holds up! Tbh, I think there's way more skill to it than many people give it credit for.
Just a little microtalk under the topic of Games About Games:
schedule.gdconf.com/session/game...
on the UFO 50 discord theres a bot command called /randomforme (random for me) thats a daily randomly picked UFO 50 game. i've been using it as a warmup and watercolor practice for some weeks now, so i'm gonna start a thread of em, starting with Day 1: my man, Jangi (Rakshasa)
Awesome! I'll be there too
Hi I'm on bluesky now! Last year was a hell of a year as my 2-year-old was diagnosed with cancer (!?!?!?) and spent much of it in the hospital. Thankfully it's in remission now. What a ride. Hoping to slowly get back into gamedev stuff this year!
I love it when I open a one sentence reminder email that says, "Make dentist appointment" & Gemini is like "Can I summarize that for you?"
Thought of another:
-Fog of war in Starcraft
A subcategory of spectatorship I'm particularly interested in is dramatic irony in games.
Examples:
-The hole cam in Poker
-Being a moderator/dead person in Werewolf
-Watching your teammate pick a card in Hanabi
But I can't think of many other examples.
Totally-- I believe fighting games are probably the most watchable multiplayer video game genre.
I can see that! For the right person, being a moderator and simply facillitating other people's fun is super enjoyable. Often when I'm teaching a lighter game, I'm happy to sit out and just run it if we have one too many players, even though "running it" often turns into just watching.