Stephane Bura of 10tacle has posted his piece on engineering emotion in games on his personal website. This is basically a written-out version of the presentation he gave at Game Focus Germany -- and while I'm not sure I'm convinced, it's quite interesting, and worth reading if you're interested in game design theory.
Everything Cool in Games -- OUT of the Mainstream
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I don't know about you, but one of the things that really pisses me off about what's happened to the game industry in the last twenty years is the complete disappearance of adventure games.
Not that I was ever a huge fan of adventure games, really; Kings Quest and Gabriel Knight left me cold. But Zork was a lot of fun, back in the day, and I loved the Monkey Island games, and Grim Fandango was goddamn brilliant. Adventure games let you do things with actual story -- stories with real characters you actually come to care about -- that almost no other digital game style can manage. And with rare exceptions, digital games are relentlessly and really annoyingly unhumorous. Indeed, they're by and large ridiculously portentous: The evil Whatsis of Whatever has entered the world and turned everything to steaming piles of shit, and Only You and your l33t skillz, along with the Gizmo of Frammistan, can rescue us from the crapper, but of course first you have to collect the seven Thingummies of Plot Device.
I am so sick of that. Give me Guybrush Threepwood any day.
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Blogged @ karljones.com
Very interesting study by Stéphane Bura -- theories, principles, speculations, and a pattern language of emotional game design, including numerous excellent graphics.
I posted an excerpt to my blog @ karljones.com:
http://www.karljones.com/index.php/2008/02/13/emotion-engineering-in-vid...
- Karl Jones