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The Fourth
Annual Game Design Think Tank
Project Horseshoe 2009
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
by The Fat Man, George A. Sanger
It appears that the rubber has hit the road, and the attendees of Project Horseshoe have set a tone and pace that, I hope, we will be able to sustain for many more years. The underlying message that seems to be forming is that, when we look at affecting our own survival and success, we are really looking at community issues.
Team HJ presented a framework to describe and understand ethical and moral issues as they are presented within the design of games. They laid out a system beginning with the idea that ethical dilemmas are not just shallow decisions of “do something nice” vs. “do something evil.” Rather, they can be looked at in terms of a set of elements: Goal, Method, Degree, Knowledge, and Motivation. In their presentation, they were able to illustrate that game situations involving fully qualified ethical dilemmas are interesting, compelling, revealing, and downright fun.
Oh, boy, being community-minded is going to make me rich. The Armani Straightjackets gave us a capitalist’s guide to survival in 21st century game development. The clear take-away: Community is now the product. Examples were drawn from the, music industry, cruise industry, Stargate community, the Apple store, and others. The group examined “brain hacks” that mark certain successful products, and looked at the possible up-sides and down-sides of long-form and short-form games, and showed that either way, success is based on the community around the product. Rules of thumb were mentioned that would help insure the formation of successful and effective communities. Some extremely interesting methods of monetizing situations once a community is formed were enumerated. eg. “Direct Cross Subsidies,” (you have to buy a controller to play Guitar Hero software), Super Premium models (comic book artists sell original artwork) Negative Free (this machine counts your change for free as long as you take the results in a Starbucks gift card), Asymmetric Monetization (Ladies Night at a night club) Mechanical Turk (crowd sourcing player base to solve problems). WHEE!
The Social Butterflies opened with an amazing song about Facebook and Farmville. They looked at the design of currently popular social games and identified things that work and don’t work, and brainstormed several new ideas of things that might work as social games but haven’t been tried yet. We played a round of “That’s Mildly Interesting,” a game Dr. Cat came up with (and Steve Meretzky “fixed” as in “fixed a cat.”) which demonstrated play based on raiding content created by users.
On top of all this, energy remained high and positive, right through the end. Some wonderful “future traditions” were planted, pranks were pulled, and friendships were formed. And I am SOOOOO happy about being part of this!
Love,
FAT
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