MIT OpenCourseWarehttp://ocw.mit.edu CMS.608 / CMS.864 Game DesignSpring 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.CMS.608 – 6 March 2008 Notes by Clara Rhee - The reading had two bad definitions of “information” - In the future, don’t use the word “information” …unless you’re trying to deliberately confuse - ‘Information’ as a measure of uncertainty - In the Shannon-Weaver model, information is the range of possibilities - So in game design, the perimeter of all moves that the players can make is the possibility space - Degrees of freedom, range of choice - One important difference between information and uncertainty is NOISE - Noise is a part of the information that is not controllable by the source - This fits in with the idea of games as purposely inefficient systems - Being unable to clearly communicate in Charades or Pictionary is the point of the game - It can be more fun, or it can be just frustrating - Game state and player knowledge can be obfuscated - A particular signal can mean more than one thing - Can happen in many ways – for example, low sampling rate - Are there games where you’re trying to communicate to some people but not others? - Canadian Fish, Kemps, Bridge, sports signals - There’s misdirection, obfuscation, encoding - Noise cancellation is redundancy is error correction - Are there games with error correction? - Sudoku, Picross, any game with multiple referees, photo-finish for races - Even in video games, if you get shot, there are multiple signals: sound effects, red flash, stats drop, other visual effects… - Perfect vs. Imperfect knowledge - Most board games have perfect knowledge - Are there card games with perfect knowledge? - Freecell, - Blackjack? Is the state of the deck knowledge? - Hard to find, because cards are designed for hiding information - There are games with too much knowledge as well as too little knowledge - There are games where the rules are the commodity - Flux, Mao - Computer games can be generally slow to introduce rules, since the rules are hard coded in, so the players don’t need to understand every nuance to play - Over the course of play, the range of uncertainty generally decreases - Are there games where uncertainty increases? - Mario Kart? - Strategy games where the effects multiplyManaging information, I mean knowledge, overload - Player memory and player computation power - Many games (especially German computer simulations!) throw a matrix of information at you – too much! - But too little information, like a text adventure, can be bad too - Overall, decisions should be easy to make and execute - The data can be obscured (and should be sometimes!) - Objective vs. perceived information (warning: bad definition in book!) - Is perceived information the stuff you the player know and the objective info what’s there in the
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