XI – The Inevitable Post!

Tools for Creating Dramatic game Dynamics

We were recently given the LeBlanc document related to a games Uncertainty and Inevitability. It discusses how drama is a desirable quality of games and how it is a part of a games play content – it is a kind of fun. It also states how we cannot create drama, only the circumstances from which drama will emerge, which I half agree with but only due to the games that are solely based on storylines such as Heavy Rain, which is basically an interactive movie with immense control, similar in fashion to the battle books were you control were your character goes and what items he uses.

Aesthetic Model: Encompass our understanding of what drama is and how it occurs.
Dramatic Arc: Central conflict of narrative, creates tension that accumulates as story builds to a climax and then dissipates as conflict is resolved

What is dramatic tension? 

Dramatic tension is the level of emotional investment in the story’s conflict, the sense of apprehension and urgency with which we await the story’s outcome. It gives the story a sense of wholeness, that it is a complete work with a start, middle and end. All drama originates from conflict – in one form or another, in a game the conflict comes from the contest around which the game is built. For example, a story driven game has its drama in the character arcs, a FPS game has drama on its inherent conflict, kill or be killed etc. Dramatic tension is the product of:

•   Uncertainty: The sense that the outcome of the contest is still unknown, any player can still win or lose.
• Inevitability: The sense that the contest is moving forward towards a resolution, the outcome is imminent.

Without uncertainty, the outcome of the game becomes a forgone conclusion and the players become spectators.
Without inevitability the outcome of the conflict seems distant and players are given little incentive to invest their emotions in the contest.

Over the course of the game we expect the inevitability to increase and the uncertainty to decrease, the climax of the game happens at the moment of realisation, when the outcome is clear

Dramatic uncertainty is needed to create and on-going sense that the game is  a close contest and yet undecided,  uncertainty and inevitability are caused by different systems and mechanics such as a negative feed system which is used to decrease the gap between the leading players and the players that are falling behind.

However they can cause a game to stagnate as they remove inevitability, and so enter the positive feedback system which gives players in the lead an advantage, adding to the obvious outcome of the game and also ensures that the game does not take too long and keeps the players from losing interest.

There are two methods of applying these feedback systems;

• Force - Manipulating the state of the contest itself
•  Illusion - The game seems closer than it actually is

Pseudo Feedback, illusion and dramatic uncertainty 

It seems as though there is a negative feedback system in play, but in fact there is not. It is just the illusion of one, they can be implemented in many ways and here are a few of them listed in the document:

• Escalation: Score changes more dramatically the longer the game has been running, an example of this would be in Tetris, the longer you play the more points you get per line.

• Hidden Energy: creates dramatic uncertainty by manipulating players understanding of the score. It is easy to think of this as a starting resource, or a special item that can be used at any point in the game, using it early on can give that player the lead and it can seem as though they are doing better than the other, but factoring in the hidden energy the score is relatively equal.

• Fog of War: This is about the control of information. You cannot be sure of how well you are doing in comparison to the opponent until you discover what they have been doing under the fog of war. It keeps the score unknown, or repeatedly hides the score slowly adding more and more information until the climax is imminent.

• Decelerator: This is when the score gets slowed down, at one section it progresses slowly and once you are past that it continues as normal. It creates the illusion that the players are close, but whoever reaches the slow section first will also more than likely leave it first as well and then the score will return to its original form.

Dramatic Inevitability – Force

The largest classification of inevitability is the Ticking Clock under which everything else derives. It is the countdown that you see in every game, it can be the health bars in a fighting game, the resources and amount of units in an RTS game, the amount of pickups in a FPS game or a literal clock in any type of game. It measures a player’s progress through the game and gives a sense of how far the end might be, it is a matter of the player’s perception. 

Resolution

In this documents final pages it states how tension cannot rise forever, it needs to drop to give the player a sense of closure on the game, it needs to reach the climax, then change direction and fade away. Sometimes the resolution can occur in the meta-game, but there is still a resolution.

This was an interesting read, it gave insight into how we should plan the methods of progress through a game, it is hard to remember at times that these also apply to solo games against the computer. A lot of these topics will be used later in my computer games design course and also in my own personal projects.

