The challenge of the virtual value code

One of the benefits of being an artist is to be able to communicate your values to the audience. So let’s talk about the challenge of transmitting values through games. How to make a player act according to the moral code held by its protagonist voluntarily? Or the reaction: how do I, the player, can make my moral code to be enforced by the mechanics available to the protagonist?

Looking past the structure

Here’s a common scenario: you have to save your loved one but the game keeps asking you to enter that sewer level collect some kind of completely unnecessary item. Or maybe you want to escape your average zombie-infested Police HQ, but has to deal with chess keys first. The task structure thrown upon you matters and should not be ignored.

What Annoys Me About A Link To The Past

Despite recognizing it as a Genre Great game, I remember I didn’t quite like my first Zelda game much. It was A Link to the Past (aLttP). A Link to the Past is the quintessential Genre Great game. Don’t confuse that with just “Great”. If Genre Great is the top student from the class, the Great is the Nobel Prize winner.

In defense of old values: talking with Pid's Kian Bashiri

Kian Bashiri, maker of You Have to Burn the Rope and lead programmer of Might & Delight’s Pid, talks to us about the passion, the intellect behind his craft; the values his game tries to defend and maybe… just maybe… how he may suffer from “coding OCD”!

For there shall be no rip-offs: talking with Rocksmith's Paul Cross

  We kind of love Rocksmith. Like, love love. It’s the second game ever to give me hand calluses (love hurts) and the first one that does so without wrecking my controller. So I was kind ecstatic to find the game on

JETPACK JOYRIDE and the essence of bullshit

I hate the coins from the Super Mario games.

Even when they were born they are merely a vestige from the arcade days of endless gameplay. When Super Mario Bros. introduced the idea of a game with an ending, the coins were merely mending the gap from the concept of playing a something to beat the score. Now, despite the fact games have fully embraced the idea of chasing an end goal, those coins have never disappeared. As we talk about the benefits of applying game mechanics to our real lives, we started to recognize these coins as the most basic achievement unit. Coins are the atoms that form achievements.

The reason why I hate coins is that they are too easy to use. In both games and real life, coins can trivialize the concept of gamification. They blurry the line and, instead of enhancing your experience, game mechanics become an end in itself. That’s the exact point gamification starts being bullshit.

Jetpack Joyride is a bullshit game. There is no better way to put it. Basically, it’s Canabalt without the elegant simplicity, without the context and meaning, without the balanced gameplay that encouraged the player to gain momentum… but with many things Canabalt did not need. Coins and ranks and purchasable items and crap.

The Ugly Paulistano

Every tourist is an ambassador for its country. As a man who mostly communicates with bullets, Max Payne isn’t perhaps the best man to represent its country.

Max Payne has always communicated through bullets, though. In Max Payne 3, the only difference is that he is now restrained from relying on any other means. As an ignorant foreigner, unwilling to learn the local language and expecting the impoverish locals to know his, Max forces us to play the role of the ignorant foreigner.

I’ve been living in São Paulo, or Sampa for short, for almost a decade now. A German friend of mine asked me how it felt to play as an alienated foreigner while being able to understand everything being said by the locals at the same time.

Finding out the answer scared me.

After Pressing Start: How Rocksmith Reinvented the Syllabus

We all know what a syllabus is, right? The syllabus is the content of that first class you started to attend. It’s probably all you are going to do during the first week of school (so feel free to extend your vacations): to read over the summary of topics some council of elders decided the class should cover. This is the day you’ll find out when the tests are, what the teacher thinks about the students’ presence and the book he will force students to read.

Sadly, many teachers are satisfied by merely reading the syllabus. It’s a pity, for anyone can read the syllabus on their own. No use wasting the teacher’s time with that. What students need, however, is a taste. They need to glimpse the potential that class is going to bring if they apply themselves. This is particularly important given the scarcity of information available about a new class. During my time in college, we had the course’s name, a two-line description and that was it.

Well, fuck that! Let’s have Rocksmith show them how it’s done!

ROCKSMITH and the victory over gamification

Gamification is a sexy buzz word. It was born from the assumption that people value the things they struggle to obtain more than the things they freely receive. And so, the behaviorist wizard assigned points and levels to everything. His spell dictated that we would become more motivated if we became aware that every level passed or song beaten was a stepping stone, an achievement.

It was under the lure of this magic man that I purchased Rocksmith, a rhythm game you play with a real guitar and whose goal is to teach you how to play it. Perhaps now, with the ethereal motivation provided by gamification, I would be finally able to switch from the G chord to the C chord without having to stop and mentally command my fingers to do so. It was an impulse buy to be sure, but one that ended up being my most played game of 2011.

And here is the twist: gamification didn’t do a damn thing.

After Pressing Start: Bioshock's Elevator Pitch

If you go to an entrepreneurship lecture, you are sure to hear about an elevator pitch: the concept of communicating a value proposition to someone in 30 seconds. If you ever meet Bill Gates inside an elevator, you only have