Doug Church

I've mentioned doug's site before on this blog, as a site that I love, that I wish my site was more like, as it encourages play and exploration, whereas mine merely reflects on it, and at best encourages the reflection on my reflections.

Improvisation: getting player past rote execution of skill. Tony Hawk Pro Skater, The Sims, Pinball, and Nethack are good examples of improvisation in games.

Expression: at least off the opportunity to be "good" or "bad" (not very sophisticated yet, still very overt). Examples: Fable, KotOR, HJade Empire, Black and White, Deus Ex. Expression in some respects = improvisation.

Agency: the ability to of the player to "push against" the design of the game. 

most improvisation takes place at low level actions (dance instead of move forward, move backward), whereas much of the expression takes place on the higher level (player choices early on prescript later play). Many actions one can envision taking aren't supported in the world [and here's where worlds like 2nd Life are interesting to me --john].

Improvisation requires a sea of possibilities from which to choose actions. Many games penalize failure, so how to encourage more improvisation? build shorter games (less risk), more rewards, wider victory conditions, more recovery, push players into mire divers or interesting areas! CHALLENGE THEM!

Check out Interactivestory.net.

John Seely Brown is the respondent. To respond to Doug's talk, he spoke of Improv in theatre, where the main point is to create opening moves that open up the next move by the next user. To speak to Robin Hunicke's point on Dynamic Adjustment of games, he talked about his own experience designing jet fighter simulations for the military, he had to try to dynamically adjust the play to respond to sub-optimal procedures in order to discourage their use by the players.