Bibliography time!

Books

Griffith, C. 2009, Real-world Flash game development: How to follow best practives and keep your sanity, Focus Press: Oxford.

Steed, P. 2002, Animating real-time game characters, Charles River Media: Hingham (Ma).

Contribution to Books

Barrett, K., Harley, J., Hilmer, R., Posner, D., Snyder, G., Wu, D., 2003, Pseudo Interactive’s Cel Damage, Grossman, A., Post-mortems from Game Developer: Insights from the Developers of Unreal Tournament, Black & White, Age of Empire, and Other Top-Selling Games, San Francisco, CA, pp 41-50.

Caillois, R., 1962, The Definition of Play: The Classification of Games, Salen, K., The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, pp 122-155

Articles

Stevens, C., 2004. Custom-build your own flash game: dip a toe into the ocean of Flash possibilities--without getting out of your depth.(flash games). , Internet Magazine, Vol. 118, pp 72.

Chun, R., 2004. Design Simple Flash Games. , Macworld, Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp 62-65.

I hope I'm not a Vidiot!

Another article from Costikyan this week, discussing the importance of games designers drawing innovation from non electrical games, as to widen their creativity.

Vidiot - Someone who's sole understanding of video games comes from them alone.

Basing your whole knowledge of games on video games severely limits a games designers imagination, and the resources for the games designer to draw upon for inspiration and problem solving will be restricted.
A key part of playing boardgames is the communication and debate that it creates between the players, the interaction between players is one of the main reasons that people choose to play boardgames rather than video games. It is important that as games designers, we try to incorporate this interaction into our designs to make a more enjoyable and interactive experience.
Tabletop games promote a business model of 'sell the parts and pieces of the game' rather than the game itself, this is also something that games designers need to look at, as tabletop games tend to offer expansions and a wide variety of choices for the player, video games only offer the player one choice and expansions to video games are only now becoming more mainstream.
RTS games have a lot that games designers should draw on for inspiration, rather than the player purely interacting with what's in front of their eyes, the conflict and struggle within the game tends to be a larger focus for the player than actually playing it.
Sci-fi and fantasy boardgames have a habit of being a too complex branch of wargaming, this is an important lesson for games designers to learn, try not to over-complicate games but still try to make them as in depth as fantasy boardgames are.

Summary
People don't understand that boardgames can be relative to video game design and can learn from what does and doesn't work in them.
People restrict their ideas to what they play - creates similar games, this leads to a stale games market and dissatisfied players.
It is a current trend that innovation is led by technology rather than creativity in today's game design.

Design Tools

Blog post 5

This week I have analysed two articles, 'Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design - A PopCap Case Study' by Marcos venturelli and 'Formal Abstract Design Tools' by Doug Church. Both of the articles discuss the vocabulary involved in games design and the thought process of designing, Venturelli focuses on the emerging 'Casual Game' market and Church discusses games design in general.





Doug Church's Article
In Church's article he discusses key design tools that are very important and interesting - these are 'Percievable Consequence,' 'Intention' and 'Story.'

Perceivable Consequence
Perceivable Consequence is the player's understanding that their actions will effect how they play the game and it's outcomes. An example of this would be in a platformer, when the player comes across a hole that they must clear they realise that they must press the jump button to clear the hole, otherwise they will fall into it and die - to put it simply, perceivable consequence is realising how the game works and what dangers there are.

As a designer, we need to think about perceivable consequence, we need to ensure that the player knows that every action they take will have a consequence, whether it be good or bad, for example, as a gamer you should know that falling down a hole is a bad thing but that is because the designer makes it so. It is due to this that 'Perceivable consequence' is a crucial design tool.

Intention
Intention is very closely linked to Percievable Consequence, intention is when the player plans and thinks about their actions and the outcomes of these actions, therfore planning how to overcome obstacles, etc. Using the same example as for Percievable Consequence, the player knows that they will die if they fall down the hole and so, they plan to jump over and pass this obstacle.

As a games designer, it is important that we think about intention and implement it in our designs, although ultimately it is the player that makes their own intention. As designers we give the player choices on how to use their intentions.

Story
Story is the narrative thread of the game. Whether the story is driven forward by the designer and the player progresses along a pre-determined path or the player has more influence over the story, the story is the main thing that drives the game forward and gives the player a purpose to play.



Marcos Venturelli's Article
Venturelli's article discusses PopCap, and generally talks about aspects of casual games and casual games developers. PopCap is a well renowned casual game developer and so is the ideal focus for this article, from the article there are two key tools that we can take, 'Pacing' and 'Possibilty.'

