On game design

I've corresponded briefly with Kyle about a very good article on game design that he wrote and posted on his site. If you play video games at all or are even mildly interested in them, it's a fun, if somewhat formal and technical, read, and I recommend it.

When Kyle visits, we inevitably spend a chunk of time discussing how to design fun games and exactly what it is that makes a game fun. Why did I enjoy MechAssault so much but not bother to finish MechAssault 2? (Sales figures generally aligned with my feelings, by the way, so it wasn't simply that my taste was odd--though that is often the case.) Why are the Halo games so much fun?

These may sound like questions that matter only to geeks, but they're not. The video game business is huge, and the costs of making the big games is equally large: think $15M and up for a single game. With that much money on the line, figuring out how to come closer to being fun for the player is worth a lot.

Kyle's paper has a lot of good insights, and game designers would do well to heed them.