Toby pointed me to a very interesting presentation by Sebastian Deterding, related to the things I’ve been writing here about system fatigue and game design. The presentation, embedded below, is about the trend of putting points and leaderboards on everything, as if these husk-like metagames are enough to keep people hooked or make something tedious [...]

Russell Davies says something important in this blog post and its very lucid follow-up. It relates to my concerns about a lot of pervasive apps, both in the real world and on the web: A great many things that have been trumpeted as game-like have actually proven to be quite dull. I’ve let this niggle [...]

This DICE talk is doing the rounds (to me via Kim Pallister’s notes and Nicholas Lovell’s embed).
I’ve often thought about designing game rules into everything: what if a mundane job could be made compelling by game rules? That simple rule systems can become compelling is something I talk about a lot. From The Game and [...]

Spotted this one off physical pong set on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories the other day:

You can read about the full build on their blog.

I really love this game idea: cards with objectives on, that you have to sneak into people’s possession, ideally and most elegantly by reverse-pickpocketing.
(via Boing Boing TV, via someone on Twitter I think)

One of the things I sometimes talk about on stage is that game mechanics can make a massive difference to an experience. Even the most trivial and arbitrary rule set can suddenly become incredibly compelling, when people have targets to aim for, a measurement to compete with, or just some rules that allow people to [...]

In 2005, the BBC did some research into who plays games in the UK, and the results were good for the time: even compensating for age groups not included in the research by assuming noone in those brackets plays, and excluding people who play some form of game less than once a week, 40% of [...]

A lot of games were just announced at E3. Here are HD trailers of some of the ones we’re most looking forward to:
The Last Guardian, by Team Ico
WipeOut HD Fury, developed by Sony over in Liverpool
Assassin’s Creed 2, set in Renaissance Venice. While the gameplay of the first may have been criticised, the artistry in [...]

Valve are setting an excellent example of how to update games at the moment, by making the updates into entertainment themselves rather than mere patches.
Last week they unveiled an update to the sniper class in Team Fortress 2, which seemed to completely negate spies, the counter to snipers. Knowing full well that such an update [...]

Offworld was also recently launched by Boing Boing, and along with Rock Paper Shotgun appears to be a stalwart and interesting games blog that updates a lot yet is above the standard of typical games blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq.
One of the posts that caught my attention the other day was this one about Left [...]