Like movies, the design of games can often be reduced to a set of “building blocks”, various elements that you can combine to form the final product. It’s an abstract concept, but one that’s perfectly illustrated in this…card game.

Put together by Liselore Goedhart, “Game Seeds” is part of the Utrecht School of the Arts’ attempts to help budding game designers “bring new characters and game ideas to life”.

They’re just as useful for gamers themselves, however, breaking down the various components and styles that go into making the games we’re playing. Remember, knowing is half the battle!

Game Seeds card game. [Lizzy Wanders, via Boing Boing]

News reports frequently mention studies that indicate some benefit to playing video games, whether in cognition or critical thinking skills, or physical benefits like hand eye coordination or therapy. Gaynor incorporates some of those examples into his manifesto, which is that games must make the player think. It’s a bedrock design principle that will keep gamers from being an underserved constituency.

All media and genres of art have their schlock; Hollywood is a great example, so are commercialized works of fiction, paintings, you can come up with an example of high art and yard-sale garbage in all cases. But games seem to face a higher barrier to acceptance and legitimacy, both due to their origins and their nature. So it would seem to me that the obligations Gaynor describes for games are not only to gamers, but also to the medium as a whole.

An Obligtion [Fullbright, blog of Steve Gaynor, Jan. 23]

Video games by their nature rely on the input of the player to mean anything. The fact that you can fail at your entertainment is in some ways a barrier to entry for video games. But it’s also the medium’s defining characteristic, and our one inherent hook for engaging the player and making them important.

It’s our opportunity to make the player think. Not to encourage or invite players to in the way that challenging music, art or film might, but to absolutely require demonstrable logical reasoning from our audience. To immerse them in a world and motivate their progress through it with the promise of constantly evolving core interactions and intriguing fiction, then require them to engage their powers of visualization, abstract thinking and mental mapping to proceed. It’s good for the health of the player’s brain. I think of that as being meaningful and enriching entertainment.

This kind of on-the-fly problem solving is accomplished by activity in the player’s prefrontal cortex, employing fluid intelligence and working memory. One’s fluid intelligence decreases over their lifespan, making them less able to formulate new ways of thinking. However, some scientific and military studies have shown that engaging in interactive mental exercises that require us to make these kinds of connections can slow the decline of fluid intelligence, essentially keeping our brains younger and healthier as we age. They’re the kinds of mental challenges that video games can ably provide— creating and maintaining logical connections between new and abstract concepts and spaces to overcome obstacles— that might confer this benefit to players, along with their escapist fun.

Not all games work this way, certainly. As blockbuster, spectacle-focused rollercoaster games rise in popularity, we seem to see less of these sorts of challenge structures in gaming’s mainstream. When the game I’m playing doesn’t need me— when I can sleepwalk through it, when I can tune out and let it wash over me, when it doesn’t make me think— an opportunity has been wasted. Our work can be more than an empty waste of time for our players. We can entertain them while engaging their minds in ways beneficial to their cognitive wellbeing. I think that there is practically an obligation to do so, if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to creating interactive entertainment at all.

- Steve Gaynor

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Sundays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Matt Jones of the London-based design consultancy BERG, has unsuccessfuly nominated console games like Left 4 Dead and BioShock for three straight years in the Design Museum of London’s Designs of the Year exhibition. Writing for Edge Online, he says that games subordination of “scenery and backstory” to physics and gameplay make them, for him anyway, a form of architecture, and thus eligible for consideration in design awards, alongside physical examples of design like laptops or office buildings.

But he reasons that they are also rightfully considered media to be experienced like a film, a book or an album. And that too is owed to a feat of superior design. It’s just one not recognized, yet anyway, outside the games community.

Are Games Design? [Edge Online, Jan. 6]

I must admit to being a fairly hardcore ‘ludologist’ when it comes to appreciating games. The scenery and backstory come a very poor second to the physics, mechanics and ‘toyetics’ (as Gary Penn has dubbed it) of the world I get to play in. So as a result, for me, games really are frameworks for fun, rather than ‘interactive stories’.

I tend to see them as having much more in common with the approach of an architect or landscape designer in terms of shaping and creating flows, confluences and possibilities for enjoyment. Whether it’s Molyneux, Wright or another guru of gamespace, the language and argot used to describe what they are trying to design often leans heavily on that of architecture – and of course architects have often been involved in or crossed over into world-building, concept art development and even level design. As a result I really do think that critical appreciation and commentary from the world of architecture and design could be illuminating and progressive.

