This week we were given readings from a Doug Church article about game tools
as well as a chapter to read in
Challenges for Game Designers by
Brenda Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber. This chapter was about advising and
showing how all games could be broken down into tiny atoms, hence the title of
the chapter being Atoms. They focused on design tools used in the making of
games and they both had different methods of selecting these tools. So let’s
begin and start the dissecting.
Doug Church really emphasises in his article the lack of technical and
precise language used within the game industry, specifically in the design of
objects and assets. After explaining the way in which most people analyse work
by saying "oh that was fun" or "I don’t know, it wasn't that
fun" he expresses his desire for the need of a structured framework for a
design vocabulary around the basis of designing games. The fact that many
people analyse assets of game design like this doesn’t really give the designer
much information about what or how they have done something wrong, sure they
get a very basic idea that its wrong, but not a precise enough amount of detail
that they can set it straight, hence the need for a specific system.
The framework he has come up with was FADT (Formal Abstract Design Tools.)
Here is the broken down phrase explained: 'Formal,' criticise and define items
and be able to explain this to somebody else; 'abstract,' to explain an array
of new and fresh ideas around the whole subject; 'design,' as well, we're
designers after all and 'tools,' as this is the actual framework we will be
creating. The first tools he explained in depth with so far was; intention and perceivable
consequence. But to break it done into a blog post I have simplified these:
Intention: Giving the player a feeling of intention
and progress into the game by letting them act on their own plans as they
understand with your game world.
Perceivable consequence: Giving the player the
ability to assess the situation of an event easily and so that they can learn
from their mistakes and not feel cheated by the game in any way.
After reading this article I really began to appreciate the vocabulary and
tools Church suggested. The feeling of being able to see what went wrong when
you attempted a move on an enemy and it was unsuccessful really does get the
player more involved into the game especially when you can see what went wrong
and apply that observation to the rest of the game world. However the chapter
from
Challenges for Game Designers broke games down into even smaller
and easier digestible atoms of information, so let’s have a look at that shall
we?
Instead of breaking the games down into tools of what designers use to
create a game and to make the player feel absorbed, here they (Brenda
Braithwaite and Ian Schreiber) break games in general into simple tools that
the designers can use to create the finished product. Here they give all these
terms very simple names; however they still define complicated issues. These
were the definitions mentioned inside the chapter:
Game state: A collection of all the relevant game
data that may change during play. The chapter gives poker for example; the game
state would be each players hand and chips, the size of the pot, whose turn is
it to bet, who has folded on the current hand, which cards are in the deck and
in what order. Basically it is every bit of information the game needs to
operate.
Game view: Is the area of the game the player can
see and interact with. In a game of draughts, the game view would be the board,
the pieces and that’s all. None of the information is hidden from the player,
however in battleships; the game view is vastly different.
Game space: This is the whole game area in general.
Avatar: This is the object that represents the
player digitally
Game bits: This is the category for all the games
pieces such as dice, cards, and counters. All the physical objects that make
the game
Game mechanics: To explain this simply, this is the
game rules and how the player interacts with the rules to complete the game. E.g.
how when you land on a snake on snakes and ladders, you MUST go down to the
bottom of the snake. There are no exceptions.
Game dynamics: This explains the pattern of play
that occurs after implementing the game mechanics. They explain in this book
that a game such as
Risk and
Civilization are highly involved
with territorial acquisition.
Goals: Many games have one ultimate goal, and that
is to win. However some games have separate goals that are used to submerge and
absorb players into the game world by getting them to slay beasts and receive a
reward afterwards.
Theme: This is a general definition for: what’s the
game about? Battleships is about you, a captain of a fleet of ships, hunting
down enemy ships pretty much blind. Snakes and ladders is about reaching space
100 and avoiding the snakes.
Both the article by Doug Church and the Challenges for Game Designers book
describes this vocabulary used to create a more structured game design phrase.
However I personally feel that although Doug Church was attempting to make
sense and increase the amount of precise accurate vocabulary, his attempt
actually made the words more ambiguous to me. However that’s my own opinion. He
did however point out tools in
Mario 64 on Nintendo 64 that got me
really thinking in terms of how games are designed more thoroughly. All in all I
actually preferred Braithwaite and Schreiber’s vocabulary of game design.
Simple and straight to the point, theres no need to complicate things.
Following on from the previous episode, here Benjamin Woolley shows us the influences of board games over the last 200 years on British society and how they have developed into game that can become a moral teaching for many people.
After this point, family board games were being produced to bring families through the Great depression, Cluedo and scrabble became a popular family game during this time, these them started to form the biggest game companies at the time, some even are around now, producing the same games.
