Accessibility and the concept of “fun” were this week’s two main focus. Putting aside “fun” for a moment, while some games pay heed to the more common of, such as color blindness or perhaps control schemes, is still something that I think is ignored for the most part in many games. I can think of several games off the top of my head where there were no regards to visual contrast, both for the game and the menu, or several games where the controls are confusing and difficult with no ways to change aspects of it, meaning there is already difficulty of access to certain parts of the game. While I do not have a direct example of visibility within games, there have been times in other courses where students would have to design a portfolio or create our own webpages and students would use similar colors for both foreground, background, and text, making visibility extremely difficult. Using something like that as a basis of poor visibility and contrast, I can only imagine what it must be like for those visually impaired.

                Fun was something that was discussed that I found greatly enjoyable, simply because it is such a basic concept that is different for everyone. As we discussed in class, different games are fun for different reasons; where some games might be unfun to some because of its difficulty, others might find it fun because of that difficulty. I spoke of Dark Souls as my example of a game where the difficulty spurred me onwards, making me want to play the game. However, I have several friends who have quit playing because they didn’t have the patience nor tolerance to deal with the difficulty, attributing the difficulty to either unfairness or an acknowledgement of their lack of ability. Similarly, I have friends who enjoy games that offer “dumb fun” because of how powerful the player feels. Something that is completely foreign to me is the idea of competitive gameplay, where some would find fun and enjoyment over the sole reason that there was a visual skill indicator. Fun is a concept that I saw as very basic, and hearing of reasons why different people found something fun was just a nice and different perspective.

                Sources

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

               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

               This week we covered cooperation within games, both in gaming and the designing of. We attempted, important key word right there, to cooperate in games through playing a board game and by playing overwatch. I feel this was something that many, if not all, students within the course had experience with, though none of it really went to good use as perhaps the suddenness of doing so with people we were not wholly familiar with had the opposite effect. Through discussion, we discussed and went over the different roles within game development and the importance of playing our parts, something that we would have to put into effect for our own projects.

                The board game my group played in class was something that took teamwork and really obscured it, making teamwork almost an impossibility throughout the early stages of the game. It did explore different methods of teamwork, as teamwork was something that wasn’t possible in the early game, almost discouraged, but as the game progressed the goal of teamwork with other players would emerge despite the lack of a team objective being present. It explored the idea of teams not needing to be present, just personal goals, and morphing that into working together to achieve those goals despite the game being one where there could only be one “winner.” I feel like the game my group played embodied the idea of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which within the game setting felt unique when conceptualizing teamwork.

                Something Fullerton briefly mentions in this week’s reading is “everybody does everything.” While we talked in class of people in teams working on what they excel at, we also talked of the importance of actually putting in work individually. Our groups aren’t these large, company scaled work forces; while it is important that we try to put our own knowledge and expertise to use, simply sticking to what we know isn’t possible in small scale projects such as what we are to be working on. These three short words describes our roles as students, and group members, pretty concisely as it covers what we spoke in class about working in groups.

                Sources

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

               This week’s exercise of working with cards to construct a story was something that was putting Fullerton’s Working with Dramatic Elements into practice in sorts. My group started off with only the white cards of Cards Against Humanity and turning that into a narrative, which was easy enough since the cards already had words on them and spinning them into a semi-coherent story wasn’t too taxing. Things got harder once we switched to a standard deck of cards, because it’s just like how Fullerton describes checkers.

               “The game of checkers is very abstract: There is no story, no                characters, and no compelling reason why you would want to                capture all of your opponent’s pieces, except for the fact that it’s the                objective of the game.”

               This is something that applies to a deck of cards as well, to a slightly lesser extent, since the cards do have symbols and values to them. But the usage of the cards still varies, making it abstract. It’s that abstraction that allows for the for the wide variety of different games that use a standard deck of cards to exist. But turning that into a story was somewhat more difficult, especially since my group opted to try to incorporate each person, card type, and card value into the story. Our stories were closer to short stories that didn’t really go anywhere, so there wasn’t any chance to get invested in them. There was no character development, no story progression, and no attachment, and ended being like something you would see out of a writing prompt that goes ‘make a horror story in three sentences.’

               We also watched and played through a little of Virginia, which was one of the most linear games I have seen in a long while. Linearity isn’t something that is bad, because far from what EA thinks, linear games aren’t dead. It’s something that works for the game, as it’s supposed to a game that retells and recreates real life events. Despite being a game that doesn’t seem to hold much stake, and essentially is just a story that you go through at your own pace, there is suspense and the subverting of expectations. If I had to compare it to something, it’s like a game of DnD where we don’t get to roll for initiative and the DM is just going through the campaign like they’re telling a story.

