A Chat & New Format with Keith Burgun
Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 3:18PM
Featuring Keith Burgun, lead designer at Dinofarm Games, makers of 100 Rogues and the upcoming AURO. He wrote the book "Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games", and he's a contributing editor at Gamasutra and his own blog, keithburgun.com.
This is a new format for visual podcasts. I'm really looking for feedback on this.
- Turn up your sound or put on headphones.
- Click "Start Prezi"
- Click on the "full screen" button on the bottom right.
I plan on making a youtube video out of the presentation. However, I'm most interested in knowing if you find the interactivity of the presentation valuable. I want to know if you interacted with the presentation and information more freely by exploring around the slides at your own pace. I don't think there's too much extra content in this presentation, but I may add more in the next few days.
Enjoy!
Reader Comments (3)
Just finished watching/listening! :D I found that the visuals helped me focus a bit more, but also made it less portable, or restricted my options about when and where to listen. I didn't make use of the interactivity - to me, a YouTube video would have been the same. Though the presentation does zoom in nicely for fullscreen without taking up a lot of bandwidth! ;)
My overall views: I loved the discussion and it was full of super-interesting points that I would like to hear more about, but as I mentioned on Twitter, I prefer to listen to podcasts while I'm working so the interactive format didn't really appeal to me. I didn't actually manage to get it to work though so take that for what it's worth!
Interesting point you make about Quick Time Events. I'm personally not a fan of them, but I'd never considered them in the way you describe. Perhaps the reason they seem so banal is that they exist in this little bubble where all other dynamic elements of the game are suddenly disregarded, and the challenge is boiled down to a very basic binary state resulting in fail/succeed. I've yet to see a QTE where any other nuance was permitted.
Keith raised the issue of whether timing matters and you said it does matter, but usually no more than 'if you wait too long then you fail'. There is no meaningful choice there; only reaction time.
I'm not saying this is an invalid type of challenge (entire games are built around this idea) but they do seem to be at odds with - or even separate to - the other parts of the game they usually sit within.
Feedback on the visual podcast. First, it's a great idea.
my problem: I finished reading the visual content way before the audio content ended. Having finished the visual content, I wanted to skip to the next part (visual content being more stimulating than auditory) but of course that's the wrong thing to do because then I would miss some of the podcast. It felt akward and I didnt like having to wait for the audio to catch up.