My project for this coming semester involves developing a game for software development. It is called Devcathlon and it is focused on using game mechanics to improve the health of a project and to motivate programmers.
Through my research on game design I found this informative lecture on game design by Will Wright. In it he incorporates ideas from the fields of psychology, biology, computer science, and physics into his idea of good game design. A game designer needs to understand the mind of a player, giving him many possibilities of success. A designer should avoid having an optimum path to success and instead allow players to use different, viable strategies to reach their goals. Playing a game is very much a learning process so a designer should use successes and failures to teach players how to play. Each learning tier should build up on the one before. In games where players have to interact with each other, players can find themselves grouping together in order to achieve goals that they couldn't accomplish individually. In these groups specialization usually occurs, with some individuals more skilled than others at certain tasks. A designer usually must find a balance between competition and cooperation. He must give the player reasons for cooperating and reasons for doing their best.
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