In this blog I will be talking about chapter 5: Working with System Dynamics. In this chapter, it talks about objects, properties, behaviors, and relationships of the basic elements of systems in games. In the textbook objects “are the basic building blocks of a system. Systems can be thought of as a group of inflated pieces” (Fullerton p. 130). An example of this would be individual chess pieces such as the kings and queens. “Properties are qualities of attributes that define physical or conceptual aspects of objects. Generally, these are a set of values that describe an object” (Fullerton p. 130). In the book, it talks about checkers and how it has only three properties: location, color, and type. Checkers have a set color, they can change locations and depend on where your piece is, it can turn from a normal piece to a king. The behavior has to do with the potential actions that a piece could make. For instance, in chess, a bishop can only move diagonally, and a rook can only move up, down, left, and right. The final one he talks about is relationships amongst objects in games. Ms. Fullerton said that “relationships can be expressed in a number of ways” (Fullerton p. 131). For instance, the progressive spaces from the board game Monopoly. This game has a fixed linear relationship that restricts your possibilities while the game Sims has a loose relationship where your character can freely interact with objects that they want to interact with.
In my opinion, the most interesting element is relationships. Recently I have been playing the Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch and it reminds me of a loose relationship. In Animal Crossing you are able to interact with pretty much anything you want. In the game, you can talk to anyone on your island. You can fish, catch bugs, pick up items, and even dig up items! You can customize your clothing and your home to whatever you want it to look like. The game has an endless number of possibilities that a single player can do. It is exciting every time I get to see other friends islands because the map layouts are different and the way they play the game is different.
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.
I think it’s interesting to see how a game like checkers that only has 3 main properties can create a good game. So this also shows that the relationships between the elements are way more important than just having bunch of elements
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It’s definitely interesting to see games that have very little properties but still come across as a complete and functioning game. Some of the games many of us play during our childhoods are just that; simplistic games with little properties. For instance, in addition to checkers, you have games like Tic-Tac-Toe, or Connect Four, both of which only have two properties: Color/Shape and location. Thinking carefully about how properties relate and function with one another definitely is something that is just as, if not more, valuable as having elements that are interesting on their own but do not interact with one another. I mention in my own post that a game like Warframe falls victim to that problem, as it has many sources of content, but each piece of content is unique and has no relation to other forms of content, resulting in something like a tree, where everything branches off from the main trunk but none of it relates to one another, as opposed to something like a web where though there is an origin, each strand ties in with one another.
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