#soren johnson

[smbhax]

Designer Notes: Sid Meier - Part 1

Episode 23. A game design interview podcast, from Soren Johnson of Mohawk Games.

Civ IV lead designer Soren Johnson interviews Civilization co-creator Sid Meier.

He also had an earlier episode interviewing the other Civ co-creator, Bruce Shelley.

[dr-iphone]

【限時免費】Epic 放送經濟即時戰略遊戲《Offworld Trading Company》和獨立遊戲《GoNNER》，3/12 前快領取！

Epic Games Store 推出最新的限時免費活動，這次放送的遊戲是出自《文明帝國 IV》的首席設計師 Soren Johnson 之手的經濟即時戰略遊戲《Offworld Trading Company》外星貿易公司，以及瑞典獨立團隊 Art in Heart 開發《GoNNER》。限免遊戲不嫌多，大家趕緊在 3 月 12 日晚上 11:00 前到 Epic Games 下載遊戲吧！ (more…)

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[curejune]

just wanted to draw this one

[raincoastgamer]

- Red Planet Nocturne, by Christopher Tin

Fun fact: you might remember a song called Baba Yetu, a breathtaking rendition of The Lord’s Prayer in Swahili which featured as the main theme of Civilization IV. Possibly one of the best-known and most widely recognized pieces of video game music of all time. Another, related fun fact: Civilization IV’s lead designer, Soren Johnson, just released his independently-developed economic real-time-strategy game Offworld Trading Company after about a year of Early Access and even longer alpha testing, and lo and behold it features an entire soundtrack by Christopher “Baba Yetu” Tin himself.

It’s quite pretty, actually. Not quite what you’d expect from a game about cutthroat resource trading on Mars.

Consider this my unofficial ‘on hold’ music while I get real life stuff out of the way so I can go back to talking about internet cartoons and video games.

Stay tuned.

[overthinkingvideogames]

This Game Kills Fascists

I have always found the endless public debate on the theoretical dangers of video game violence to be endlessly bemusing because it misses the true danger of video games by a mile. Video game are dangerous, but not because they might inspire players to imitate the well-armed protagonists in absurd, fictional situations. Saying that what makes video games dangerous is that they might make the player violent is a bit like saying that what makes Mein Kampf dangerous is that the reader might write a terrible autobiography. A game’s ruleset is dangerous because, in Sicart’s words, it “defines the action prior to its existence, and denies the importance of anything that was not determined before the act of play, in the system design of the game.”

In other words, games make us all fascists and communists; anarchists and tycoons; kleptocrats and ascetics, so we better hope that games are not as powerful as we once dreamed they might be.

And yet…

What makes our totalitarian game rules so slippery is that often the dynamics that emerge from these rules are actually at odds with the beliefs of their creators. For example, Will Wright, an atheist, began making Spore as a game about evolution but somehow eventually shipped a game about intelligent design. Monopoly started life as The Landlord’s Game, a board game meant to teach about the evils of capitalist landlords, who unfortunately ended up being a lot of fun to play. In his 2014 GDC talk on The Novelist, Kent Hudson described a poignant moment of crisis in the game’s development when he realized that the game’s rules had evolved into something that said the exact opposite of his own beliefs about marriage and parenthood. Basically, the death-of-the-author folks should have put down their Proust and gone down to the basement to see what video games their kids were playing.

In college, my dream was to make games about history, that made the past real in ways books never could. Thus, I started my career with my absolute dream job when I joined Firaxis to work on Civ 3. Five years later, when I shipped Civ 4, my old dream was dead (although, to be fair, a new one had started). Civilization was supposed to be a game about history but – despite my best efforts – many of the lessons it taught were somehow the opposite of what I actually believed: that revolutionary change could be controlled, that the orientation of a society flowed directly from its leader, that history was a story of continual, upward progress, and that “upward progress” could even be defined.

[iamapiratecupcake]

I personally despise ideologies because they inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world’s problems. One set of solutions means all other options are heretical, which means they must be controlled. Ideologues put ideas above people, which is the beginning of terror and oppression. People are more important than ideas. Of course, discouraging rigid thinking is not the only reason I make games, but it is the best answer I can give to [the] question. If I ever get to release my dream strategy game, this idea will be clearly be at the center of the design.

Soren Johnson

[nyugamecenter]

The rules that they see in front of them, also run in the player's head.

Soren Johnson, on transparency in board games, and how it can be useful to strategy games.

[martyrunyon]

By Soren Johnson

The following two articles form an interesting diptych on Plants vs. Zombies 2:

Owen Faraday slams the game because it “it exists primarily to wheedle you for money”

Michail Katkoff argues the opposite, describing it as “pretty much a paid game without the price tag”

In other words, the first author believes that the game is ruined by microtransactions while the second author believes that EA didn’t do nearly enough because it was “afraid to upset players.” Did EA ruin PvZ2 by going free-to-play? Or did it simply not go far enough? These two pieces seem to emerge from parallel dimensions.