Another parallel with architectural criticism is that those versed in architecture can look at a drawing of a building plan and section, and be able to read it – allowing them to comment on the intention of the architects, and the possible qualities of the building without experiencing its constructed form.

Similarly, a seasoned gamer or game critic might be able to read a videogame in abstract very quickly – seeing patterns, references or even clichés in the mechanics and dynamics offered by its designers. But to a less familiar eye, games are hard to appreciate without playing them and experiencing the physics and laws of the world they present. Without such literacy in games, and without the prompting to simply play games, it’s little wonder that mainstream design critics tend to ignore their charms.

It might be quite an easy bridge to build between the lush three-dimensional worlds of leading console games to those of architecture. It’s perhaps easy to cast a more esoteric critical eye over the possibility-sculptures of god games. But I’d also argue that the same critical appreciation should be given to the elegant minimalism, the exuberant joy-giving and often beautifully crafted bottle universes of so-called casual games.

After all, one can see their analogue in the everyday objects – spoons, chairs, staplers, kettles – reified in design museums the world over for their immaculate balance, simplicity, deft detailing or just whacked-out joyfulness. Why should pocket calculators be put on a pedestal, and not Peggle?

- Matt Jones

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

For my picks, I went not for the best graphics, story or gameplay innovation, instead focusing on some of my favorite character designs from the past year. I considered games released in any territory in the past year, not just North American release. That includes two-year-old arcade games and Japan-only (for now) releases.

Read on for my favorite characters and costume choices for the year, with plenty of pictures to illustrate my point. Let me know your picks in the comments.

Muramasa The Demon Blade

Vanillaware’s Wii game might not have had the substance to match its excellent style, but the developer deserves kudos for delivering one of the best looking games of the year. It has done similarly spectacular visual work on games like Odin Sphere and GrimGrimoire for the PlayStation 2, but Muramasa: The Demon Blade gave the Wii some rock solid character designs.

Sure, Vanillaware might be pandering a bit, what with the big bottoms and other anatomical liberties, and they almost veer into cat-girl territory, but few games had such a homogeneous, well crafted set of characters, costumes and environments last year.

Tekken 6′s Zafina

I’m not a huge fan of the Tekken aesthetic, but Tekken 6′s Zafina was the best of the new additions to the Tekken 6 line up. And while I’m a fan of her standard outfit with its serpentine design cues and un-Tekken-like subtlety, it was her butterfly costume designed by Mutsumi Inomata that stood out as my favorite fighting game get up from 2009.

The addition of the horrendous Lars Alexandersson and Alisa Bosconovitch helps elevate Zafina’s style, but I’m not complaining.

Hikari no 4 Senshi: Final Fantasy Gaiden

No, Final Fantasy XIII isn’t on the list, but Nintendo DS series spin-off Hikari no 4 Senshi: Final Fantasy Gaiden is, despite only seeing a release in Japan in 2009. I love the color palette and cute, but not obscenely cute, character designs which mesh well with the DS’s low-fidelity graphics.

I mean, look at all those jobs!

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

I know, I know. Drake and Chloe? Aren’t they just wearing shirts, jeans and cargo pants? Yes, they are, but Uncharted 2′s character designs are brilliantly appropriate across the board. They may not be as ornate or flashy as some of the other choices on this list—or your own—but the realism of the character and costume design in Naughty Dog’s PlayStation 3 exclusive help to sell the believability of its cast. That they’re all modeled so beautifully from head to toe doesn’t hurt.

That Chloe and Elena look so attractive and that Lazarevic looks so evil doesn’t hurt either. The cast is sexy and strong when appropriate, not to mention believably human. And they all look good in black.

Bayonetta

She may be anatomically impossible, and I never thought I’d be into hirsute women, but PlatinumGames’ Bayonetta was my favorite character of 2009. I can’t say the same for the rest of the Bayonetta cast, but one look at PlatinumGames’ Flickr account shows that Bayonetta’s outfit and accessories were layered with loving detail.

Held by German firm International Forum Design, WiiSpray was one of 377 finalists in the prestigious awards, from a total 1,368 entires coming in from 24 countries. So for it to win one (it picked up a “product interface” gong) was pretty damn impressive!

So to WiiSpray’s creators, Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse: congratulations! Maybe the award is enough to convince somebody at Sega tha ta Jet Set Radio remake would be a good idea.

To see what WiiSpray looks like in action, you can watch the below vid.

» Wii Spray honered with iF design award [WiiSpray, via GameSpot]