This week’s Fullerton chapter was “Functionality, Completeness, and Balance”.  The author discusses how games are complex systems, and users often find unexpected ways to do things you may not have anticipated, which is why playtesting is extremely important.  While reading this, I became reminded of what Riot Games is doing with their beta for their upcoming game VALORANT. They have decided to release access to some players for playtesting before they release the full game in the summer.  During this playtesting time, players have already discovered unintentional “features” the game has. One of the champions, Cypher, has a camera that watches enemies. Players found a way to get a gun on the camera and shoot with the gun in camera-mode.  This is definitely not what Riot Games intended, but if they hadn’t had playtesters, they never would have known it to be an issue. This goes to show how difficult it truly is to test games, especially extremely complex ones. Another thing the chapter talks about (and what we talked about in class) was spawn points in a game.  There are multiple solutions to campers at spawn points, such as a force field, which many shooters utilize. However, there are pros and cons to every single option. Every shooter game is different when it comes to spawn points, and while some may work better than others, they all have their negatives as well. It is hard to come up with a completely balanced game, especially when considering variety with characters you are allowed to play.  For example, some characters have abilities that are seen as too “OP”/annoying for players to tolerate. An example of this is Clash in Rainbow Six. She was banned in ranked for a period of time but has since been unbanned. Because of this, she is always getting voted out by players in the initial ranked banning phase due to the annoying nature of her ability.

Overall, there is a difference between a loophole and a feature in a game, as expressed earlier with the VALORANT example.  This is why it is super important to get as many playtesters as possible and try to perform actions that aren’t intended in your game to see if you get the desired outcome.  It is hard to identify every bug, however – even the biggest game developers struggle with this.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.

In Fullerton’s chapter about playtesting, she discusses how playtesting is the single most important activity a designer can engage in.  The purpose of playtesting is to ensure that the game is achieving your player experience goals. It’s important to, as discussed in class on Tuesday, ensure there is balance throughout the game and that there aren’t too many or too few components.  For example, if you’re creating a 2 v 2 card game, you need to make sure both teams have the same advantage to win the game, or else it would be unfair. Additionally, if you have a card game like Uno, you’d need to make sure you have enough variety of cards to keep the game going.  You also want to make sure the time played isn’t too long or too short (depending on what you’re going for). Initially, you should playtest your game yourself in the early stages and then recruit more people. This reminds me of our team’s process of creating our board game on Tabletop Simulator; we started by having all of us get into the game and test the components.  After we realized one member was completely powerless and was at a disadvantage, we increased that characters’ abilities to make sure the game was more fair. Next, we will be recruiting groups to playtest our game, which is exactly what Fullerton suggests. In this environment, it is a lot harder to have our game be playtested by total strangers, which is also what Fullerton suggests so that you can gain a new perspective from people you don’t know who all have differing opinions.  However, it would be interesting to do that someday with our game. It is important to recruit testers who are actually interested in your topic, however; you will get far more relevant feedback than someone who would not wish to even play your game. This reminded me of when we had a board game day in class and our group was playing The Fury of Dracula.  I have never really been super interested in long games that require knowing a lot of rules, so my feedback that day was biased.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.

Last week in class, we played/watched Fortnite and discussed the game’s design choices and system dynamics.  It was especially interesting to note how the dynamics of the game changed as time went on. In the beginning, the zone was very big, and we didn’t see as many opponents.  However, as time went on, the zone would get smaller and smaller, bringing enemies closer and closer. We witnessed this firsthand during the playthrough. Many battle royale games choose to use this mechanic, including H1Z1, Warzone (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), and a lot more, which I found to be very interesting.  This helps limit the amount of time per game, which had me wondering: what other methods are even out there to ensure the match doesn’t last forever yet still only have one winner? Making the map get smaller is the most obvious mechanic, which was interesting to think about. However, there were also other game mechanics that were very interesting.  People can be toxic by throwing downed players around before they are revived; however, the further you get into the game, the less time and space you have to do that. Additionally, building is a key feature in Fortnite that separates the game from other battle royales. You can build stairs, walls, floors, and ramps in the game. Some players have mastered building to the point where they can do it incredibly fast, and by the end of the game, you see huge build fights between players attempting to reach high ground.  However, enemies from a distance can simply shoot down the builds in order to knock out the players when they fall down – although this may be hard to do when there are so many builds holding everything together. 

