PLAY & GAME
Formalist: focus on game themselves or related philosophical questions (film studies) -
categorization, reasoning
Situationalists: focus on the players and culture (context and variation, real experiences)
Rules:
- Define the space, objects, passage of time, consequences of actions
- Facilitate goals, progress/development, challenge
1. Operational rules: required to be able to play the game
2. Basic ‘constitutive’ rules: underlying often logical mathematical rules on which the
operational rules are based
3. Rules of conduct: sportsmanship, often unwritten
Goals:
- The reason for the player to play the game
- Achievable but challenging
- Can be determined by the game (e.g., with support from the story) or by the player
themselves
Goals:
- Conquering
- Defeating
- Chasing
- Racing
- Building
- Exploring
- Solving (puzzle)
- Etc.
Challenges/conflicts
- Stand in the way of the goal
- Often based on the rules that limit the players actions
- It takes effort to overcome them
1. Obstacles (physical/mental)
2. Enemies
3. Dilemmas (choices)
Mechanics: the action invoked by an agent to interact with the game world, as constrained by the
game rules
The ‘verbs’ of the games: what can the player do? Walk, run, shoot, switch weapons, throw
(grenades), indicate (enemies), build
,Mechanics = interactions (Example: player can jump by push button A)
Mechanics:
- A group (combination) of mechanics from a strategy
- Different players may use different strategies (=other combinations of mechanics)
- Not all strategies are always intended by the designer
Strategies:
- Jump
- Combine jump and run
Core mechanics:
- An action or strategy that the player frequently executes or resorts to
- Required to reach goals within the game (=core of the game)
They are:
- Readily available
- Consistent throughout the game experience
Examples:
- Moving blocks
- Shooting
- Building & harvesting blocks
- Running/jumping
- Accelerating and steering
Secondary (core) mechanics:
- Make the game more engaging or accessible
- Work only when combined with (primary) core mechanics and/or are not only available
They are:
- Available/required occasionally
- QR requires the combination with the core mechanic
- Not (entirely) necessary to reach the end-state
Examples:
- Diving into cover
- Strafing (moving sideways)
- Collecting coins
- Avatar personalization
Context: space or environment, objects, story, user interface:
, - How many dimensions?
- Discrete or continuous?
- Which rooms are there? How do they relate to each other?
Context: objects
- The nouns of the game
- Anything you can see and manipulate characters, physical things, tokens
- Often the means with which the player reaches goals (enemies, money, cars)
- Can have certain properties and status
- Help tell the story
User interface: how you look into the virtual world:
- Perspective (e.g. first or third person)
- How certain information about the game is presented
Diegetic: music is playing within the fictional word (the characters also hear it)
Non-diegetic: music is only audible to the viewer (player)
Meta
Spatial
Story:
- Crucial
- Gameplay and story can strengthen but also contradict
- Can explain what you can do within the game, why rules are the way they are
- Show, don’t tell
MDA framework: is a formal approach to understanding games, one which attempts to bridge the
gap between game design and development, game criticism, and technical game research
Criticism regarding MDA:
- Too much emphasis on functionality, mechanics
- Does not apply to serious games, gamification
- Aesthetics -> experience
CHAPTER 2
The brain offers flexibility and amounts of potential to learn new knowledge and skills, so you use
way more than 10% of your brain.
The left hemisphere is the logical one while the right hemisphere is the creative one is a gross and
inaccurate simplification. Both hemispheres work together in harmony.
Even if there are some differences in brain wiring and some behavioral differences between men
and women, we cannot link the neurologi- cal differences to the behavioral ones when considering
cognitive skills. In fact, there usually is a greater difference among the brains of people of the same
sex than between the sexes.
,There is actually no solid scientific evidence that you will learn something better if the teaching style
matches your learning style preference.
Every human has the same limitations but may have expectations and a different mental model for
the products they are interacting with. Your brain is rewiring every second by seeing, reviewing, etc.
Cognitive biases (cognitive illusions): patterns of thought that bias our judgment and our decision-
making.
We have a tendency to rely on previous information to make a judgment about a new piece of
information by comparing one to the other.
Experiencing and enjoying a video game happens in the player’s mind, but the experience is crafted
by a developers’ minds and is implemented in a system with specific constraints.
Although learning to play and master a game happens all throughout the game experience, the
newest elements are learned during the tutorial or the onboarding part of the game, so this
constitutes one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for players.
Information processing usually starts with the perception of an input and eventually ends with
modifications in memory via synaptic modifications in the brain.
ARTICLE 1:
MDA: Games are created by designers/teams of developers and consumed by players
.
Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and
algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each otherś
outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts
with the game system.
, LECTURE 3
Problems in perception, attention or memory can result in usability and player experience issues,
which makes us lose players.
- I can’t figure out what to do (perception/attention)
- I can't’ remember what to do (memory)
Active attention: you decide to pay attention to something
Passive attention: something happens that draws your attention
Selective attention (focused): like a spotlight
Divided attention: multitasking
Attention and engagement:
- Cognitive
- Emotional
- Behavioral
