Stéphane Bura

I've added a couple of games I developed to the site:

War and Peace - The One-Button Civilization - a small game I developed over a couple of days for Gamma 4's One-Button Games challenge.

War and Peace is a one-button implementation of the major game mechanics found in Civilization. As in Civilization, you have to choose carefully which technologies you research, when to build up your cities and when to be more offensive, depending on which kind of victory you're shooting for (conquest, domination, or spaceship). You just do it with a single button.

Cortical - a game I developed in order to test a theory of mine about game design innovation. The corresponding article is forthcoming.

Cortical explores a control scheme in which the player acts by changing the behaviors of the game creatures instead of directly controlling their movements.

It's hard to describe how satisfying and fulfilling working on a design problem at Project Horseshoe can be. When you're interested in such a byzantine subject as abstractly codifying the workings of videogames, it's just amazing to be in a room full of people who share that interest, are very knowledgeable about it, bring original viewpoints and are willing to push themselves together to create something new. It's fair to say that we were on a cloud during these work sessions. Many thanks go to Kathy Schoback for being our skilled facilitator and for bringing us back to earth with her insightful comments when we where lost in the clouds.

We worked on expanding the existing body of work on skill atoms and game grammar to turn it into a helpful tool for design sessions and game design critique, and we studied how this theory can be applied to multiplayer games.

Our report is now online at Project Horseshoe's site. There's a lot of things in there, combining the workshop's results and an organized summing up of the prolonged email conversation that followed. A lot of these ideas warrant their own articles - I'm thinking for instance of Dan Cook's concept of deep skills or Victor Jimenez's production grammars - which they'll surely get in the upcoming months.

...and I'm off to Project Horseshoe

I'll be moderating Tuesday August 19th game design panel at Leipzig's GCDC, with illustrious panel members Bob Bates, Steve Meretzky and Bobby Stein. Come and see us if you're around.

Abstract: Game design has a rich past and a bright future, ripe with yet undiscovered innovations.
In this panel, industry veterans and innovators in their own right will draw from the past and reach into the future to discuss gameplay mechanisms that, like Achievements recently, can transform the player's experience, the game designer's habits and the gaming community as a whole.
They will talk about how designing such mechanisms relates to managing constraints outside of the game design field.
Finally, they will offer their views on what's in store for players and on which design opportunities we should take advantage of.

Target Audience: This session is open to anyone curious about how future advances in game design will impact our relationship with games, and how these advances can come to be.
It is a non-technical, non-gloomy session.

Many thanks to Simon Carless and Christian Nutt for publishing my article on emotion engineering on Gamasutra.

I feel honored and giddy at the same time to be part of this nexus of the videogame community.

And I certainly don't feel any pressure for my next article... none at all.

I've put online an article entitled "Emotion Engineering in Videogames, Toward a Scientific Approach to Understanding the Appeal of Videogames".

It's a theory about how to design game systems that can induce a chosen emotion in a player and, in fine, about how to find a certain type of abstract game design rules that are applicable to all videogames, across all genres. This is a more detailed model than the one I presented at Game Focus Germany 2008.

Here's, for instance, one way to induce hope in a player using only gameplay systems:

The article explains what this all means. Hopefully.

Hello and welcome to this blog.

I've made this small space on the net to share my ongoing work on the creation of a game design grammar.
Updates should be few and far between, so I'm grateful for rss feeds.

Also, I'm French.