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The Third
Annual Game Design Think Tank
Project Horseshoe 2008
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
by The Fat Man, George A. Sanger
Project Horseshoe 2008. I was there.
Well, I wasn’t there the whole time. Family Stuff. But I was there at the beginning and end. I was the bread in a Being There Sandwich. Here’s the meat.
Four powerful speakers seemed to be adding up to an industry-changing trend. Thursday night, Richard Dansky challenged the industry to act its age—no more “we’re a young industry” excuses. The following morning, Jason Rohrer asked where our auteurs were. Steve Meretzky asked where our fun went. Jeff Pobst offered up a new business model with the potential to solve most of the issues, and invited us to join him in refining the model.
The minute I left, everything went all yardsale, which in this case was cool! We formed four facilitated workgroups and four rogue groups. This is double the number of work groups we have had in each of the past two years.
The Prototypicals (facilitated) explored the benefits of, and methods and justifications for prototyping games before actually building them. The payoffs in risk mitigation, lower costs and increased quality were made clear. The difference between prototypes and demos/vertical slices was emphasized as well.
Patricia Pizer formed a solo rogue group, “Off the Shelf.” She will set up a series of pages on GameKabal.org, for sorting, detailing, and recommending books related to game design. She generously invested her precious Horseshoe time into beginning work on this project, and we got to see some first images from the project.
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari had been facing some challenges involving quantifying human behavior within stories. Allen Varney joined her in a rogue group, “Quantifying Human Relationships,” and examined various ways in which she might improve parts of her approach to AI in order to face down those issues.
The Content Gators (facilitated) looked at the game design questions raised by the proliferation of games in which the players find it so hard to progress that they effectively keep players from experiencing all of the entertainment that they purchased. The group defined conditions under which it’s best for the game to lower the game’s difficulty.
The Dating Game, a rogue group, formed around the question of how to make games a date activity. Other media are date activities, but games somehow don’t seem to be leading to successful social interactions. This group explored the general principles that a game design could take advantage of in order to drive up the scoring average of the player… so to speak.
I was particularly gratified to see the work from this next group, maybe because it’s vaguely one of the things I had expected to see and hadn’t seen (or hadn’t been able to recognize!) in previous conferences. Meneki-Neko and the Potlatch Boys picked up where last year’s game grammar group left off. They had so much success at this that they have already begun pitying the people who had to design games “the old way,” back in the dark days before they had come up with this new method a few hours ago. Using their new grammar they generated a flow chart of the “atom” of gameplay. From there they managed to use their new grammar to describe football, even though they are, you know, geeks. They also analyzed a game whose design was in progress. Using charts of gameplay “atoms” proved useful for analysis, evaluation and debugging the game.
Dr. Cat, as a solo rogue group, “The Island of Misfit Toys,” presented a moving illustrative story to drive home the powerful potential of the “one laptop per child” program.
The Play is the Thing (facilitated) followed up on the themes touched on in the opening talks. They explored the idea of a game designer as artist. They found that there is not so much a lack of art in game design as there is a lack of recognition of game design as an Art Capital A. They mapped out the problems and some specific solutions. Among these:
1. A new type of game festival that involves playing games all the way through.
2. And an award for Game Design Artistry was presented to Jason Rohrer who joined this work group halfway into the conference and after the award was decided, thus screwing up the award plans in a warm and ironic way.
Thirteen years ago I asked Van Webster, my mentor, how it’s possible to know if a conference is a success. He answered “Three years. Once you throw your third conference, the thing is here to stay.”
Thanks, brilliant and kind attendees of Project Horseshoe Number Three, and congratulations on being here to stay!!
Love,
FAT
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