PLAY JOURNAL

Aybuke Gul TURKER

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Address Is Approximate from sharp & Jenkins on Vimeo.

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Infinite Analytics - MIT Summer Accelerator Demo Day 2012 from Martin Trust Center on Vimeo.

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Week 12 Fun and Accessibility

Fun and Accessibility (Chapter 11)

Fun is something that we always have to consider from the beginning of game design to the end. Games are voluntary activities; therefore they should take players attention to make them keep playing. Accessibility is the another important part of our game. We can easily go through the game without thinking twice. Everything can seem us very accessible and clear to understand because we design the game. The more we spend time with our own game, the less we can see what is missing and if everything is accessible to everybody. Therefore working with a usability team can help us to see if our game is accessible to everybody. For this usability testing professionals and researchers work together in those high tech labs. There are many ways to test your game. In the book , it is suggested that keep players separate like different rooms, if not , ask them not to interact with each other. However, as far as I know from my other classes, for usability testing letting players to speak with each other can be a good way. Sometimes having 2 participants to play the same game can give a rich data to researchers.

Dramatic elements of games are what engage players with the formal system- what gets them and keeps them emotionally involved in the game.

Is your game fun?

Challenge: ask your self and tester the following question to make sure your challenges are working.

Reaching and Exceeding Goals: Ask your players to speak out loud so that you can understand if they are engaged in the goals.

Competing against Opponents : Listen your player talk to each other.

Stretching Personal Limits: Ask your play testers to speak about their personal goals in the game as they play.

Exercising Difficult Skills: Reward the player for challenges in the game to make the process fun

Make Interesting Choices: ASk your players to explain what they think the consequences of their choices

Play: What forms of play does your game employ?

Living in Fantasies: Let your player live their fantasies. These are powerful things to keep player in the game.

Social Interaction: People likes being in a communication with others. Adding this feature to your game will keep players stay in the game more.

Exploration and Discovery:

Collection: let people create their collection for engaging them in a game.

Stimulation: Stimulate the senses and imagination (motion sensors, cameras,footpads.)

Self-expression: Give people a chance to show off who they are

Construction/Destruction: Let people build and ruin

Story: it is a powerful mechanism for engaging people’s emotions

Analyzing Appeal: Analyze the main pleasures of your game concept and make sure they are clearly apparent to the players.

Improving Player Choices:

Risk versus reward - make the choices matter. In order to have an engaging game let the decisions rise and fall.

Types of decision: to make the decision exciting, each weapon must have a dramatically different impact on the player’s chance of winning. The decision itself also should be challenging.

Puzzles are good for creating conflict in single player games.

Reward and Punishment

Reward System:

support the next level

have romantic associations , like magic weapons

tied into story line if the game

Anticipation: Make it clear to understand for the players.

Suprise ; suprises should be rondamly presented during game in a good way

Progress: allow players to feel that they are moving toward is good to keep players in the game. Designing milestone could be a way of doing so. These are small goals along the way to the grand goal of winning.

The End: Once the players resolve the game completely. Give a good reward. Multiplayer games have their own reward built in the game itself. For example the satisfaction of beating beating other players. For the single player at the and the hero can give the reward like animation.

FunKillers

Micromanagement: When a task becomes repetitive or tedious to a player. Bring a fresh player get their ideas about certain mechanics if they complain like too much work, too tiresome. It is a red flag. Let players avoid details.

Stagnation:

insurmountable

Arbitrary Events

Predictable paths

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Week 12 Functionality, Completeness, and Balance

Functionality, Completeness, and Balance (Chapter 10)

The author of the book addresses the ways to make your game functional, complete and balanced. There are many rules to have all those features in your game. I feel like breaking the original game into pieces and see them step by step is a great idea. I cannot imagine anybody fixing a game as a whole. However, this fixing on a particular part of the game will affect the other parts. For example if we do not have any balance problem in the beginning, we can have this problem, as we modify the game. Therefore designers should keep an eye on every subtle change, not to have a big problem at the end.

I briefly summarized the rules and steps below.  

Break the play testing process down into discrete phases, with each phase focus on specific aspect of the design, get done with one aspect and move on to the next one. This will help to organize your fixing process of the game.

