When Borrowing Mechanics is a Bad Idea…

Poya Manouchehri 4:22 pm on November 4, 2011 Counting comments...

This is something I posted on my blog a while ago and since I haven’t had too much time to write, I thought I might just cross-post it here. I warn that this is a little incoherent but I think there is a point in it somewhere…

I recently bought a new laptop which is pretty decent for gaming. Ignoring the fact that I had to (soon after getting it) send it for repair, I got a chance to install StarCraft 2 and been playing quite a bit. I then started watching some actual StarCraft tournaments and found it quite fascinating. I didn’t quite realize how big the StarCraft e-sport scene really is; with proper commentators and large live audiences. Following one of these commentators, I found a great game review YouTube channel. It’s called Extremes game demo. Especially regarding the actions that are present at the bottom of the household UI…when I watched friends play the game, they hardly read what was there and make informed decisions. Rather they’d be clicking as many things as they could, as fast as they could. Obviously if the game is trying to encourage the player to think about a certain concept, the mechanics of the game needs to not only allow for that thinking and decision making to happen, but encourage it.

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