The human mind is the most powerful game engine - but it can always use some help.
This book is meant for developers who want to create games that will evoke richer and more memorable gameworlds in the minds of their players.
We don't just enter such unforgettable gameworlds when we play first-person 3D RPGs with high-resolution graphics; even relatively simple 2D puzzle or strategy games with 8-bit-style visuals can immerse players in worlds that are beautiful, terrifying, mysterious, or moving, that are brutally realistic or delightfully whimsical.
Indeed, good video games can transport us to incredible new worlds.
The process by which a particular gameworld emerges is a symbiotic collaboration between developer and player: the game system presents a carefully architected stream of polygons and pixels, which somehow leads the player's mind to construct and explore an intricate world full of places, people, relationships, dilemmas, and quests that transcends what's actually appearing onscreen.
Drawing on insights from ontology and philosophical aesthetics, this volume provides you with conceptual frameworks and concrete tools that will enhance your ability to design games whose iconic gameworlds encourage the types of gameplay experiences you want to offer your players.
Among other topics, the book investigates: The unusual ways in which a gameworld's contents can shrink or grow in players' minds, depending on whether the players are mentally positioned within a game's social space, cultural space, built space, or tactical space.
The manner in which players' minds spontaneously concretize the countless gaps that exist in a game - and how this dynamic explains why so many players still enjoy 8-bit-style games with retro pixel art.
The differing ways in which players experience success and failure, danger and safety, good and evil, the future and the past, the known and the unknown, and engagement and retreat, depending on whether a game reveals its gameworld.
| Player | The game system presents a carefully architected stream of polygons and pixels which somehow leads the players mind to construct and explore an intricate world full of places people relationships dilemmas and quests that transcends whats actually appearing onscreen |
|---|---|
| Among other topics, the book investigates | The unusual ways in which a gameworlds contents can shrink or grow in players minds depending on whether the players are mentally positioned within a games social space cultural space built space or tactical space |
Defragmenter Media Phenomenology of the gameworld: a philosophical toolbox for video game developers, paperback/matthew e. gladden
