Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
248
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
advantages to participating in this kind of alliance and even exposing yourself to potential
acquisition by a publisher. This can be of great benefit for game studio owners
or game studio partners, but isn’t always a great situation for developers at large in
terms of creating opportunity. But creating opportunity is not the ultimate goal of the
independent game developer: having a big payday on acquisition is. In today’s market,
if you’re not working on a game connected back to a “big five” publisher, uh oh.
The ability to take chances with game content may continue to decrease, while the
search for risk-sharing capital from the companies looking to bring their brands to
gaming will no doubt accelerate.
If the industry is going to continue its growth and expand its opportunities, gaming
will need to make even more inroads with travel providers, hotel chains, promotional
settings, education, even government and will need to continue growing its relationships
with other kinds of more traditional entertainment media providers.
WEB GAME ENTERTAINMENT
WITH PHYSICAL COUNTERPARTS
Before the bust of everything remotely related to web entertainment, several entertainment
companies with a gaming focus were pursuing ideas related to gaming on
the Web with “physical counterparts.” These physical counterparts might include,
but are not limited to, customized game-feature-dependent action figures, toys, game
pieces, tokens, gems, cards, and so forth.
Web-oriented game entertainment also experimented with ideas like providing
payoff for players that could be redeemed physically. As an example, suppose you are
encouraged to play some multiplayer web games of a certain kind (many kinds of
games fit the bill). A tournament environment is created around a player community.
Players can earn points for play, as well as prizes and give-aways based on points
accumulated and their own tournament standings. This creates several security problems,
but that’s another issue.
These earned player points might be redeemed as prizes or might convert into a
limited kind of purchasing power in participating retail stores. The idea is to try to
create extra value for the player engaged in the experience. Who doesn’t enjoy winning
cool stuff for having fun? It’s almost too good to be true and that might be the
problem.
This kind of experiment is still in progress with sites like pogo (www.pogo.com),
which cater to the so-called casual gamer. I’m always fascinated to see 32,655 players
hard at work playing solitaire. You really need to understand your audience. How
would Extreme Solitaire perform on the PlayStation 2?
No matter which gaming audience you build content for, the idea is always to
grow your player base. Can physical counterparts grow the gaming universe? They
are probably only attractive to certain segments. This is the question many are still