Game Theory and You
You probably heard of game theory at one point, nodded your head trying to convince the people around you that you knew what it was about, but like me, struggled to grasp its applications to actual...
View ArticlePleasure without learning leads to addiction
Our industry tends to use many terms without having strong understanding of them. Pleasure, motivation and addiction are generally mixed up and misused despite being central to entertainment. So much...
View ArticleFun and uncertainty
“Have you found the fun yet?” is a question we often hear asked to designers. It shows how shallow is our understanding of the craft of games, but also how easily we accept such a vague mandate. Trying...
View ArticleTeaching design instead of asset creation
The GDC Vault has recently released Professor Brian Moriarty’s talk from the 2012 conference, Lehr und Kunst mit Perlenspiel, that reports on the game design course he has been giving at the Worchester...
View ArticleUnderstanding Gameplay – Part One: Definitions
Just like fun, gameplay is a word that always felt awkward to me. This is critical for game designers as it is mostly their responsibility, yet there doesn’t seem to be any established definition of...
View ArticleUnderstanding Gameplay – Part two: Technique
In the previous article, we’ve looked at gameplay from the perspective of a symbolic system that proposes abstract problems to players, and that requires structuring norms while allowing for variation...
View ArticleSFU talk – Defining Gameplay: Between Chaos and Structure
I was recently invited by the cognitive science department of Simon Fraser University to participate in a series of event regrouping researchers and industry members at the Centre for Digital Media....
View ArticleRecently started vlogging
As I had a good amount of requests to run the game design seminar on the East coast or abroad, I turned myself toward online solutions. As a result, and while I am working to setup my training program...
View ArticleAssassin’s Creed flow, motivation and reward
Recent Ubisoft games have been observed to share a lot of game mechanics. The formula gradually evolved through the years but took its roots in the first open-world title of the company, Assassin’s...
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