I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
Discord
Johnnemann

typing games are a genre that's being renewed and explored - from their origins as learning tools they're moving into a more traditional challenge role - i.e. without the pedagogical component, just a way to provide a mastery barrier to the player.

But, other pedagogical game designs haven't made that leap - no one is solving math problems to get ammo, or word problems to progress in adventure games. Is it because mastery of difficult button combos/dexterity is already an accepted part of game design, e.g. fighting games? Is it because more people played Mavis Beacon growing up than Math Blaster or Search for the Secret Stone? Or is it just that math sucks and isn't ever fun?


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @johnnemann's post:

I think math does suck in the form you normally see it, it also doesn't have a very satisfying difficulty curve depending on how you scale it. I remember doing lightning-speed mental math on Dr. Kawashima on the DS and it was mostly frustrating when I made a writing error or something, the challenges would repeat a lot too (obviously). Typing is something that feels like it exercises two different parts of the brain at once and the dexterity challenge is spread out over a longer period of time (rather than seeing how fast you can hit 5 instead of 6 on the numpad).

Word problems I think are different - we do kind of have an amazing era of word games on mobile right now and a lot of people are super into cryptics. But I think they don't need to be carried by another genre and so stand alone. You wouldn't sit down to do a daily typing challenge (although now I kind of want to make that) so it gets embedded in a game, whereas you'd happily sit down every day to just do a word puzzle on its own.

I think math stuff is best expressed through logic games, which test math-y parts of the brain but aren't stereotypically what we think of when we hear the word 'math'. I play Slitherlink games daily at the moment and it feels intensely satisfying, I need to write about them sometime. That feels like it stretches the same part of my brain. But again, it doesn't need integrating anywhere else (although I would love to make a Slitherlink-enhanced game sometime).

edit: i hope you appreciate me writing math here rather than maths

Haha, I do appreciate that! Thanks for localizing.

I think you've probably hit upon it, and the fact that there's basically no ability to develop mastery of maths in a game context. There's no good difficulty curve there.

I also think you're right with word games, although actually what I meant with "word problems" was a specific genre of (American?) exercises that put maths into a story format and expect students to extract the necessary information and apply the correct operations - the infamous example is "two trains traveling towards each other at different speeds, when do their paths cross". I used to play computer games in school that relied heavily on that sort of construction to provide a veneer over the educational content (and also because solving those problems was thought to demonstrate important skills with applied maths).

Oh yeah that's a good point. I could imagine that being quite interesting actually, if it was testing your ability not so much to do the maths (maybe you even have a calculator in-game) but to break the situation down into the maths that needs to be done. Like being the voice in the spy's ear who is figuring out how much time they have before the train hits the end of the broken bridge or whatever.

Typing is closer to a pure dexterity challenge with known good implementations (just copy Typing of the Dead etc), math and word problems are more like puzzles ("boring", says market dogma, also requires creative elbow grease and possibly even design R&D to make novel and/or high quality enough to be interesting, "too high risk" says market dogma).

Unless you're talking about math problems as in, timing based solving of simple arithmetic, in which case I'd guess the market answer is just "that's more boring and nerdy than typing a word"