Reflection Wk 4 – Is that all there is?

Re: Reflection Wk 4 – Is that all there is?

I agree with David Jaffe’s response that art games should not be made if they aren’t going to be fun, because games primary purpose is entertaining lots of people. If someone was to add a little more depth to a game it should not be at the expense of the fun. But to make a really fun game that also has depth would be hard to do. I think that games mirror other entertainment like TV and movies which are also made by large teams of people and a lot of things have to come together and work really well to create something fantastic.

I can see that it would be difficult to add rules for generating particular emotions in a game that are also fun. Games are harder to predict their effects because unlike any other medium they depend on the player’s interactions and the designer cannot control how the player will play the game.

Games need to be engaging for a much longer period of time than a movie or TV show, which is why they lend themselves well to action type games where the player runs around killing things. It’s not like you can fast forward over the dull bits in a game, you have to play through them to get to the next part.

Reflection Week 3 – Emergence

Re: Reflection Week 3 – Emergence

Gish

The demo for Gish had a steeper learning curve compared to other games. I spent ages trying to make Gish jump high enough to get up a ledge only to work out a way of sticking up the wall instead because the jumping was so much more difficult. I suppose that’s a sort of emergence in itself, but not really the good sort. But after you get going there’s a lot more you can do. So there’s a trade-off between shallow controls, which are easy to use, and deep controls, which give more flexibility.

It’s interesting that in David Rosen’s design tour he mentioned the annoying physics bugs in Gish, because a lot of emergence in other games results from players taking advantage of physics bugs.

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Constellation

I’m not sure putting random things in a game is a good thing. This could mislead the player into thinking there’s something there and then they become frustrated when they investigate further and find nothing. They might have fun investigating, but at the end there is cruel disappointment. It could also teach the player to mistrust the game and ignore things that were real clues. This is different to Easter eggs because they have been put there deliberately and the player understands what they are. If the player understands they are not important then they could add to the game, for example leaving a piece of the plot unexplained means that they could have fun speculating about what would have happened.

Journal wk2 – digital vs non-digital games

Re: Journal wk2 – digital vs non-digital games

Your reflection topic for this week: What are the differences between table-top board/card/roleplaying games, computer games and sports/live action games? What does abilities and constraints does each kind offer you as a player or as a designer? How might the same game change from one medium to another?

Journal Wk 1: Why am I here?

Re: Journal Wk 1: Why are you here?

• Why are you doing this subject? What interests you about games? What kinds of games would you like to play? To make? What do you hope to learn?

I’m doing this subject because I like video games and I’d like to make a game sometime. Games are interesting because they’re fun to play and they also look like fun to make.