Цитаты из книги Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

Try this antidote for the fallacy of vision: instead of trying to envision the best experiences generated by a game, try to envision the worst. Carefully picture every frustrating failure, boring grind, and unclear interaction. This takes more cognitive effort than picturing a wonderful movie in the mind. But it is far…

Traditional rock-paper-scissors has three viable strategies. But there is also a version of the game called rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock (my favorite outcome is “paper disproves Spock”). That version has five strategies, and all of them are viable because each has an equal chance of winning. And we can easily add more…

Mental skill is all about predicting and manipulating his mind better than he can predict and manipulate yours. This is the pokerlike end state of most limitlessly deep games, and it is the reason most limitless games are multiplayer — because a person can learn nearly any game system, but he can never fully understand…

Eventually, I got good at predicting movements. Map knowledge was easy, and aiming challenges were a nonissue. But Unreal Tournament wasn’t done. It reinvented itself again, into its final, consummate form: a pokerlike game of psychological trickery. I knew what my options were, and what my opponent’s options were, and…

For most of history, there were no game designers, and games were pieces of folk culture passed down through generations and enjoyed mostly by children. When adults played, it was typically as a short reprieve from their harsh, bland lives. In such a primitive environment, nobody needed a better term than fun to describe…

A plan can take away the anxiety of being unsure by creating a false sense of certainty about the future. But as the philosopher Nassim Taleb says, if you want to relax, have a drink, don’t make a forecast — reckless forecasting is far more dangerous.