Games

Open source gaming is a goon cult

Submitted by Duion on

After having experienced my "Open Source Games Groundhog Day" in my recent blog post I felt that somehow it feels similar to some phenomenon I witnessed before many times. Then it dawned on me and it is a goon cult, you know one of those vaporware projects, that never get finished, but keep making promises and their delusional overloyal fanbase will eat it up and stick to it and keep pouring money into it.

Open Source Games Groundhog Day

Submitted by Duion on

Most people probably remember the old movie "Groundhog Day" where the main protagonist was trapped in a time loop being forced to experience the same thing over and over again.
When browsing the supposedly open source games community websites I had a similar experience after noticing they constantly put up "new" news that are somehow identical to the "old" news all the time.

How a small algorithm change created the let's player plague

Submitted by Duion on

If you regularly watch youtube or other video platforms or streaming websites you may have noticed that by far one of the most popular trends is the let's plays, where people record themselves playing video games and give their stupid commentary into it, well this was not always the case, it was very likely created by just a small change in the youtube algorithm and therefore not organic.

The boredom of circular based multiplayer games

Submitted by Duion on

I already covered why linear story based games are boring, but this applies mostly to singleplayer games and I thought there must be an equivalent for multiplayer games, since somehow multiplayer games also feel boring, but it's not so clear why, so I try to break it down as well. At first I thought there may not be enough content for an article about this topic, but I will try anyway. The first problem was that I did not really knew how to call it, so I called it circular based, which sounds a bit weird, but I will now get to why I chose those terms.

Why there are no more RPGs

Submitted by Duion on

Have you ever wondered why it seems nobody is making RPGs anymore? At least AAA RPGs, since I'm not perfectly aware of all those thousands of indie game developers that may exist, but I would guess with a high probability, that even those will or have not created any true RPGs, since RPGs are hard to make and require a lot of resources, talent and skill, which indie developers often don't have, well at least not the resources, but often they also lack talent and skill.

The ultimate bad game design choice: Money

Submitted by Duion on

As the Bible already stated it: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." This also seems to apply to the video game industry and to artists.

I already felt it pretty soon when writing those articles, that many of the bad game design choices have one big thing in common and it is the love of money or the intent to maximise monetary profit over everything else.

Bad game design choices: Remakes, Clones, Sequels etc

Submitted by Duion on

What is worse than creating something? Creating nothing. How can you create something while at the same time creating nothing? Well you simply copy. Artistically a copy is nothing, or close to nothing. I once heard that the definition of art is to create something new and unique aka being creative and if you just copy, you are not being creative or artistic by definition and therefore a remake game, or clone is not good game design, as nothing or not much new is actually created.

Bad game design choices: Invisible Walls

Submitted by Duion on

Almost every gamer probably also knows this one, it is those invisible barriers that prevent you from going out of the map or going somewhere you are not supposed to go. For game designers this is often a necessary evil, because there is no other way to do it based on their resources, but it is an ugly solution, therefore a bad game design choice.

First this was planned as multiple articles, because there are many kinds of invisible walls, each for different reasons, some physical, some metaphorical, let me make a list of the basic types of invisible walls in games:

Pages