Season 9 2018

Quality Assurance, or QA, does not mean you sit around playing games all day. At least, not for fun. But if you have patience, love experimentation, and find the right team, it can be an extremely rewarding job.

You would think that paying $60 for a game would be enough, but so many games these days ask for money with DLC, microtransactions, and yes, lootboxes. There's a reason for that.

Let's talk numbers: marketing, office space, dev tool licenses, voice actors, and more that goes into the average AAA game budget. Why do some games never turn a profit while others seem to magically make it work on the cheapest budget possible?

Why does the games industry seem to prefer lootboxes over other types of microtransactions nowadays? Why are they so easily manipulated to abuse players' agency? How can we make them better?

Legislating regulation around in-game purchases seems like a good idea, but let's proceed cautiously: the phrasing of such potential rulings could create situations that unfairly affect gamers themselves, not just publishers.

Many video games offer you the chance to make “good” or “bad” choices, but often times these choices lack weight; you as a player aren’t emotionally attached to the circumstances, the causes, or the outcomes. Nier: Automata, however, lets players truly empathize with others in a crucial end-game choice.

Why does a small, incremental increase in a stat sometimes feel like an overpowered boost? How can we use break points to improve the player's experience? Guest art by Allison Utterback! (No, not THAT Allison, but a very awesome Allison nonethless.)

Academic research in games should be challenging our need for commonly accepted principles like Skinner boxes or certain narrative structures. Historically it tends to be focused on finding only certain types of quantifiable data, which can be distracting from the medium's overall progress.

Sometimes bad design is created intentionally, to cover up a flaw in the system instead of fixing it. Using cities like Seattle and London as examples, we examine how architecture is designed to remove homeless people from the public eye without actually helping them.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus offers up one of the most honest depictions and criticisms of Nazism and bigotry in modern mainstream games, and part of that is due to its "b"-game-like nature--similar to b-movies that transgress the standards of their time.

The Assassin's Creed Origins team recently added a non-violent exploration mode to their game coupled with an educational voiceover narrating facts about ancient Egypt. How could we improve on this museum-like experience.

Game designers must decide how to segment and present choices so that the player isn't overwhelmed. From character creation to strategy, there's a lot of complexity to the user experience.

Say hello to Matt Krol, our new narrator! Today we're talking about about that cursed buzzword "blockchain" that's appeared on the fringes of the game industry within the past year, most infamously Cryptokitties. How could blockchain tech actually provide good game design value?

Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. The first 500 people to sign up at this link get their first 2 months for free: http://skl.sh//extracredits Why do team-based video games like Overwatch seem to struggle with judging team cooperation and not just individual skill? The answer, surprisingly, comes from chess.

These games are definitely perfect...ly suited to expanding your game design knowledge, even if they have some flaws here and there. It's another edition of "extra" game reviews: Games You Might Not Have Tried!

Procedurally generated content seems like a really appealing route for a lot of indie developers--it's what AAA game studios are doing, and it seems to protect game balance! But often times it's worth the extra effort to craft a few handmade pieces, even at the risk of "breaking" the game.

E-sports scholarships are becoming slowly more commonplace, but they have inherited some of the bad qualities of other college sports, as well as unique issues like the usually short lifespans of video games themselves. Should you pursue an esports career?

Let's examine the elements that make up "game writing." Plot, characters, and lore all have to be balanced depending on the type of game you're making--knowing what to cut from your story bible is just as important as knowing what to keep.

Let's compare the RNG design in Hearthstone and Slay the Spire and figure out how we can design RNG for strategic difficulty without veering into completely frustrating players.

Today we're talking about a Japanese word "ma" and how it applies to game design. Incorporating rest, space, and emptiness can make the rest of the gameplay, action, and narrative stand out.

Games can help us heal, emotionally as well as physically. We need to do more research on their positive impacts and how we can maximize the emotional value of commercial games, not just on the harmful effects of gaming disorders.

Having 500+ hours logged on a particular game or franchise shouldn't be a job requirement to work on that particular game or franchise--in fact, by working with folks who aren't already "super-fans" of your game, you'll end up making better creative design decisions.

We can learn a lot from Steam's player numbers about why certain games, like PUBG and Paladins, continue to be popular on Steam, as well as why niche driving simulators are doing better than adventure games.

Gestalt design principles--how we understand groups of objects as a whole unit via symmetry, proximity, closure, and more--is a powerful tool in game design to quickly and effectively communicate visual information to the player.

How can we use empathy, intuition, and other types of design vectors to create interesting gameplay besides the most popular mechanics--which are based in reflex and logic challenges?

Check out some new games to play this month!

The design of multiplayer games means that, in most cases, half the playerbase is losing games at any given time. However, that shouldn't mean that half the playerbase is miserable or is unable to have fun. You can still have fun learning how to be a better team leader and practicing mechanical skills--which is important for combatting toxicity in multiplayer games.

Every developer should be taking full advantage of the visual and interactive mechanics in games to deliver extra layers of meaning without having to do all game storytelling through text. And players can enhance the depth of their gaming experiences by paying attention to possible metaphors that exist!

Let's look at how, in 2005, World of Warcraft accidentally provided a virtual simulation of a pandemic that academics have been studying in papers since.

From internet drama stories of Crusader Kings 2 to the secret rooms in Enter the Gungeon, there is value in designing really cool gameplay and story experiences that not all of your players will necessarily get to experience (at least, not immediately). Stoke imagination and wonder by including exciting details that players can enjoy experiencing, even if only vicariously through shared transmedia knowledge.

A good new player experience consists of three pieces: the hook, the tutorial, and the reward. Spider-Man (2018) is an example that gets this right, by giving players an amazing experience right off the bat and not waiting until the second act.

Guest writer Evan Hill (a level designer from Naughty Dog) talks about creating surprises--expectation gaps--in your game, and why adhering to a "lifelike" experience isn't the same as preserving the player's sense of immersion.

Happy Halloween! Today a whole bunch of the Extra Credits folks are here with some spooky scary skele-games for you to try!

Adding streaming-friendly features to your game can increase its marketability, but they have to be as well-thought out as the rest of the gameplay mechanics that cater directly to players.

Context sensitive game design is often the key difference between a good tutorial, and a condescending, painfully obvious and frustrating tutorial.

The GDPR stands for the “General Data Protection Regulation.” It’s a European regulation that became effective in May 2018, designed to overhaul the way we think about data and data privacy--even internationally--especially when it comes to the privacy of your game-playing data.

Happy 400th episode Extra Credits! Consider taking some time today to play a game you love. YOU matter, so, take care of yourself!

Growing up, MJ fought non-stop with their brother--until they discovered Pokemon Stadium together. It would not only change their own life, but that of their entire family, for years to come.

High school English teacher Patrick wondered how he could connect better with his students--for one in particular who kept to herself, she just needed someone to let her know that it was OK to talk about video games in the classroom.