Pay-to-trade
Isaac Knowles on Jun 6, 2013With increasing frequency, developers are restricting what can be traded inside of new games. This is especially true given the rate at which social and mobile games are being released, but it is a trend that has crept into the more hardcore...
Player Culture: The RealID Fiasco and the Magic Ci...
Lauren Collister on Apr 22, 2013One of the things I’m most interested in as an ethnographer is the interface between online and offline life, and how this line is increasingly blurred. I originally became interested in this when reading about the Magic Circle, a concept which...
7 Essential Resources for Understanding Motivation...
Travis L. Ross on Apr 4, 2013Motivation is an important topic for game designers and social scientists. Many herald the ability of games to motivate players through incentive systems, by fulfilling intrinsic needs, capturing attention, or hooking into evolved motivational...
GDC: Riot Experimentally Investigates Online Toxic...
Jim Cummings on Mar 31, 2013Riot Games has gotten a fair amount of press in recent months regarding their empirically-based research on the nature of “toxic” player behavior in League of Legends. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find standing room only for Jeffrey...
Self-determination theory at GDC
Gabriel Recchia on Mar 29, 2013In a previous article, I argued that theories of motivation that include a diverse range of motivators might be more useful to game designers than parsimonious theories that pick out a small handful of motivators as primary. Apparently, I have much...
Productivity and Replay Value
Lauren Collister on Mar 18, 2013One of the things that has captured my attention recently is the replay value of games. If you have already played through a game once (assuming it isn’t a game with new released content), why play it again? Some players take joy in reliving a...