Overall, the game has many interesting mechanics.  They have added movement by adding helicopters and launch pads into the game (which at one point were taken out to decrease methods of movement).  This helps when the zone is closing in fast, and is especially important in the middle of the game when you need to travel the farthest distances. As time goes on, the distance you need to travel gets smaller, but the danger gets a lot larger!

Fortnite. Battle Royale Mode, PC, 2020.

This week, we were supposed to go to our escape rooms.  However, since those have been canceled so that we can all self-quarantine, we instead played We Were Here.  I found this game to be very interesting, especially relating it to what we discussed in class on Tuesday about possibility spaces and other dynamics of a game.  In We Were Here, there are two players: one is an explorer, and one is the librarian.  The librarian mostly remains in the same room throughout the game and has to help the explorer navigate a variety of rooms to reach the final stage.  Together, the players need to solve puzzles to get to the next challenge.  

In We Were Here, the players get basically zero clues as to what they need to do.  It is entirely up to you to navigate the room and figure out how to solve the puzzle.  Since you cannot see your teammates’ screen and they cannot see yours, communication is very important in this game.  You must describe a variety of shapes that look very similar to each other so that you can figure out what symbols match the ones on your teammates’ screen.  This also reminded me of the week before spring break in which we all played games where we needed to communicate and work together. We Were Here is largely a game about working together.  You both want to survive, so you need to talk to each other and coordinate with each other in order to do this.  However, at the end, there is a big twist (spoiler alert!). You go from wanting to help each other to possibly being against each other.  The last puzzle is you escaping the building; however, in order to open the gate, one person has to stand on the button.  That means only one person is able to escape, and you have to decide who. This can often pit friends against each other, since no one wants to get left behind.  In this way, it goes from a cooperative game to a slightly competitive game. However, the interesting fact lies in the way that different people all play the game differently.  Sometimes, it’s not competitive, and someone is happy to let their friend go and sacrifice themselves. That’s the beauty of a game – everyone has a different experience playing it!  The fact that the game doesn’t offer very many clues also shows how different it is compared to possibility spaces in other games.

In class on Tuesday, we discussed how we wish to create our games with our teams and then proceeded to get into groups to play a board game.  Our group played Fury of Dracula which involved one player as Dracula who secretly travels the European countries and turns humans into vampires.  The remaining players are the Hunters who must locate the Count and kill him before he can win the game. The game alone took more than an hour to read the instructions and figure out the logistics, and even after doing so, we were still slightly confused.  It really opened my eyes to this sort of perspective, because I’d always been explained the rules of a game by a friend who knew the game if I was new at playing it. I never really had to learn a new game by myself/with others by reading thoroughly through the instructions – especially a game as difficult as Fury of Dracula, so I found that interesting.  

Once we got into the game, however, our group was able to discuss more about the cooperation and teamwork involved and how this differed from other games.  The game initially reminded me of Betrayal at House on the Hill in that it had various character sheets and each one had their own “stats”/abilities.  One character, Mina’s, ability involved her being able to find out if Dracula is in the same region as she is given the fact that she is in the same city currently as another hunter.  Additionally, the fact that hunters on the same city could trade with each other and see each other’s cards shows the teamwork involved in utilizing each characters’ abilities and items.  However, Dracula didn’t have teamwork involved with his character, as we were all meant to plot against him. This differs from other board games that are often highly competitive between characters, like Trouble.  If you don’t try to work together, you will likely be at a disadvantage.  I found this interesting since a lot of the board games I’ve played have been mostly competitive.

Hand, Stephen. Fury of Dracula. Games Workshop, 1987, and Fantasy Flight Games 2006. Board Game.

