The gaming think tank “Project Horseshoe” solve in their own words “Game Design’s Toughest Problems”. In an outline of a group discussion they held on a 2006 gaming conference they write on “the creation of radically new game experiences”.
“In an effort to bring experiences generated by games much further then they have gone today we considered a variety of new or different approaches to game design; approaches which are not currently well understood within game design circles. By presenting these approaches we hope to enable further discussion in an effort to expand the tools available today.”
They come up with digital and thinking tools accompanied by game examples that cover new possibilites for the creation of new game experiences. One approach is the reducion or aggregation of significant senseble information to build new experience structures. Based on the fact that your surroundings can always be read in more than one perspective.
“There is a social bandwidth of information present in our lives that normally isn’t included in a game. By understanding what these are and finding ways to include them, we can make our games richer interpersonal experiences.”
Another approach ist the Temporal Emotion Engine: it “‘reads’ the emotional content of a scene, based on generic parameters like rapidity of user input or density of movement and characters in a scene, as well as custom-designed input factors which can be scripted by the developers using the tool.” Such an approach could make clever use for kind of tools, like hiding features, that are not suitable for non-power users.
