Something Fullerton mentions during this week’s chapter, ‘Working with System Dynamics,” is the relationship between objects leading to their roles as systems, with the lack of relationship resulting in the objects being a mere collection rather than a system. “…systems also have relationships among their objects. This is a key concept in design. If there are no relationships between the objects in question, then you have a collection, not a system.” This is something that resonates with me, as I have played several games, some of which I have played for years, that doesn’t seem to understand this. Using a game that I am familiar with, Warframe, as an example; the game has many resource pools to draw from, and with each content update the pool of resources grows larger and larger still. DE, the developers of the game, states that this is done to prevent veterans from being able to trivialize future content with their hoard of resources. However, this serves to detract from what the community has been asking for to change, as the community has been advocating for the merging of content with new uses for old resources, allowing for the interaction (relationship) between old content and new content. This cannot be further from reality however, and every new piece of content provided by the developers only serve to alienate old and new further, creating much less of what would be a “system” and more to what Fullerton deems as “collections.”

                While on the topic of Warframe, it is also a good example of a bad information structure. The game has been touted as not new player friendly, and rightly so. Warframe is a game where majority of the information provided to the player is hidden beneath a multitude of drop-down menus and out of the way screens, or even outside of the game on wikis rather than in the game. While it retains information structures one might expect from many games, such as on-the-screen keys indicators and objective markers, much of the information on statistics, personal quest information, or even something as basic as intuitive item pickups are not present. An even more apparent example of bad information structure within Warframe is that ITEM LABELS, you know the thing that tells you what each item is, is turned OFF by default. Warframe is a good game to highlight the importance of systems and information structures, as while it has its moments with the good in both categories, it’s also a perfect highlight of all the bad. It exhibits good examples of “collections” rather than “systems” and what should theoretically be incorporated within good information structures.

                Sources

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games; Third Volume