In class on Tuesday, we were told to bring a deck of cards and tell a story somehow with them.  This really got me thinking of how you could possibly tell a story with playing cards; after all, they’re just numbers and symbols.  However, after thinking about it, my group was able to come up with an entire story about a king and a queen who had a certain number of children who ended up dying, and the story’s components all somehow related to the images on the cards.  I thought this to be interesting because we were able to add meaning to something that didn’t seem like it truly meant anything. Although our stories were rather randomly generated and often quite strange, we created something interesting out of a mere object, and I found this to be symbolic of modern-day games in which people use symbolism and environmental images to tell stories.

After we performed the exercise, we played a little bit through the game Virginia.  Upon immediately watching the gameplay, I could tell it was very movie-esque.  Different games tell stories in different ways, and Virginia was definitely taking a less “choice-impacted” route. The beginning had credits saying it was a true story, and all of the people who worked on the game were listed behind beautiful landscapes and colorful screens accompanied by intro music.  We talked about what dramatizes a game, and the music and lighting definitely did this for Virginia, as did the random cutscenes and dreaming sequences.  The red lighting when the main character goes to show the lady her FBI badge before walking across stage gave us an unsettling feeling, as did the other random dream with a Buffalo being in the missing child, Lucas’s, room.  The fact that the game has no talking adds to this feeling – the creators want to create an environment in which the viewer experiences what is happening and can interpret it for themself. Voice acting often has a strong impact, like in the animated Uno video, but a lack of voice also has a very strong impact.  We can focus better on what’s happening for ourselves and listen to every little sound queue like the music. It adds more of an unsettling feeling, almost like we ourselves are watching everything unfold and don’t quite get a say in what happens.

Virginia.  505 Games, 2016.

In class on Tuesday, we discussed Henry Jenkins Game Design As Narrative Architecture.  One main point was that not all games tell stories.  The author makes a good point by thinking of games such as Tetris, where there isn’t really a story involved and it’s more of a manipulation of the graphics.  I agree with his statement, and it got me thinking about the games that I play that don’t tell a story.  I don’t play many single-player story games, but it had me wondering if games such as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege which are mostly multiplayer tell stories.  I believe it’s a mixture of both, since a lot of the game is just teams shooting each other.  However, each operator has their own background story and their own abilities, which makes me wonder more about the story itself behind the game.  Even though there isn’t a specific plot, like there might be with a game such as Life Is Strange, it still has story aspects to it.  Regardless, Jenkins’ point that games don’t need stories to still be games persists in this case.

Jenkins also discussed enacted narratives.  In these cases, the story is mostly structured around the character’s movement through space.  The environment may also accelerate the plot in this case. Jenkins talks about “micronarratives”, which are “emotional attractions” such as cut scenes.  However, instead of a cut scene, the game could allow a player to do something in the story space so that they themself can see the interaction instead of just watching it without actually doing much to get to that point.  There is also a difference between a plot and a story; plot happens to be how a movie will display its narrative, whereas story is how we personally construct events that have happened in order. This reminded me of Firewatch and how the chronological events were all very out of order.  The main character was experiencing flashbacks of his time with his partner, Julia, while he was currently in the woods.  I liked the fact that the past was being told in the present, and intermittently between his flashbacks, we could see the peaceful environment of the world.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Electronic Book Review, July 10, 2004, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/game-design-as-narrative-architecture/

In class on Tuesday, we listened to Mark Barrett’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to Rapid Prototypes.  It was really interesting to hear his perspective on this subject, as he discussed things I never really thought about.  Barrett talked about game jams (creating a game in a short amount of time) and how they’re a good way to learn more in both the game industry and as a human.

Barrett discussed setting goals, which are something you desire that motivate you to do certain things.  He discussed the differences between Urgent and Important goals. Urgent goals are more immediate/current and an important decision is a more long-term evolving decision.  He resists his urgent goals and instead tries to creatively control them so they don’t prevent him from his long-term goal. I think this honestly isn’t only applicable to prototyping, but can also be applicable to everyday life.  He brought into play how important it is to write your goals down in game design.

