MIT OpenCourseWare http ocw mit edu CMS 608 CMS 864 Game Design Spring 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 multiply Managing 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 game
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