                Sources

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

                 I feel that narrative is something that many people confuse with the idea of a “story,” which isn’t wrong. In Henry Jenkins’ Game Design as Narrative Architecture, he states that “narrative analysis need not be prescriptive” and that “many games do have narrative aspirations.”  The first quote is something I would relate to people who believe that narrative is something that in is a 1:1 relation to story and spoken dialogue. Again, this isn’t necessarily wrong but there is so much more to narrative than just what is explicitly told to us in games. Much of the world building, the background information, and even the context of the events of the game can contribute to what narrative is. “If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories. Stories are not empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to the next.” This is something that I feel is especially true for games; an action roleplaying game has its own way of telling its story through dialogue and cutscenes, while a shooter might do it do mission briefings and descriptions.

                 If I remember correctly Mejeur’s PLASMA presentation, her definition of narrative was simple a means to an end of progressing the story, something to move the story along. Translated into a game, that can be as simple as something like ‘turning the page’ or ‘selecting the next level.’ In ‘Rainbow Six Siege,’ a shooter game, the narrative might be the character bios, or the situational context of each round, or the overarching theme of the events, or even simply the act of defeating the enemy team. But that is something that people may be confused simply by the fact that in the game, there isn’t a driven story. Something like the game Half Life 2 would be a textbook definition of a game with a story driven narrative, with exploration and important dialogue explaining the story to the player. Jenkins’ also mentions that “the experience of playing video games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story.” Simplifying the narrative of a game to just the story ignores many other aspects of a video game that might contribute to the broader definition of game narrative. Game state, game population, or even, something I feel is most important to game narrative, us the players.

                Sources

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Electronic Book Review

                 This week in class, we looked at the idea of prototyping from several different perspectives. We saw and experienced prototyping firsthand, listened to Mark Barrett speak of rapid prototyping, and watched our peers play several levels of The Beginner’s Guide. All of these really helped to open up avenues on different ways prototypes and prototyping can be interpreted and used. Our own prototypes were very much in the works proof of concepts type products, and one that we as students would have to carry on and develop into final products after having deliberating on them for a while. Barrett’s presentation on game development, and as a subsequent eventuality: prototyping, portrayed them as a quick and dirty product. Prototypes in that regard seemed to be more a brainstorming tool and first step rather than a second step, as seen with the one-to-four-day prototyping period. Finally, there was The Beginner’s Guide, where the “prototypes” are presented more as final products rather than the previous two. I just thought with these three examples, we seemingly have different definitions of prototyping in different stages of development.

                 The different tools, resources, and perspectives that Barrett introduces was something I thought was noteworthy. For instance, he redefined several things I thought I had a solid grasp on up until hearing it. His outlook on what a prototype should be, where every stage of the prototype should still be reminiscent and indicative of the final product, rather than my notion that only the final stage of the prototype should matter. That “the journey is just as important as the outcome” definition was something I needed, and the visual representation with the bike drawing was more helpful than any statement really. Goal setting was another point Barrett goes over, and its yet another thing I felt was useful in any working environment. I spent two years in high school and my first three years of college in architecture, and I guess something I always had trouble with was working towards that important end goal (final structural design for example) with all these smaller urgent goals in front me (in this case, assignments from other courses). Something I eventually realized (after I decided architecture wasn’t my thing) was that all these other assignments were also architectural assignments, and were stuff I could’ve tied in to my final design, and that they were goals I should’ve incorporated along my path to my final important goal rather than as side goals. Barrett’s presentation was pretty much a visual representation of everything I have been hearing up until now, and it was something that was sorely needed to really cement much of it in place.

                Sources

GDC. “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Rapid Prototypes!” YouTube video, 6 September 2017.

This week we talked about the structure, procedural rhetoric, and some ideas for games and game design. In Conceptualization of Game Design Workshop, Tracy Fullerton talks about the origin of ideas when it comes to design. “Great ideas come from great input into your mind and senses. Living a full life- full of curiosity, interesting people, places, thoughts, and events- is the starting point to being a person full of ideas (Fullerton 165).” This was something that we also covered in class during our brainstorming session where we all came up with a game idea, no matter how simple or mundane, based off of something we had experienced that day. If something as simple as our everyday lives could inspire a game, unique experiences and thoughts could inspire something greater.

