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[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language.
After having analysed some of the most-played Facebook games in previous instalments of this series (Candy Crush Saga, FarmVille 2, Puzzle Bobble Clones, Diamond Dash and Pet Rescue Saga), this final chapter looks at what is so "social" about these "social games" – if at all.]
It is a common assumption that games that are part of the Facebook platform are inherently more "social" than other games, since that platform offers the possibility to developers to tap into the social graph.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language. As part of my master's thesis I am analysing already existing games that are commonly known to be addictive. A lot of those games are Facebook games.]
Most Puzzle Bobble clones play quite similarly, with their graphics being their most distinguishing feature. The outliers are Bubble Island, which adds the element of time pressure into the mix, and Woobies, which comes from another era of online games, and lacks most of the additional game mechanics the Facebook games use. This core mechanic can be expanded upon, allowing the Facebook game studios to find ways to monetize the game. The game is easy to pick up and is equally well playable with any input device, be it a mouse or a track pad, making it an obvious candidate for a casual game. It is deceptively simple to play: aim, shoot, aim, shoot, with hardly anything that takes the player out of the flow.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children. This is just a rough first draft, and I gladly welcome all critique and suggestions – be it on a content level or regarding my use of language. As part of my master's thesis I am analysing already existing games that are commonly known to be addictive. A lot of those games are Facebook games.]
Diamond Dash by Wooga superficially looks like a matching tile game similar to Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled, but works slightly different. Diamond Dash lacks some of the refined features of its competitors. When compared to Candy Crush Saga, Diamond Dash seems a bit rough around the edges, both art-wise as well as in the use of game mechanics. While Candy Crush Saga tries to cater to as many player types as possible, Diamond Dash mostly attracts agile, quickly reacting players that like to compete with their friends. Still, the classic Facebook game mechanics are implemented, mainly that one one hand, Facebook games usually provide strong motivations to do certain things but on the other hand directly prevent players to actually do those things – unless, of course, the players pay or bug their friends about it.
[The following text is part of my upcoming master's thesis on the use of game mechanics in therapy games for children.]
FarmVille by Zynga is probably one of the best known Facebook games to date, both because of players that cannot seem to quit the game and their Facebook friends that are annoyed by the game's ceaseless stream of pleas for help, designed to suck in even more players. FarmVille 2 has several tightly interwoven game mechanics that manage to keep the player glued to the game. The most important among them are the tight feedback loops, where finishing one task has an immediate effect on the next task at hand; a constant stream of quests that provide temporary "winning" conditions in an otherwise endless game; the possibility of self-expression through decoration, even if severely limited and finally the integration of Facebook friends that "ask for help", cleverly exploiting social norms that result in players returning to the game again and again.
Over at The Astronauts, someone figured something out. Sometimes, games work even when you're not shooting things.
Listed below, there are five well known action-adventure games. Think about your favorite, most memorable moments from the single player part of each, then click on the + spoiler button and see if I have managed to guess any of these moments.
What do all these moments have in common?
They are game-free. They are gameplay-less.
That’s right. You heard me.
If we understand gameplay as something that a challenge is a crucial part of, then none of these moments features any gameplay. You just walk, or swim, or ride a horse, but that’s it. You cannot die. You don’t make choices that have any long term consequences. No skill is involved.
There is no gameplay.
In other words, certain things worth remembering from certain video games are not what these video games are all about.
What this guy now figures is that you have to remove gameplay from games to get those moments.
But I don't think so. It has nothing to do with gameplay. But a lot with pacing.
A lot of games just keep stomping on, throwing new enemies to battle at the player even before he finished the old ones off, in order to make the game "gripping". The makers fear that if there is just the slightest lull, the players will become bored and stop playing. But will they?
In most other narrative media it is well known that ceaseless screaming action is very tiring and impossible to watch.
My current job/civilian service has given me the unique opportunity to have a look at a variety of therapy games that have been designed for children's neurorehabilitation. Most of those games come with specialised input devices.
As a matter of fact, it's usually the input devices that come with games. Too often, the games seem to have been created as an afterthought of the device, and too often, those games have good intentions, but fail to deliver.
