Notes from Will Wright's Masterclass:

• Take ideas from many sources eg economics, history

• Identify elements that can flow through different parts of the software eg editors in Spore across disparate game types

• Drawing alternative box designs to see what resonates (cf Amazon “writing the press release”)

• Make simple prototypes (as cheaply as possible, don’t have to be reusable) in order to make a decision - identify what the decision actually is and how you can tell the answer from a prototype

  • Can people use the interface?
  • What are the failure states?
  • Is it motivating?
  • Are people getting both the social and the individual components?

• Technology changes but human psychology doesn’t

  • Freedoms + limitations + goal states = motivated to do things and avoid others
  • “No entrepreneur went broke overestimating the intelligence of the public” Barnum; substitute “narcissism of player”
  • Getting player to build a mental model of agents, agency, goal states
  • People learn by trying things and seeing what happens -> they understand patterns/schemas
  • Model doesn’t have to be perfectly correct/representative of the actual world, just has to work within the software

  When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery | The Obscuritory

• Users will fail a lot of the time and that’s good, otherwise it’s not challenging. But failure must be understandable so the user can succeed next time, otherwise just frustrating.

  • Capture metrics on people entering failure states or getting stuck at learning stages

• If active contribution to the game can become part of player’s identity (eg Sims content creators), that powers experience for them and for other more passive users - how to reward creation?

  • Player’s innate incentive to engage with the game process is much more important than gamified rewards.