Pacing
Pacing is the speed of progression and flow in the game, and how the game is affected as a result. The easiest way to describe pacing is that casual games have a fast pace and more mainstream games have a slower pace. In casual games, there is little story and very few choices for the player to make and as a result casual games are appealing as they are very fast paced, making the player make quick decisions that increases the tension and thus makes them more fun. In more mainstream games, this wouldn't work as the story and planning would be lost, defeating the purpose of designing a detailed and in-depth game.

Possibility
Possibilty is the number of options that are available to the player, the more options available, the slower the game progresses. Both tools are very closely linked and as a result casual games have very few possibilties to ensure a fast paced game. With more possibilities the player has a lot more choices to make and so spends a lot more time thinking about these choices, theerfore the pacing of the game is ultimately slowed down.

Pacing and Possibility
As designers it is our duty to find the right balance between pacing and possibility when designing a game, this can be affected by genre and other aspects, but ultimately once we find the balance we find the type of game we want to create and then we use these tools to form the basis of the experience the player has when playing our game.

Board Game Iteration

Blog post 4

In the first week of the course I designed a board game centred around a zombie apocalypse, where players had to be the first to get to the evac zone and escape the apocalypse. The game is a basic board game where the player rolls a dice to move across the spaces to reach the end.

To make the game more interesting there were spaces where the player could pick up cards that would either be beneficial or detrimental to player progres; for example, picking up a card with a chainsaw would move the player forward 3 spaces whereas a card with a horde on it would force the player to retreat a space.
I also added in a combat aspect to the game to make it more interesting, if two or more players landed on the same square, they could decide to work together to progress faster or they could fight and one of the players would either be forced back a space or made to miss a turn.

When playing the game it became apparent very quickly that there were some problems with the game. The first problem was that with only one six-sided dice gameplay was slow as each player could not move very far forward and they were always within a square or two of each other, which meant there was no real sense of competition. The second problem was that there weren't many cards on the board so for the majority of the game the players progressed very slowly, one space at a time. The last problem that I found with the game was that the combat system wasn't very well designed so the players were constantly getting into conflict and failing to progress.

This week (week 3) I had to review these problems and try to improve the game. The first thing I improved was the board layout, I made more spaces and doubled the number of card spaces so that players could land on a card almost every turn to make progression faster and more enjoyable. I also added in spaces with 'abandoned buildings' that the player could be forced into if they got a bad result on a dice throw, these buildings could also either be beneficial or detrimental to player progression.

To make player progression faster and more competitive, I added in a second six-sided dice which meant that players had the ability to progress much further than each other, depending on the roll of the die. And the final improvement that needed to be made was the combat system. I decided to change it to a similar system to that of the combat system in 'Risk,' but instead of the players fighting each other they would have to fight a horde of zombies which would determine progression for that turn.

When I played through the game again with these modifications, it was immediately clear that they made it more enjoyable. The pacing of the game was made a lot faster by the use of two die and the extra card spaces added. The combat system has been improved significantly but it still doesn't work properly and will need more iteration before it works successfully with the rest of the game.

The paidea/ludus analysis

Blog post number 3

Hello again,
Today's critical games analysis lecture was centred around what makes a game and how we define them.
There are several ways to define a game and I have been set the task of analysing a couple of games using some of these definitions.

I must fierst talk about what the games offer in terms of paidea (effectively 'play' for pleasure) and ludus (more constrained by rules, with a clear outcome(e.g. winning)).

I will then analyse what each game conforms to in terms of Agon (competition); Alea (chance/randomness), Ilinx (movement) and Mimicry (simulation, make believe, role-play).

The first game that I will analyse is 'Dead Rising 2'
The premise of the game is your player is trapped in a quarantined shopping centre with thousands of zombies and the military won't arrive for 3 days. the game has various missions and side mission, varying from obtaining zombrex(zombie antidote) for your infected daughter, to saving random survivors that you find on your travels, to trying to clear your name of any involvement you had with the zombie outbreak. These 'objectives' place the game under the heading of ludus, however, one of the main attractions of Dead Rising 2, and its predecessor, is the inventive way you can kill zombies.
The player can use practically every object imaginable to kill zombies, for example mowing down a huge horde of zombies with a little pink tricycle or hiding out in a restaurant throwing plates at any zombie that dares get close enough. If the player wishes he/she could just spend the entire time until the military arrives killing zombies, as long as a couple of the most important missions are completed. The ability to run around in a sandbox environment with unlimited weapons and unlimited zombies offers the player the ability to play the game as paidea instead of ludus.