In order to be aware of those problems myself, I decided to make a list of my observations and how they could be mitigated.
The following points do not intend to discredit the work of all the people that designed and programmed the therapy games mentioned, it should merely discuss some problems that can occur and should be addressed when designing new games. Of course, that mostly means me, so I don't fall into those pitfalls myself.
Common Pitfalls and their Resolutions
First of all, it has to be said that if you're tasked with creating a therapy game for children, you have quite a challenge to overcome. Children are one of the most demanding audiences, and they will have no problems picking your game apart at the seams when they feel like it. They will feel most inclined to do so when you give them reasons. Like creating incoherent game worlds. A running dog that has to avoid exploding mushrooms by jumping whenever boing poked in the belly with a huge hand and meanwhile collecting diamonds that hang suspended in thin air?
Well, this is an interesting idea: a horror game, where the player sees the world with the eyes of a two year old.
In the borderland between dream and reality, surreal creatures and diverse environments will present you with both physical and mental obstacles that challenge your creativity.
I'm definitely interested to see how Among the Sleep will turn out! [ᔥreddit]
The praise that Bioshock has received from other critics is – after having played through the game – definitely well earned. Even though I'm usually not exactly a very good FPS player, I managed to get through the whole game. And it definitely was worth it. The world building in Bioshock is excellent, be its embedment into the historical background, or the rich story that shines through at every corner, or finally the beautifully captured art deco architecture, which simply is a joy to explore and walk through.
Gameplay itself is reasonably varied as well. While some parts leave the player wondering whether they were just added to draw out game length1, the "magic" abilities one receives over time offer enough variation and allow the player to change his tactics over time.
Later in the game, some near-failure states are added: at one point, one continually looses maximum health, forcing the player to react faster. At another, the player isn't able to choose his currently activated plasmid. Not only is the game randomly cycling between the equipped plasmids, but between others as well, allowing the player to test out previously unavailable plasmids – and requiring him to change his tactics to deal with splicers every minute or so.
With Bioshock having distinct horror elements as well, sound plays an important element as well.
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Even though they might leave this impression, all parts are able to tell some part of the background story, allowing the player to dive deeper into the world. ↩
You see, some people still think that Unity 3D is just for script kiddies and art students. Well, take that.
Arthur Lee created a game that effortlessly combines Portals and time manipulation by allowing the player to take snapshots of the game and place them somewhere else on the surfaces – where they act as snapshots not just of the view, but also of the time, therefore allowing you to go back in time.
But watch for yourself:
[Found thanks to Alex Amsel]
Yes, so maybe I like reblogging Robert Yang's posts. Like, a lot. But the point is: he writes good stuff. In this case, it is about level design. And in my opinion, it is pretty clever idea.
Based on a presentation by Randy Smith on "Level Building for Stealth Games", Robert Yang creates a system do design levels based on valence.
In this way, Randy Smith's "valence theory" (NOTE: again, he never called it that, but I am) posits that different parts of a room or level can afford stealth mechanics: level elements can have a POSITIVE [+] valence (shadowy, quiet, stealth-friendly) or NEGATIVE [-] valence (bright, noisy, not stealth-friendly).
Scattering those elements with their valence over the level can give you an overview of how the level will be traversed.
Robert Yang kindly asked me to translate the article about my level design considerations for my bachelor's thesis game. I'm slightly afraid that he is going to be disappointed, since this is not so much a theoretical approach to architecture and level design in general, but rather my thoughts and motivations for creating the specific level architecture for my own game.
When starting to design the level, I considered the following points to be the main guiding lines:
Isolation
With the game being a serious game and a bachelor's project, I have neither the time (now) nor the money (in the future, when, hopefully, I'll be able to finish and publish the game) to create a large, open world.
There seems to be a new trend in town: games that found a way to deal with all that nasty, unpredictable human intervention in games – they do away with it.
There is Cory Arcangel at the Barbican, letting bowling games play themselves. (Nothing new, really, there has been a Lego Mindstorm robot playing Wii Bowling on its own for quite some time now).
