XX - Games Britannia part 2

The second instalment in games britanica is central to board games and how they have effected each other.It starts off with Monopoly, which was made in America yet the original game board was set in the Britain. This is due to the game that it was influenced by called Landlords which worked with a similar setting. Monopoly is unique because its game board relates to a location and the desigenrs keyed into this and made regional game boards based on different countries. This is part of the major success of monopoly as it could be played worldwide with the same set of rules and a different game board which felt special and personal to players world wide.

The great depression greatly influence the next generation of board games, with more family themed games appearing. Games like scrabble became very popular and have remained so until this day.

In today’s market, board games have a lot more competition, in the form of digital games, and other table top gaming formats. However they are still holding their own, many games such as monopoly have converted to the digital age and you can see gams of them being made and played all the time. New games are made online to imitate board games. Turn based strategy games are effectively a board game, being able to move units a set amount of hexes before your turn is over etc.

XIX - Story isnt important in games? o_O ... Lies

Chris Crawford talks about the fundamental requirements of a good story and a few mistakes that games might be making in comparison to other media forms.

The first argument that I relate to his document is his stress that games are about things, instead of people – yet stories are supposed to put more emphasis on people and not things. I disagree with this almost completely as games must be looked at as their own separate entity. They are not the same as a movie or a book, although very similar. The aim in a game isn’t to let you be a backseat passenger, watching all the action, you ARE the character and thusly you must play as the character doing things that your character would/could do.

Things being less important than people is true in the sense of attachment in a story, but in an MMORPG game for example, spending 3 days of training in order to fight a boss to get a powerful artefact is undoubtedly going to create attachment to that item, especially with all the built up story around it that you get from other people or players as well as the narrative.

I think MMORPGs are a great example of how objects and people mesh perfectly together, the story plays a huge role with these games (however note that most people choose to ignore the story) and other characters and other real players impact upon the game world in ways that nobody can expect. Invasions, luring monsters, stealing, killing, foulplay, alliances, etc. This all adds to make these games successful, the sheer amount of control over the story of the game. But the narrative is always driving players to find the rare items and it makes it bloody hard to get them too. Knowing that you now carry with you sword that you spent a week looking for that was used by some great ancestor and fought off the scary bad guys who stole it away many years ago gives a great sense of pride in yoru character and helps to further immerse yourself in the storyline.

He also talks about conflict and how they are usually the main focus in games, which is bad because there are many different types of drama that developers could draw upon. Well as a gamer I have played many games and I can say that although the majority of games do draw on violence (if its popular, it will make money) but so many others do use other drama types, and many use a mix of them all. Fable for example is a violence driven game, but it also uses many other drama types to solve its quests. For example if you wander off the beaten path you will find a man cheating on his wife and your given the option to turn him in or play along with his little scheme, either way you get rewarded so you choose the character you want to be.

He also talks about puzzles and them not being a fundamental part of a story. But depending on how you think of a puzzle, I don’t see how this can be further from the truth. If you think about a puzzle in relation to a story, if its all set out in front of you and you know the ending before it even begins, then you wont bother to read or watch on. This is the same with games, the story needs to unfold or be unlocked as yoru play on, and in more advanced games with multiple paths available depending on the choices you make this is even more important. The puzzles themselves define a game, how do I get from point a to point b with only my trusty spoon, if I team up with character A instead of character B I might get to X faster, but A could try and steal it all on me. These decisions wouldn’t be very important in a movie or book as you have no control, but in a game these things shape the future story and puzzles of the game, after all you can consider a game just a series of many puzzles, decision you have to make.

XVIII - Remediation

Remediation is the representation of one medium in another. This is effectively the evolution of storytelling, a crude way to look at it is beginning with talking about stories, then writing about them, then reading them, using the radio to remediate these methods, then the tv, then cinema, then games. We see each of these fields crossing over into different platforms all the time; movies, books, poems, radios, podcasts, everything is in games while also we see games and everything they contain in movies and books. Likewise without movies, games would never of been how they are today, and without games, many movies and the like would never of been the same if they existed at all.

There are 2 main types of remediation, Immediacy and Hypermediacy. The differences between them is that one tries to hide the media format it is in and attempts to draw you into the story to the point of total immersion. You forget your watching a movie or playing a game, grow real attachments to the characters and become emotionally tied to the story. The other highlights the fact that it is all structured for the enjoyment of the user, to better their experience – hand crafted for the betterment of the media. These are things like HUDs in games, or the narrator talking about himself in a movie.