Fullerton also mentions something I think is very important, which is drawing inspiration from sources other than games. “Use your interest in something other than games to fill your mind with potential ideas.” This is something I so, so, so very much agree with, and I cannot stress that feeling enough. This permeates to not just game design, but also game critique. I cannot recall how many times I have heard the phrase “This [game] is the ‘Dark Souls’ of [insert genre].” When describing a game idea, I believe it is fine to draw inspiration from a game, but it should only go that far; if the game can be described using another game, I feel it has become far too reliant on the source. For instance, using Dark Souls as an example, I can name several games that simply is “Dark Souls but [x].” The Surge is Dark Souls but futuristic, Code Vein is Dark Souls but for people of culture anime, Lords of the Fallen is Dark Souls but bad medieval; these games simply use too many similar features and become so reminiscent of one another that they can be described almost in its entirety as such.

Using what we learned about the themes and structure of games (story, mechanic, setting(?)), I feel there has to be some deviation in thinking. There is only so much “inspiration” before it becomes a poor attempt at a homework copy with some answers changed. “Vary the method. Don’t rely on just one method for brainstorming (Fullerton 168).” I wholeheartedly agree because there are so many sources to pull inspiration from, it’s just a matter of seeing them.

Sources

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

The idea of a “mythical norm” is one that although I had not heard before this reading was something that felt similar to another term, I had learned previously in a different media course. Audre Lorde describes in Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference that mythical norm is something that people recognize as “not me [themselves]” and that “it is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society” (Lorde 116). What stands out to me is what the implications of the mythical norm is, it being that a mythical; fabricated or non-existent, term is what is supposed to be setting a precedent for what is meant to be “normal,” as if normality could be defined with a single statement.

What mythic norm reminded me of was the term “mythic speech” used within a different course. Myth is something Roland Barthes describes in Mythologies: Myth Today as “a system of communication, that it [myth] is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea, it is a mode of signification, a form” (Barthes 107). I feel these two terms really tie into each other and build upon what a term with “myth” in it means. Barthes speaks about how myth is a form of communication and its presence is signifying something; in the case of Lorde, she is saying that myth in mythic norm is to signify that normality is “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure (Lorde 116).”

This idea of mythical norm is something that is not only present in gaming, but many other forms of media as well. We are not going to sit here and pretend that the gaming industry is the only offender of this with characters like Doom Guy (by far the most Christian of games and character), Sole Survivor from Fallout 4 (while character customization is available, the game starts the creator as a married white male with a white spouse in house), and though he isn’t exactly Christian nor financially secure in the normal way, Geralt from the Witcher series, when extremely “mythical norm” representatives like Tony Stark, John Wick from John Wick, or Lucifer from Lucifer diverges much from this concept.

Sources

Barthes, Roland. Myths Today.

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

               Robert Ebert’s Video Games Can Never Be Art was a reading that, I will admit, got a reaction out of me. After reading it, there were many things I wanted to discuss about his stance on video games and several things I believe to be misconceptions. Ebert argues the extent of what video games can be before the simply become a “representation” of another medium, and that ultimately what separated video games from what he perceived as art was that games had “rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.” What I personally fail to understand is his next point that when a video game lacks these traits that make them uniquely such, they become a representation of one of several entities he considers art.

                Ebert states that is that games have rules, points, objectives, and an outcome, therefore allowing the audience to “win” that stops the game from being an experience, which is something attributed to art; it is something you can only experience. However, are there not traits which he has associated with games that are also present in story, novels, plays, dance, and films? These are all mediums Ebert believes to be art, not on the basis of emotions evoked, or messages conveyed, but because, from my understanding, they do not require effort nor participation from the viewer in order to experience it. “The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.”

                However, do story, novels, plays, dance and film not contain rules, objectives, and outcomes? Though they do not require participation from the viewer, are these traits not essential to the way those art mediums are created. A story, novel, or film with no outcome isn’t much of a complete piece. Rules are also necessary, are grammar, human limitations, and certain requirements (such as sound, or visuals) necessary for certain mediums? Are stories, novels, or film something that are written and created with no objectives in mind? I could argue that there are video games that have no outcomes, nor “winning”, that certain games revolve around the idea of making our own objectives and rules. Do we as the viewer not have to participate, be it mentally (reading, paying attention), or physically (moving, listening, seeing) for other forms of the listed forms of art? Why would games be an exception on the basis that they require more?

Sources

Ebert, Robert. 2010. Video Games Can Never Be Art. Received –  http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art