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Games, Design and Play - concepts

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by cryogee, Sep 5, 2017.

  1. cryogee

    cryogee

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    I'm reading 'Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design'
    Stumbled upon this paragraph and felt like discussing below bolded line in more depth with fellow game designers.

    Think of challenge as a knob that you can turn up or down, like heat to a pot on a stove, to influence the intensity of a player’s experience, help them develop their skills at the game, provide meaningful effort toward the game’s goal, and to give them access to concepts that can be difficult to express in any other medium.

    Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design (Kindle Locations 905-907). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

    • What concepts do you think author is referring to besides the interactivity the game medium provides as compared to other medium like movies, books?
    • What is your fav experience that you feel only game medium provides as compared to movies/audio/books?
     
  2. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    I'm not sure what concepts the author meant there.

    However, I do think games can produce experiences that are very hard to provide with any other medium. The essence of fun, I believe, is a sense of accomplishment. Everybody loves accomplishing stuff; it makes us feel good about ourselves and how we spent our time. In real life, accomplishing things usually requires patience and hard work. Games provide the same feeling, more easily.

    A huge mistake many game designers (even those who write books) make is thinking that the only way to provide this sense of accomplishment is to provide a difficult challenge, which the player is then expected to overcome. And that's just not true. Overcoming challenges is one route to accomplishment, but there are others:
    • seeing things you've never seen before (exploration games like Myst, No Man's Sky)
    • increasing your credits/cookies/score/other-surrugate-for-wealth higher than ever before (idle clicker games)
    • watching/helping a virtual family/tribe/garden/city grow and develop (The Sims, etc.)
    • making new friends, or strengthening bonds with existing ones (many online games)
    Note that many of these games also have challenges to overcome, but some do not (some idle games have no challenge whatsoever). And even in games that do have challenges, for many players that's not really the source of the fun. My mother-in-law keeps playing WoW not because she really cares about the challenge of the next raid, but because visiting with her friends/family online makes her feel like it's time well spent. The puzzles in Myst were there mainly to slow down the exploration and prolong the game; it was the joy of discovery (a strong source of accomplishment) that kept people playing to the end.

    Conversely, as soon as a game no longer provides a sense of accomplishment, it ceases to be fun. This will happen with challenge games whenever the challenge is too easy or too hard, which is why so many game designers focus so much on tuning the difficulty level — especially if challenge is the only tool in their toolbox (at least, the only one they're aware of!).
     
  3. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Active experience in the story rather than passive experience.
    Having choice in the experience rather than passively experience the game is the most rewarding part of games IMO compared to other forms of entertainment, although choice isn't always provided in linear games.
     
    cryogee likes this.
  4. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    I'm gonna guess that that line was probably written with less thought than it needed. Unless they come back to expand on it, I doubt they have any concrete examples.

    What games excel at are making experiences personal. Games are first person, while just about all other mediums are third, more or less. Rather then handling concepts better, games being first person can make it feel more like the concept is being bashed over your head. Other mediums can handle subtlety much better.

    If anything there are liable to be more concepts games can't handle compared to other mediums. Consider trying to model interpersonal relationships that doesn't explode into incomprehensible 14 dimensional chess, or isn't so overly simplified that it reeks of stereotypes.
     
    cryogee likes this.
  5. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    Games can give a personal touch that is difficult to achieve in other mediums.

    Books tend to be great mediums for getting the player to understand issues, and explore the different ways that characters deal with the issues, and the consequences of dealing with those issues. But a game can go one step further and force the player to deal with those issues.

    Mass Effect is a common example. The themes it deals with have been dealt with in thousands of science fiction books. But Mass Effect gives the player the opportunity to make the choices and face the consequences. At one point you are asked to kill or save the last queen of an alien hive race known for warmongering. If you choose to save her, you later encounter bases destroyed by her offspring.

    The downside is that games tend to be much less subtle at dealing with complex themes then books. Games tend to present things in a fairly black and white fashion.
     
    theANMATOR2b and cryogee like this.
  6. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    At my previous job we had a client who loved what we did because we could take something that was hard to explain and help users understand it by letting them interact with it. As an extension of that, by giving people challenges to reinforce the value of a thing or lesson by getting them to see how it can be used to solve different problems. Maybe that's the kind of thing the author was trying to get at?
     
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  7. cryogee

    cryogee

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    Seems like you had a bad experience with something. Details?
     
    Martin_H likes this.
  8. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

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    Dark Souls. Ornstein and Smough boss battle.

    Imagine that as a movie or a book. In film, it might be an exciting action scene, but the only reason it might carry any emotional weight is because of the time spent with the characters involved beforehand.

    As a book, well, describing an actual fight moment by moment isn't really what books are good for.

    But as a game, it's a fantastic experience of triumph and defeat for anybody who ever played that part. Perseverance, focus, mental stamina, determination -- I'm pretty sure everybody who ever toppled Fatty and Skinny for the first time experienced some of these things to some degree. Movies and books just can't do that (unless they really suck but you have to read/watch them for some reason).
     
    Martin_H likes this.