Here are some great examples of remediation:

Ground Hog day – Relive the same level over and over

The Matrix – kill the bad guys, respawn and they come back again

Kill Bill – Insane superhuman fights

Heavy Rain – Interactive story / choose characters path

Knights of the old republic – Live the life of the universe made from books / movies

XVII - Females Play games ? .......

The video game industry is mainly built of men. There are very few women in the games industry and many of those that are in the industry take up the less vital roles or the ones that can be used in other fields such as marketing or HR management. A big factor to this is due to the industry being aimed at male gamers, it just isn’t very inviting to females.


That’s not to say that women are not considered when making games, it’s just that they are aimed primarily at the male gamer. Typically when you think of female games you think of puzzle games and social games, but over the past few years as online social gathering has become so immensely popular, this dividing line between female and male games has become a lot thinner and it’s becoming common fact that genders play both game types.

A lot of people would say so what; they play the games but don’t want to make them? Seems fair enough to me. But the problem is the target audience; it is a lot easier for woman to make a game aimed at other women than it is for a man, simple because they can get into the mind-set of a woman easier than any man can – at least without some form of psychology degree and many many years of studying women.

Over the past few years the amount of female gamers, the amount of time playing and the types of games they play has been increasing and signs indicate that this pattern will continue, then it makes sense that we will see more female game designers come into play and this could well mean that more and more games will be aimed with a majority of female gamers as the TA.

XVI - La Decima Vittima

La Decima Vittima is a 1965 film in which people need to risk their lives in order to get great rewards. The idea is to survive through ten rounds before you can get your reward of a million dollars and become a legend. There are many real life elements incorporated into this movie to draw people in and make it more believable, even with the comedic aspect. This is true to games as well, games like dead rising 2 has the main character killing for sport, money and the enjoyment of others.

I believe that although this film does not relate very well to today’s audiences, there is still a lot of complex emotions at play within which if made today could be expanded upon and would make for a very successful movie/game combo. Character progression with romance and the threat of death draws the viewer into the movie and wanting them to survive in much the same way as video game does.

Many movies have imitated very similar settings since this movie, lord of the flies, battle royale and the new movie the hunger games.

XV - Game Level Design

There are many things a game needs to be successful and level design plays a huge part in how well it does. You can have the best idea for a game ever, but if the levels don’t fit well within the game then it will fail. Here’s a list of the core features a game requires:

1. Concept
2. Environment
3. Beginning
4. Ending
5. Goal
6. Challenges between the player and the goal
7. Reward
8. Defeat or failure system

Story is another area that is fundamental, but not overly required in every game. Although it can be the driving point behind certain genres of a game, many games work well without any story or theme at all. However these games that have no storyline could have had one, a story can drive the player through the many different levels of a game. 

If you think of chess and battle chess, battle chess is the same concept with a story build into it, whereas chess and computer games like battle simulators allows the players to generate their own narrative and make their own AAR (After Action Report) into a custom story, if the player is thinking of this during the game, it can change the way he plays to make his AAR more exciting. 

The challenge in level design needs to increase as the player progresses through the game, but in each level the player needs to almost immediately recognize what he needs to do, whether or not what he does is the correct way to complete the challenges set in motion does not matter as long as they don’t end up sitting back thinking ‘I don’t know what I need to do next’ as this leads to frustration and boredom. 

Each game has its own set of rules that govern how everything works. Whether it follows the real world rules of things like gravity absolutely, partially or not at all can change how the player thinks of the game state. If each level in a game has different rules then the player can get confused, or will take a longer amount of time figuring out how the items in the world will work, this extra amount of time will eventually seem pointless to the player over the course of the entire game as they relearn the rules set within the game state and they will lose interest with the extra work required to play.

It’s also a good idea to have multiple paths that lead to the final destination, each providing its own tools and challenges as this gives variety to the player resulting in replayability and extra enjoyment for the player. This also works within a single level, if there are a couple of different methods of completion then the player can pick and choose on how to play the game, giving the illusion that the player is the playing the game their own way.  These tools may not all be directly compatible, but as long as they work under the rules set in the game, then the player will understand how to use them. 

The rewards of a level can be as simple as progression to the next level, but I think it is wise to give the player something extra as I believe that getting something as obvious and expected as progression looks like laziness on the developers part. Getting a bonus achievement in a game makes the player feel like they have accomplished something difficult and this will make the player feel better about themselves and thus the game. Points are generally the easiest way to reward a player, this can be things like the score or the amount of items received but it can include things like the type or quality.

