Major publishers and developers keep churning out game after game, without any innovation in gameplay or content. And, though we gamers keep paying them our hard earned cash, we keep wondering how many innovative and revolutionary ideas had to be sacrificed on the altar of the so-called “market-oriented design”. There must have been a large number of lost chances for change over the past two decades, or else computer games would be the driving force of many economies, we think…and we would probably be right. But why don’t the big boys in the industry get the point? Why don’t they give us revolutionary games like they did in the past?

In this series of articles I will discuss the reasons for the lack of creativity in design in the game industry from a developer’s point of view…

This is a post-mortem for an RPG game production in Iran where I was the designer and producer. Unfortunately, it suffered from under-budgeting and untimely payments from our funders, and ended up dying on our hard-disks, never reaching customers. As a first, in my country Iran, I believe there is some learning value in publishing this post-mortem, and I have decided to publish it...

  These days “Immersion” seems to be the big buzz-word for marketing departments. Marketing, being hype-driven as it is, tends to stick that “immersive gameplay” label on every single game retail box, console and demo video they release. On a deeper level, everyone in game development seems to agree that “immersion” is an important achievement, if not the ultimate goal of playing games. Immersion makes players feel passionately about a game and crave for more of the same.

Unfortunately, many game designers have failed to analyze the constituents of immersion, and have treated the concept as if it were magical; impenetrable to analysis! In this article, I will try to explore what immersive gameplay is, and how the state of immersion can be created…