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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