Gamasutra Member Blogs: From Interaction To Chords

Showcasing highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our weblog writers examine the three-chord trope, interaction types, and multiplayer difficulty.. Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.) We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. Here are the top member blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Member Blogs - End of 2009: Three Chords and The Truth (Stephen Chin) What does three-chord rock have to do with trends in the video game industry? In this blog post, Stephen Chin relates the cyclical emergence and decline of three-chord rock to the ongoing back-and-forth of hardcore and casual, game pack-ins, console and PC, indie and mainstream, and more. For his effort, he will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - Difficulty Setting in Multiplayer Games: Can it be done? (Enrique Dryere) Difficulty settings are nearly ubiquitous in single-player games, but they are almost unheard of in multiplayer games -- the variability of challenge there tends to have more to do with the skill of a player's opponents. Here, Enrique Dryere considers how one might implement more intrinsic systems. - Perception Killed the A* (A Star) (Blake Nicholas) Complexity and skill aren't the best metrics to identify the most convincing artificial intelligence, argues Blake Nicholas -- a less-skilled but more believable AI is preferable to one that exhibits robotic precision. Here, he considers ways to take advantage of that. - Four Categories of Interaction (Altug Isigan) Gamasutra bloggers have frequently examined and reexamined classifications of player types, but here Altug Isigan attempts to classify interactions as they relate to narrative structure, identifying events, story persons, storytelling, and narrative situations. - The Fallacy of Choice (Justin Keverne) Depending on your perspective, Uncharted 2 is either helped or harmed by its rigid linearity -- but in this blog post, Justin Keverne argues that the game's lack of any meaningful player choice is important not for traditionally qualitative reasons but because it necessarily evokes the proper qualities from its protagonist.