This past Saturday, I attended the second annual Boston GameLoop, a small game industry unconference hosted by Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan. Instead of a normal conference where speakers plan their presentations months in advance, the schedule was decided the morning of the conference. There was a large wipe board with a grid of available meeting rooms and times. People simply wrote in session ideas that interested them, and then attended what they felt like attending. Some sessions featured a speaker, but many of them were roundtable discussions that everyone in the room participated in. For me, the best part was meeting gaming industry people from all over the northeastern United States, and seeing some familiar faces from New York.
The discussion in many of the sessions centered on MMORPGs, which I found both frustrating and interesting at the same time. I don’t play any MMORPGs, so some of the language goes over my head. On the other hand, MMORPGs are a big part of the gaming industry, and those of us that make casual and kids’ games have some similar issues, like appeal and balance.

Here are my notes from the Kids’ Games Roundtable, a session where about 10 gaming industry people sat in a room and discussed children and videogames.

• Children’s games are largely sold to parents, though in some cases children do ask for a certain title. Because parents make the purchase decision, children’s games are usually marketed to increase a skill parents could observe, such as math or reading skills.
• Johnny Richardson recently developed an XBox/PC game called Buddie’s Busy Day. The game focuses on issues like self-identity and respect, partially because kids get enough basic math and literacy learning in school. In testing the game with kids in the target age range, Johnny discovered that kids became upset as soon as they detected that the game was being too overt about the educational message.
• There was general agreement and discussion among several attendees that the best educational games are those that weave the entire game experience around the curriculum. For example, The Oregon Trail effectively communicates the complicated experience that settlers had finding and managing resources, and making decisions about whether it was worth risking survival to cross a dangerous river. Another person cited a game about homeless shelter management and how some players get upset that they don’t have enough resources to serve all of the ‘people’ in the game that need shelter. Such games can create more effective learning experiences than students would have reading a book.
• Some games incorporate math equations or other factual problems in an otherwise non-educational video game format. Someone at the session likened this to chocolate covered broccoli and said that children still see this as broccoli. The point was also raised that such games often don’t help a student learn the material. Either the player already knows how to solve the problem, or he doesn’t.
• Lemmings was a great educational game. Why isn’t it available on any current gaming platforms?  UPDATE: Hold the phones!  Lemmings is available on PSP.

Notes from Content on a Shoestring session:

• To save money on music, you can layer music in multitracks, and then alter different layers slightly so you’re not boring the players with the same music all of the time.
• Practices that are good for big business companies may not always be the best practice for you.  For example, just because some companies like to spend lots of money on fancy graphics to attract players, that may not be the best course of action for you.
• Foreign language college students looking to gain experience in translation can be great sources to get your game translated to a different language. You can do a machine translation first and ask the student to check it for accuracy to save time.
• Eleanor Robinson of 7-128 Software makes games that are accessible to people with disabilities. Her company strives to make reusable components that can be used by several different titles. For example, they developed a dictionary that could be used by many games. They develop a character for one game and then reuse that character in future games. She also mentioned a mystery series that featured several different mansions, and each mansion had a unique cat with his own set of sound effects.

Notes from Achieving Flow State session:

Evan Nikolich of Demiurge Studios led a talk on Flow State. I should state that not all of my notes are from what Evan said. Some are comments made by session attendees. Also, the room diverged some to the topic of keeping the player hooked, which is a similar idea in some ways, but is not the same thing. Flow is the area between the feelings of boredom and anxiety. Game designers generally strive to create an environment where players achieve flow because then they are really “in” your game. The idea of flow was first proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and we spent the first moments of the session deciding how to pronounce his name. Wikipedia says it is “chick-sent-me-high-ee.”
Evan had this list of flow state characteristics on the board:

1. Clear Goals
2. Concentrating & Focusing
3. Loss of Feeling (in other words, loss of awareness of other things going on)
4. Distorted Sense of Time
5. Direct & Immediate Feedback
6. Balance between Ability & Challenge
7. Sense of Personal Control (as opposed to the game being in control)
8. Activity is Intrinsically Rewarding
9. Player Becomes Absorbed

• Unlocking things quickly in a game can be motivation to continue.
• Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is when a game can automatically adjust to a player’s skill level.
• A ‘Game Over’ screen with improvement stats can be motivation to continue.
• Personal goals of individual players can vary, and may not be what you had intended.
• Flow state is not synonymous with performing well. If a player is doing really well in your game, they may be growing bored.

Notes from Game Balance Methods & Practices:

• Look at how player is going to use the things you put in the game.
• After release, you can’t change things players have gotten used to. They get upset.
• Pay attention to feedback, whatever it is. (For kids games released to PC or console, there is a wealth of parent feedback in Amazon.com reviews.)
• Study metrics of the game, and make sure no one weapon or strategy is too powerful.
• Remember that playing a game is about developing strategies and feeling powerful.