Selling a videogame idea on Kickstarter is a test of any studio’s marketing ability. But once a project is funded, the finished product is most backers’ main concern. UnSubject decided to look through how many videogame Kickstarters have delivered a final game. The answer so far: about a third.  It’s obviously too soon to tell if this trend holds true for 2012′s titles, but it does point to an issue that backers should think about seriously. Only 5 Kickstarted video game projects have been officially halted, but there are a lot of projects that stop providing updates or make announcements that the developers…

The holidays and traditional gift-giving occasions are coming up, and soon we’ll be caught up in listing all the things we want. As a child, saving up money to buy things was one of my passions in life; getting stuff was a way to show I fit in with society and had taste. I still get excited about new games, but they aren’t my life’s purpose anymore. Inside the games themselves, it’s not the collecting that’s fun, but exploring an experience constructed by multiple artists. Richard Clark at Gamechurch uses collectibles in Assassin’s Creed to show how the impulse to accrue goods…

The game Create claims to measure player creativity and reward you for it. But according to Eddy Léja-Six, this game measures creativity by looking at how many of the available tools players use in a given level.  The game features special challenges called “Create Chains”: the player is rewarded for using a specific set of tools in a given level. Apparently, the ambition of Create Chains is to give players many opportunities to be creative, and thus get them to know the available options better. These options are quite comparable to those of a level editor, but they are entirely built-in and use…

Paige Johnson is always looking for unusual playground motifs at her blog Playscapes. This time she’s found turtles in playground design around the world. The above picture comes from Mongolia; below is a turtle fountain from South Korea. Maybe turtles’ general harmlessness makes them a good companion for children. 

In Indie Game: The Movie, several developers mention how their intended audience is themselves. Nabokov also claimed, “I write for myself in multiplicate.”  Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves starts off with the dedication, “This is not for you.” The developer of the protest game In a Permanent Save State addresses the issue of audience when Free Tea With Purchase asked about the audience for his own game, which decries iPhone production methods while being played on an iPhone: As for ethics of being a game designer, the main thing I always tell myself everyday when it’s pencil to paper is ‘cater to…

In an effort to attract more customers, Star Wars: The Old Republic went free-to-play last week. Wired’s Andrew Groen argues that the MMORPG’s game’s design is obsolete; constantly making new content for an MMO is too expensive. In my opinion, it’s not just too expensive, but relies too much on what should effectively be a single-player experience. An MMO’s core gameplay should incorporate other players, not isolate you from them. EVE Online is an interesting game because of how the decisions other players make affect the economy. There isn’t more content to make to keep players coming back.  EVE Online relies heavily…

If you’ve used an instant messaging client, you’ve probably run across chatbots who can talk about almost anything with a weird combination of factoids and social failure. One app for iOS presents a twitter-searching chatbot as your boyfriend, resulting in weird and hilarious conversations. Mattie Brice at the Border House elucidates the attraction of having a conversation in a game: In Boyfriend Maker, there is no ‘correct.’ The object of the game is to just talk, and you gain money and points by keeping the conversation alive. The only way to do better is to pay for more points, and that…

If you look around in Portal, you can see the graffiti from previous “test subjects” warning you not to trust GLaDOS. While Portal‘s treatment of environmental storytelling is pretty simple, the upcoming game Gone Home takes these aspects of narrative design and zeros in on it. The first-person exploration game by the Fullbright Company lets players explore a family home from 1995. Do you remember the 90s? When a cordless phone was the hot new technology and Sailor Moon was all the rage? My parents had a big collection of movies they’d taped, and I made an alphabetized list of them as a chore.…