It was also super interesting to see how, even without any coding or drawing for the art, he was able to create a solid draft of his dog rescue game.  He used google images and photoshop for the art, and he used an online tool to create the testable game prototype. This way of prototyping is extremely useful and really puts into perspective how you can effectively create a prototype at such a low-cost, meaning anyone can do it!  Not only this, but you also don’t even need to know how to code, design, or draw. This is definitely useful in game prototyping and for our future endeavors as students. The fact that it truly is that easy to make a testable game is super cool.  

The other point I found intriguing is when Barrett discussed the core mechanic and how it is the purposeful mechanic that occurs most frequently.  He initially stated the core mechanic for pacman is eating, but then said it’s actually moving. That really made me think about most games I’ve played.  It seems that almost every single games’ core mechanic is moving. When we think of a first person shooter game, even though shooting is a large mechanic, you need to move in order to not get shot, and you also must move to find other people.  This notion definitely had me thinking deeply about core mechanics in the games that I play.

GDC. “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Rapid Prototyping.” YouTube video, 25:49. Sep 6, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWkiv1hTPM

In Tracy Fullerton’s The Structure of Games, Fullerton discusses the similarities between games and what exactly it even means to be one.  She compares games to other media and explains a very important difference between the two: when it comes to games, the player is actively involved and has some sort of influence on the outcome.  You can choose what you want to do when you’re playing a game. However, with regards to media, it is the opposite: the player has more of a passive role and doesn’t have an influence on the outcome.  Another feature of games that Fullerton discusses is objective. The contrast between games and media is again stated: with media, characters still have objectives, but the viewer does not. With games, the player does have specific objectives.  Along with player involvement and objectives, Fullerton further goes on to discuss what else truly makes a game, including procedures and rules. Rules are the structure to a game that state what a player can or cannot do, which we discussed in class.  On Tuesday, I found it very interesting when we created/modified one rule to the board game that we were playing in class. It completely changed the game we were playing, which only goes to show how important rules really are. As soon as you change them up, the game becomes something entirely different.  Rules are what make games unique.

Later on, Fullerton discusses player engagement in games, including detailed stories and concepts.  This is incredibly important when it comes to board games, video games, etc., because without the players, there would be no game.  Far too many games that have had great potential have ended up not being successful due to lack of player engagement from the creators.  We see this a lot in video games where the developers become uninterested or don’t have enough funding to improve concepts / fix bugs that the community complains about.  All in all, it becomes clear that to make a good game, you must be able to appropriately engage your players and make them want to come back for more. After reading this chapter, I definitely became more aware of the specific structure games have, so much so to the point where you could even find a similarity between Go Fish and Quake (a first person shooter).

Fullerton, Tracy, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Fourth Edition, 2019

Audre Lorde’s Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference was a very interesting and informative read.  In her text, she talked about the inferiority of women alongside racism, further explaining how black women in particular are even more oppressed due to them experiencing both racism and sexism.  On page 117, she states, “This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves.”  This is a very strong statement, but I believe Lorde is stating that societal stereotypes prevent white women from seeing black women’s works the same way they might see someone who is white. However, I feel as though her lack of explanation of many of these very complex and strong statements leave me rather confused and interested in the reasoning behind them, such as when she later on in the text discussed how black lesbians are not necessarily seen as black to other black women.  On page 121, she states, “Heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians.” I am intrigued by this statement, as I never knew of this. However, although the focus of the piece seemed to be mostly on colored women in America, it only further goes to show the inequality LGBTQ+ people also experience.

There were also aspects to this text that left me emotional and shocked, such as when Lorde states, “In certain parts of Africa, small girls are still being sewed shut between their legs to keep them docile and for men’s pleasure” (page 120).  I find this absolutely horrifying and disgusting. Women are still treated like objects in many countries today and are even tested that they’re “virgins” before they are married. Additionally, when she stated that women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in America, I became deeply disturbed with society’s racism and sexism against these innocent individuals who cannot change the way they were born.  Her writing is emotionally evoking and allows readers to truly understand the severity of the situation these individuals are facing and how, even though times are a lot better than the early 1900s, women (especially of color) are still not equal.

Lorde, Audre.  Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.  Received from

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