Koster and Emotion

So, Koster and Bateman are having a friendly non-conversation on their respective sites.

I'm interested because they're talking about Koster's theory, which is similar to mine in most respects. But, you know, I'm just about the only commenter on their posts, which makes me feel very nervous. There should be dozens of designers and would-be designers reading and posting - both Koster and Bateman have written well-respected books on game design. Bloglines shows them as being astonishingly non-popular, with no more subscribers than me.

I don't know what's going on - maybe they're just terrifically bad at getting people to notice their blog. But since it makes me uncomfortable, I'm not going to start up a conversation in their commentary.

Here is one of Koster's most recent posts. You can read the post, if you like, but my interest is in the comments, where it's just me and Koster.

I'm big on emotion. Koster says he just kind of takes it for granted because it's obvious.

Obvious or not, it is an integral part of making any game design - or, in fact, any kind of design at all. What the player has invested in a given system will determine what kind of depth and detail he will want out of that system.

For example, Machine City has a lot of side information you can get. People who enjoy the genre, people who like RPGs - these people will want to read that information and will have an almost unlimited capacity for it, paced properly. On the other hand, a lot of players don't like that sort of thing, and will be irritated and bored if I force it on them.

This is one of the core tenets of Pattern Adaptation Control. You want to use patterns which affect the player strongly, and to do that you need to measure what kind of play they like.

As you can see, my whole approach orbits around emotion and interest.

But I don't think I'll clutter up their commentary with posts of this type. After all, they have no investment in me or my ideas, so they are unlikely to have much interest in reading them.