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    I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…

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    Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…

I Explore

Sweet. My GDC 2007 presentation got accepted. It’s about exploration in games. Different kinds of it, how it works, what draws players into exploring, how to design to support it, and how to leverage it to broaden the expressive space of your game. This should be a challenging one.

One of the things I love about speaking at GDC is that it forces me to come up with a topic that interests me, and spend several months developing a reallt deep understanding of it. It’s like being forced to do research, that I otherwise might be too lazy to do in a thorough way. Anyhow, hopefully some of you will be there.

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4 responses to “I Explore”

  1. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    I’m sure some discussion of level design principles would add to that; from Mario to Metroid to the Milkman. Actually, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night would be a better example than Metroid because the castle is a metaphor for Alucard’s heritage, which he (and you as player) is trying to explore, understand, and conquer.
    I’ll try to attend barring any schedule conflicts, I may have to do my poster session in the same time frame.

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  2. kim Avatar
    kim

    This applies to not only speaking, but also articles, research projects, etc.
    Committing to these before you fully understand the subject is something I’ve done a lot too. A co-worker and I used to refer to this as “dump and chase” – referring to how ‘Les Habs’ often used to (rather than having a play) dump the puck behind the net, chase in after it in a “we’ll figure out a plan when we get there” kind of way 🙂

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  3. Clint Avatar
    Clint

    Kim:
    Dump and chase is a great strategy. It’s a stratgey that rests on determination. Determination is something anyone can have regardless of skill or smarts, and it’s often underestimated. Remember that until only 4 years ago, the Habs were the ‘winningest’ team in all of professional sports. Hard to argue with that.

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  4. Will Hindmarch Avatar
    Will Hindmarch

    You’ll share some of your presentation with us once GDC has come and gone, I hope? Us paper-game types can’t always get out there like we should. Exploration gameplay is something that’s been running through my brainstorming like a lode of silver the past few months and I’d love to hear a smart person chase that puck while I’m over here chasing pieces of metaphors all over.

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