I found this week’s reading a bit overly exemplified, yet still interesting. The way it broke down the stages I think is going to help me in designing any game that I will ever work on, whether I use that process or not, it still got me thinking about how I should structure the design of a level.

XIV - Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs

In the titled document written by Richard A. Bartle he discusses and defines the character types that play muds in detail and how to interact with them to control the game state. He stated that there are 4 key things people enjoy in a MUD:

1.       Achievement

a.       Game related goals, things that are hard to get

2.       Exploration

a.       Discover game world secrets

b.      Experiment with the games mechanics and physics

3.       Socialising

a.       Communicate and role play

4.       Impose upon others

a.       Use the means provided to cause distress or aid to others (the latter not being so popular)

Break down players into 4 core categories and what they want/think about. These are listed as single categories without them affecting  each other, of course in any game a player will be a mix of all four if even only on a small scale:

·         Achievers

o   Points / levels

o   Items

o   Status

·         Socializers

o   Forge player / people relationships

o   Empathy towards others

o   Status

·         Explorers

o   Find hidden features

o   Learn how things work

o   Status

·         Killers

o   Player versus Player combat

o   Status 

The one thing they all have in common is that they all desire the status of being the best at what they do in their field. I believe that achievers are the one global trait that all the others will have; it is just human nature to want to do the best they can and be recognised for that accomplishment. 

After that is socializing, each class will also socialise in one way or another, whether it be discussing battle plans amongst killers, or trading information amongst explorers, they all communicate to achieve their goals. 

Exploring is something that every player does when they first enter a game, they need to discover how it all works or else they will be stumbling around in the dark never knowing what to do. Whether they keep it up once they have a functional understanding of the games core mechanics or not does not change the fact that they, at one time or another have explored how the game works. 

Killers are the last category and probably the only category that could possibly be ignored by a player. Some people simply have no intention of wanting to cause harm to another, but at the same time also do not wish to be harmed and as these games generally revolve around combat for advancement through the game, they will have built at least a basic setup of which to defend themselves from the environment which could also be used to defend them from other players too.

There are 2 ways these 4 groups of players play a game:

Killers act > players
Achievers Act > World
Socializers interact > players
Explorers interact > world

There is also a big section on how each class of player interacts with one another; however I believe it to be extremely out dated towards today’s market. Perhaps it made sense for MUDs, but saying things along the lines of a so called ‘killer’ avoiding other killers is entirely untrue. Each of these classes of player is never pure, you do not get a player who only socializes, they will go and do dungeons, they will go and pvp with other players, this is the same for each and every class.

I suppose it could be true at its very core, talking about a ‘killer’ in the sense of only wanting to kill others, but there is no pure ‘killer’ class of player and with their need for status they would want the reward of killing the best and strongest opponents, their ‘natural prey’ would be other killers and not the achievers as said in the document.

This document went on to saying how if one type of player is increased, that it would affect the quantity of another type. I believe that it is also not entirely true on the same basis as before. 

• Killers are only interested in fighting other veteran opponents who are going to give them a challenge, more exciting to know that the kill was earned rather than predetermined before the battle began.

• Socializers want more of every class so that they can socialise with them and talk about them to others

• Explorers want fewer explorers and more of every other class so they can use their findings to their advantage over the rest.

• Achievers want more of every class so they can compete amongst other great achievers and be better than them, making the achievement all that more valuable, whilst also having a large audience to which they can display their greatness. 

To increase the amount of one type of player you need to make adjustments to the game:

·         Killers

o   More options for fighting, different types of fights, fair fights and non-fair fights – control over how they fight.

·         Socializers

o   Social gathering zones, homeland locations that are safe spots were they can gather and communicate without fear. 

·         Explorers

o   Expand the game, give it more and better stuff, with canon fluff for them to discover.

·         Achievers

o   On a similar note to explorers, the simple way of getting more achievers is to add more official achievements in the game and the ability for the players to make their own goals via in game information and meta-game, i.e. players with most points, best gear etc.

At first, this document aggravated me. Being an active participant in MMOs over the past few years I found the majority of this data to be incorrect. However once I reread the article and thought of it from a MUD perspective and also considered how out of date it was, I decided to look at the information differently. 

Knowing that the data needs to be updated to correspond to the evolution of a MUD, the MMO I realised how many of the things discussed in the writings had been achieved since and how, even though the different archetypes no longer match the criteria set for them, they still resemble their former selves giving fashion on how to manipulate them with the set rules – even if these rules need to be bended slightly to work in today’s market.

‘;..;’

SM - iHK