Decided Not to Read Much of the Game Design Reader

Last night after I posted that I was going to read the "869" page The Game Design Reader, I said to myself something like, "IT'S 869 PAGES?!!"

And today I received my copy of Schell's The Art of Game Design (464 pages), and I read its intro bits; it's so well written! It makes Rules of Play seem so boring. Schell is both funnier and a better writer. (This might be because he was a comedian and a writer.)

But back to the Game Design Reader. It just seems so redundant. Why read the "Rules of Play Anthology" after reading Rules of Play? Yeeeh, I can't think of an answer. So I'm just going to look for the very interesting essays in the book I'm not going to read, and move on to Schell.

In gaming news, today I tried the Total War: Shogun 2 demo (yes, I consider this news), and I wasn't pleased with the frame rate. On "High" settings the game dipped under 30 fps when there were thousands of troops and a lot of terrain onscreen, and I had already turned the resolution down to 1,200 X 950-ish. So, I have decided not to get Creative Assembly's best game until I get a new PC, which will probably be in 2015. Although it's very possible that I won't get the game period. Why? Well, in short it is because I suspect that the game is actually mind-numbingly boring.

No seriously! I suspect that it's mostly boring; the whole point of a Total War game is to build up to the epic battles, battles that are "really close" and that will decide the fate of a group, a province, Japan, Earth. But in between the epic moments is a lot of humdrum -- i.e. managing the province or empire, moving people around, making and breaking treaties. And because most of the game is humdrum, what the player gets is a mind-numbing boredness.

I'm going to play lots of Empire: Total War to test my theory.