You Sunk My Battleship!

I had a rather interesting session on critical games studies last tuesday as we were given the task of iterating Battleships. I'm sure that everyone nows what Battleships is and how to play it so I'm not going to explain it. I paired up with Adam Woodhouse in class and we played an ordinary game of Battleships to begin with to familirise ourselves with the rules and to ensure we hadn't forgotten anything, especially as it's been years since either of us last played. Suffice to say, I annihilated Adam's fleet with minimal damage done to my own.

We decided that we wanted our iterations to improve the gameplay but not to change the game into something entirely different. The first iteration that we made to the game was to add a bonus shot, if you managed to hit your opponents ship you would get an extra shot, this helped to speed up the gameplay and made the game have a little less to do with luck, we also stated that yoou only got one bonus shot, otherwise it would be all to easy to destroy the enemy ships in a couple of rounds.

Before we began a second iteration we quickly decided that we wanted to keep the bonus shot in our version of the game as it was an effective method of speeding up gameplay and keeping a high tension (especially when I only had two spaces left on my battleship and Adam was ready to strike).

The second iteration that Adam and I decided on was to add a repair concept to the game. Each player was given two repair cards that they could use at any point in the game to fix partially destroyed ships, each repair card fixed one square of a ship and any ships that were completely destroyed were beyond repair. We decided that one repair card would not be an effective iteration but too many and the game's pacing would be drastically slowed. We also decided that when a player repairs a ship they have to tell the opponent where they have repaired, otherwise the game would be too drawn out as the opponent would have to search every square that they hit again. Unlike the first iteration, the repair cards quickly became a nuisance, as the opponent knew where the repair had happened they knew where to hit the ship again, so rather than challenging the payers and creating tension, the iteration purely served as a way of wasting a players go by making them re-hit the same ship.

Retro Games

Back again, I'd like to make a quick apology for my last post, I was getting rather stressed looking for the collaborations on books and so wanted to get the post on bibliography done as fast as possible.

This post is going to be on the subject of Retro games and gameplay 'Segmentation,' as well as the chosen game for my first assessment.

The article I read and discussed for the Retro Games lecture was 'Rounds, Levels, and Waves : The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation' by José P. Zagal, Clara Fernández-Vara and Michael Mateas,this article covers the concept that modern games take things for granted that were developed as a result of the existence of retro games, the key aspects of which can be covered with segmentation.

Gameplay segmentation can be broken down into three different types, each type of segmentation covers their own area of games.

• Temporal Segmentation - Covers gameplay elements relating to limiting factors, synchronising and/or co-ordinating player activity over time.

• Spacial Segmentation - Covers all aspects relating to 'virtual space,' for example, levels.

• Challenge Segmentation - Covers areas relating to challenges within the game.

Temporal Segmentation
There are two main aspects covered in this area which are temporal co-ordination and temporal resource.Temporal co-ordination is about turn-taking, rounds, etc, it covers how time progresses and flows in a game. Temporal resources are about gameplay elements that are restrictive of game flow, such as time limits. Temporal Segmentation is a simple game mechanic, however, without the development of retro games, the term wouldn't even exist.

Spatial Segmentation
As stated previously, Spatial Segmentation covers the game world itself and its elements such as levels and checkpoints within those levels. It is quite a broad topic but ultimately stems down to the way the level has been made; even the components that make up Spatial Segmentation aren't necessarily included as they are a part of Challenge segmentation. Spatial segmentation boils down to three main areas; level structure, aesthetic design, and background i.e. static backgrounds etc.

Challenge Segmentation
Challenge Segmentation can arguably be seen as the section that retro games have had the biggest impact on in the development of modern games. There are so many elements that appear in challenge segmentation that couldn't have been developed from board games - waves, bosses and bonus stages all owe the retro game thier existence.


Challenge segmentation can be seperated into 4 main parts; Waves, Puzzles, Bosses and Bonus Stages. All of these are parts of a level that may or may not appear but when they do they add challenge to the game which makes players strive to overcome them. In board games you rarely get bosses, waves or bonus stages - there are often puzzles though - and as a result these were developed specifically video games and as a result, is the reason I consider them to be crucial part in the development from retro games into modern video games.

Enough said about segmentation in gameplay, the main things that I took from this article was a wider critical games vocabulary and a new way to look at game development and design.

Retro Game Review
The first assessment that I've been set is a review of a retro game, the game I've chosen is Donkey Kong, made by Nintendo to convert 'Radar Scope,' an unsuccessful arcade game, into a game critically acclaimed by the Americans in 1981. In essence it is a very basic platformer, where the player has to progress up ladders onto each level whilst jumping over rolling barrels throne by Donkey Kong from the top of the stage.

That's all for now, but don't worry, I'll be back!