Then there is the Figurine Mode of Super Street Fighter IV on the Nintendo 3DS, where you collect virtual figurines, and they will battle those of other players. All without the player doing anything – the fight actually happens while the Nintendo 3DS is in sleep mode.1
And finally, there is a new edition of Monopoly, where a computer tells you what you have to do. The reason why Hasbro chose to do so are rather hazy. Maybe American players are too dull to grasp the rules? Jesper Juul should be pleased – finally someone put an end to all that discussions about rules and inventing house rules and stuff that makes games so un-gamey ...
But seriously – Hasbro is clearly doing anything to take the player out of the equation. The game is played by the weird thingy[^batman] in the middle of the board, and the player is degraded to moving the pieces, because it's just a a computer chip, without attached robot limbs. Humans are better at moving small finicky things for their robot overlords anyway.
Some people are still waiting for the singularity.
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So where is the fun in that, exactly? ↩
It's clearly not the first time I stumbled over the assumption that the mainly heteronormative depiction of gaming characters causes "severe disconnections between player and avatar if the player identifies as a minority".1
So maybe this seems "logical" at first, but the weird thing is that I can not really relate to that. The character might be male and hetero – as long as he looks good, I don't have a problem with that. After all, most of the cultural products I consume now (and consumed in my childhood – books, films, plays) usually feature heterosexual couples. The world would look pretty bare if I set aside every medium that does not involve (exclusively) a minority.
So, instead of keeping the question "How does a girl gamer feel while playing as Mario, a stereotyped Italian male plumber in Mario Sunshine? How does a gay gamer feel while playing as Jack and being forced to marry a girl or live alone forever in Harvest Moon?" purely rhetoric, it might be time to ask people exactly that. Do they feel disconnected? Can't they play a game because the main character isn't gay, or female, or black? Or do they accept those figures as stand-ins, purely metaphoric representations to deal with the game mechanic, just as a board game token? As parts of a story, where the characters just happen to be male and straight?
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Maybe also caused by the fact that I read the Border House Blog for some time. ↩
Chris Richa has some interesting observations on the Kinect. In certain games, the Kinect controller might actually take away the player's freedom instead of adding to it. The example: Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows:
The players don’t move to advance the characters: the game does it for you. The players only move their hands and bodies to cover or to attack. This makes the game feel too linear and lacks exploration and features you usually have in controller-based games. But it does give you the feeling of playing arcade games such as Resident Evil except for the fact that you’re at home and you’re not holding a piece of plastic with a sensor in it for a controller.
When playing with a controller, you are the puppeteer and your character is the puppet controlled by you. The Kinect only pitches the characters as your doppelgangers, imitating (rather mimicking) your every move.
Seeing the film clip, this really seems to be an issue. The question is: are the developers aware of this – and will they change the design and pace of their games to account for that? Or will they make the same mistake as Hollywood: like all the movies need to be in 3D, even if it distracts and is awfully done, every game for the Xbox 360 needs to be Kinect-enabled, even if that is just slapped on later on, without making much sense?
As Chris notes: the technology is just at its beginning. It will rest on the shoulders of the developers to create meaningful uses for it.
While working on an assignement for our current module on collaborative virtual worlds, I think I started to understand what bugs me in both MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and sandbox games like Second Life. There are (as for now) two points:
A Feeling of Agency
Nothing is more frustrating in World of Warcraft than successfully finishing a quest by bringing the needed herbs to an NPC, being thanked by him and reassured that his sick daughter will now get well, and as soon as you turn your back, you hear him complain to the next player that his daughter is sick and is in dire need of certain herbs ...
What is missing here is the feeling of agency – the feeling that your actions as a player have an effect on the world and change it, for the better or the worse. After all, any of these games give you the feeling that you are a hero and part of something big, and not just another name- and faceless warrior in a confusing war (even though that picture would often be more accurate).
To be fair, it has to be said that World of Warcraft has its moments there – like when the players had to gather ressources in order to open up a portal. But those moments are few.
An Agent Beyond Your Control
Second Life has quite another problem. Yes, you can change the world – a bit, by building something on a tiny speck of land, but then again, why should you? Nothing is forcing you, there is no actual need, there is nothing out of your control.