SM – iHK

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X - MDA

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research

In this document, I discovered the MDA, which stands for Mechanics Dynamics and Aesthetics. The idea is that it will bridge the gap between game design, development, criticism and research while also improving the iterative processes, making it easier to break down, analyse and redesign a broad class of different game designs and classes. 

Mechanics: The components of the game, the rules that the game state must adhere to
Dynamics: What happens when you interact with the game
Aesthetics: How the player feels, emotional interaction with the game

Lens / Layer Each of these can be thought of as a lens, a layer that is separate, but is linked to the others. As you look through one lens to another, you see how its attributes affect all of the other layers.

Although MDA is a great method of game design, it was noted in the document that games are unpredictable as they are consumables. Every game is eventually discarded; it is when that is the issue. It is up to the designer to give the player as much as possible to consume from the game to keep them wanting more from it.

Perspective As a designer, it is natural to work through a game starting with the mechanics, getting the core gameplay working, after which you move onto and then finally you work on aesthetics, the visual and emotional output of the game. However it is also useful to look at it the other way around, the player will notice the aesthetics before anything else, getting them involved from the very beginning is very important and is something a games designer should always be aware of.

 

Describing words - Advanced Edition! It is no longer acceptable in the games community to only say a game is fun, or has good character design. To people in the design community, the terminology of describing game aesthetics is rapidly growing. This is a list of LeBlanc’s main aesthetic traits a game can contain, but there are still more that can be added to this list;

• Sensation (Sense Pleasure)
• Fantasy (Make-believe)
• Narrative (Drama)
• Challenge (Obstacle Course)
• Fellowship (Social Framework)
• Discovery (Exploring Uncharted Territory)
• Expression (Self Discovery)
• Submission (Pastime)

These are some examples given in the MDA document:

1.  Charades: Fellowship, Expression, Challenge.
2. Quake: Challenge, Sensation, Competition, Fantasy.
3. The Sims: Discovery, Fantasy, Expression, Narrative.
4. Final Fantasy: Fantasy, Narrative, Expression, Discovery, Challenge, Submission.

Aesthetic Models From these terms we can now start to evaluate games, tally up all of the aesthetical output into a chart and work backwards through the dynamics and mechanics to get a full understanding of what went into the game and hopefully what made them successful or unsuccessful. This style of analysing games will have a major impact on our own understanding of what makes a game successful and should shape how we design our own games.

Player type looking at an aesthetic model you can build a chart of what type of player you are aiming for. Taking target audience into consideration it is a lot easier to build a MDA structure that will be a success. You can look at players in many different ways, but knowing whether you want your game to be focused on competitive or cooperative, social or a solo game then you will need to build the correct MDA into your game for those players to want to play the game.

Reading this document has helped me to think about games design in a different way. Before I thought as a player, aesthetics first, I would think, if I played this game I want to see X first and although I don’t think that is an incorrect way to look at it, it is definitely not the only way to look at it, and both are required before any major work can commence.
Even though the document had quite a few awkward words that needed some Google’ing, I found it a very good read and recommend it as a great way of analysing games. 

SM - iHK

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IX Zotero - Bibliography creation

I have recently tried to get my brain around using a Firefox extension called Zotero, it basically lets me save a book of a site like amazon, and it gathers all the relevant bibliography information. I attempted to just do a little research and see how it works; these are the results that i got that are relevant to my course:

Busby, J., Parrish, Z. & Wilson, J., 2009. Mastering Unreal Technology: v. 1: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Level Design in Unreal Engine 3 1st ed., Sams.

Autodesk, 2009. Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Foundation for Games, Focal Press. 

Susaeta, H. et al., 2010. From MMORPG to a Classroom Multiplayer Presential Role Playing Game. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 13(3), pp.257-269.

Schrader, P. & McCreery, M., 2008. The acquisition of skill and expertise in massively multiplayer online games. Educational Technology Research & Development, 56(5/6), pp.557-574.

I find this programe extreamly over complicated, or perhaps its just the way that the ui is setup, from the way that me and my peers have been talking - everyone seems to dislike this piece of software, not because it isnt very good, but because it has a very long winded way of doing things.

Although, however complicated it is, i think it is going to be extreamly useful in the future when i am required to build a bibliography of my own, even with the awkward learning curve it will save me a lot of time stumbling in the dark.