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#rimworld#tynansylvester#apophenia

RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 54 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Tynan Sylvester, creator of RimWorld
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 7 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

284K views7 years ago2 recommendations

Game developmentSoftware designGame designGame programming

Tynan Sylvester explains how framing RimWorld as a story generator rather than a game unlocked unique mechanics and player experiences.

In this 2017 GDC session, RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester looks at how Ludeon Studios defined RimWorld not as a game, but as a story generator, and how forcing the team into this frame of mind opened up entirely new mechanisms for creating compelling play. Register for GDC: ubm.io/2yWXW38 Join the GDC mailing list: gdconf.com/subscribe Follow GDC on Twitter: twitter.com/Official_GDC GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Strongly recommended for understanding how RimWorld was designed, specifically regarding the simulator effect, apophenia, and emergent narrative.

ecdavison Hacker News • Recommends

On “Citybound – A city building game using actor-based distributed simulation”

It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: link to this video Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.
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jamesharton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Games that emphasize emergent narrative”

Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of player-provided narrative reasoning. link to this video
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DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Reverse engineering course”

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulato…
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DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Magnasanti – The largest and most terrible city of SimCity”

You can check out the original SimCity Classic source code here, which I cleaned up, refactored and renamed for consistency and readability, documented, and translated to C++, but it still retains the original behavior and intent: link This is also an earlier version which that code was derived from, that I started from the Mac version, ported to Unix, cleaned up and translated old C and 68k assembly to ANSI C, and made a user interface with the TCL/Tk scripting language and X11 GUI toolkit: link The one little "modernization" I made to the simulation was to copy the radar dish tile animation from the airport, and make it individually placeable as a "high speed network connection" that l…
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DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Striking the Right Balance: Over-Engineering vs. Under-Engineering Software”

Earlier I wrote about the "Simulator Effect" aka "apophenia", and "Reverse Over Engineering": link DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what g…
View on Hacker News

DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Citybound: City building game, microscopic models to vividly simulate organism”

Trying to simulate every microscopic detail doesn't necessarily translate to a fun game (or even a realistic simulation). After working with Will on SimCity and The Sims, I've written about what he calls "the simulator effect" aka apophenia (delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations), and what I call "Reverse Over-Engineering": link DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shou…
View on Hacker News

DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Magical systems thinking”

Will Wright credits Jay Forrester for inspiring him to simulate a city on the computer: link >How did the leap from Raid's world editor, to SimCity with its urban design theories, happen? >WW: First, it was just a toy for me. I was just making my editor more and more elaborate. I thought it would be cool to have the world come to life. So I started researching books on urban dynamics, and traffic, and things like that. I came across the work of Jay Forrester, who was kind of the father of system dynamics. He was actually one of the first people I found that actually simulated a city on a computer. Except in his simulation, there was no map; it was just numbers. It was like population level…
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DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently”

link >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for gam…
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DonHopkinson Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Communist Apple II and Fourteen Years of Not Knowing What You're Testing”

"Reverse Over Engineering" is a great thing: Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update): link link DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a de…
View on Hacker News