The second game I have chosen to analyse is 'Fallout 3'
'Fallout' is a game set in a post apocalyptic future where nuclear warfare has destroyed the earth and the last few survivors of humanity struggle to survive everyday, facing horrific foes like towering super mutants or feral ghouls and fighting off bandit attacks and the last remnants of a government that wishes to 'purge the wasteland.' Like with 'Dead Rising,' the game falls into both categories of paidea and ludus. The game has an almost infinite list of quests and tasks for the player to complete, along with hundreds of different items to collect. If the player wants to play the game like this they can spend upwards of 60hours to complete the game, not including the DLC, the game has a karma characterisation that adds to the ludus style of play that is influenced by the actions the player takes and governs what missions are available to the player and what allies they can make. On the other hand, if the player just wants to have some fun (the paidea play through) they can just complete the core storyline quests and spend the rest of their time roaming the wasteland, looking for fights and collecting weapons and armour.

Both games have strong elements of paidea and ludus styles of play and I believe that every game has, or should have, both. Without the element of ludus, the game quickly loses meaning and there is no lasting appeal for the gamer, and at the same time, without the element of paidea, the game will not be enjoyable for long and it is unlikely that the player will lose interest quickly or only play the game once.


Agon, Alea, Ilinx, Mimicry
As well as paidea and ludus, games also fall into categories of Agon (competition); Alea (chance/randomness), Ilinx (movement) and Mimicry (simulation, make believe, role-play).
These categories often find games conforming to them, often on purpose by developers who believe that these are needed to make the game work. I will use these categories to see what 'Batman: Arkham Asylum' conforms to and how it benefits the game.

The game doesn't conform to Agon within the game itself, as there is no online mode where you can compete with other players, but it does include trophies/achievements which can be compared with other players.
There are several elements of Alea in the game, most notable when fighting bosses, as they have several different fighting styles/attacks and it can often be hard to identify which attack will come next so the player must take chances with their fighting style. The game strongly conforms to Ilinx, as Batman's main traits are his stealth abilities and his detective skills. The hole environment within the game forces the player to use these traits to successfully take down enemies and progress to different areas of the game. The use of Batman's gadgets further adds to this element as they are fundamental in successfully sneaking through rooms packed with heavily armed thugs and scaling walls to get to good vantage points. The final category, Mimicry, has a strong presence in the game as the player often believes that they are Batman, and the sense that they are dealing with some serious opponents can often seem very realistic, especially when confronting the joker.

The majority of games conform to all or at least parts of all of these categories and so I don't perceive them to be relevant, I believe a better way of categorising/defining games is by their genre, i.e. 'Call of Duty' and 'Medal of Honour' fall into the genre of FPS, whereas, 'Ratchet and Clank' and 'Mario' fall into the genre of Platform games.

What makes a game a game?

Back again, and this time I'll be looking at what makes a game by analysing a BBC bite-size game for KS1, based on the definition of what makes a game by Greg Costikyan, in 'I have no words & I must design: toward a critical vocabulary for games.'

Here is a summary of the themes that Costikyan believes are needed to make a game;

Interaction
Puzzles and games will always be present together. The players choices/actions/interaction shape the gaming environment.

Goals
Gives the player incentive to play/to the struggle. The objective guides the players behaviour. Chance of failure is just as important as achieving goals.

Struggle
Without struggle or competition, the victory is unsatisfactory. The difficulty needs to be in keeping with the players abilities to make the game enjoyable.

Structure
Mutual player agreement that the game's rules and significance create structure. The games structure shapes player's behaviour, it doesn't determine it, therefore players have the freedom to choose what they do within the rules.

Endogenous Meaning
Within the structure of a game, endogenous meanings are created, these meanings are only relevant within the structure of the game.

My Examination of these definitions
I agree with Costikyan's definition/analysis of what makes a game a game. All of these elements do not necessarily make an enjoyable game.



My analysis of a KS1 game in reference to Costikyan's definition of a game

The KS1 game that I am analysing is a simple maths game where the player is presented with three shapes and has to pick the correct one five times to help a scientist build a robot.

Interaction-the player has almost complete control due to the fact that the only actions in the game are selecting different shapes, there is no other way to interact with the game or progress further. Player interaction doesn't change the state of play of the game.

Goals-the goal of the game is to select the correct shapes every time to help the scientist finish his robot.

Struggle-the game has different difficulty settings so the player can play to the best of their abilities without struggling to much or progressing to fast. It is satisfying to overcome the struggle, picking the right shapes and achieving the goals.

Structure-loosely structured around the player's interaction. The player has choices that they can make, get the right shape and progress further or get the wrong shape and have to retry. The rules pre-determine player behaviour.

Endogenous Meaning-There is no endogenous meaning within the game, although, the feeling of victory can be debated as an endogenous meaning. the game has a lot more relevance in the real world as it benefits the player's education.

Overall Evaluation of Game
The game needs to have a bigger endogenous reward and needs to be more challenging, giving the player a bigger struggle but bigger reward in return. the choices given to the player are very limited and so the game can become extremely repetitive and under challenging. the game doesn't give enough feedback to the player after each choice, this could be improved drastically to make the game a lot more educational and to benefit the player more.