Four Basic Steps of Design

Foundation - Fun

Structure - Functionality and Fun

Formal Details - Functional, Internally complete & balanced

Refinement - Making sure fun is there.

Is Your game Functional? Let a person who has never seen this game before  play the game. If this player can play the game without help, the game is functional. Player can encounter some problems and drawbacks.(Search for "spawn camping")

Loopholes: They are unintended and unfair advantages for players. A play can discover a flaw stem from designer and can take advantage of it.

Dead End: Players cannot continue to play game no matter what they do.

" An internally complete game is one in which the players can operate the game without reaching any point at which either the game play or the functionality is compromised".

Is your game Balanced? make sure if the game meets the goals you have set for the player experience. No single strategy dominates all other for multiplayer games. For the single player games, skill levels should be adjusted to the target audience. ( for balancing areas variables, dynamics, starting conditions and skill.)

Symmetrical Games: Each player has the exact same starting conditions and access to the same resources and information.

Asymmetrical Games : offer different conditions, different objective . They are still fair. Balance should be provided by the designer among those different items.

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Week 11 Playtesting

I made my playtesting session based on what Fullerton design suggestion. Playtesting progress is very well explained in this section. However, as far as I know from my other game class, the research question is very important before you start your playtesting. Surprisingly, I could not see anything about the research question in this particular chapter. They only explained the aim of doing playtesting.

Fullerton Chapter 9

PLAYTESTING

Introduction: (2-3 m)

Hi This is Aybuke. Thank you for being out participant for the gameplay. Iam working for this game company and we are playtesting ourgame. ( brief explanation about playtesting). Your participation and suggestions are so important for us and for our game designer. Please let me know anything you think that would improve the game. I am just here to collect the data for the designers so I did not design the game. Sometimes you can stuck during game because of poor design or technical problems please let us know those kind of problems.

Warm up (5m)

Do you like playing games?

What is your favorite game?

Do you always play game with your friends?

How do you learn about new released games?

Play Session (15-20m)

This game is still in development. We want to test the game and get some feedback from you. We are not testing your skills and there are no wrong answers. “think aloud” play test them.

Discussion of game experience.(15-20m)

what do you think about the game?

what is the objective of the game?

Did you figure out how to play the game quickly?

Is there anything that you did not like about the game ?

Was anything confusing?

How would you describe this game someone who has never played it before?

Warm up

Thank you for coming ( keep in touch with your players)

METHODS OF PLAYTESTING

One on one testing: researcher and playtester

Group testing: a researcher and a group of people

Feedback Forms: give each person after playing the game and compare the result. Surveymonkey (microsoft)

Interview: face to face not a discussion like a verbal quiz

Open Discussion

Data Hook: Collect data on player movement and action in the game. ( microsoft)

BASIC USABILITY TESTING

      Do not lead- you will learn from your playtesters.

      Remind Testers to think aloud

      Quantitative Data-take notes

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WEEK 10 Designing a Game   Fullerton, T. (2008). Chapter 6 & 7

Chapter 6:

In this chapter, It is explained that How to design a game from very beginning. I took away some key information please see the picture.

Chapter 7: Prototyping

Prototyping is the building a tangible model of what you think which can be testable for the feasibility and improvement of the idea.

Physical Prototyping:

Physical prototype of your game does not include all the game mechanics , it is a way of trying to formalize  your ideas or isolate issues so that you can see what works, what doesn't work.

It allows you focusing on gameplay rather than technology.

As a game designer, you can get real time feedback from the participants.

By asking other non technical team members to play the game, you can get valuable design ideas from their playing experience.

As a designer you should always remember that ‘ a 3D space is only one component of an engaging game experience’.

Before starting to physical prototyping,  you should first visualize the core gameplay mechanism. ( diagrams)

Do not forget, you are just prototyping the core gameplay not all the game mechanics.

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Sifteo Cubes

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Week 10 Play Journal MineCraft

Think about when you entered the game for the first time.  What did the title screen invoke? How did you feel about the game during the first few minutes of playing it?

It took me awhile to enter the game. I directly started to play the game right after I see the start point. I was trying to understand the game mechanics during the first few minutes of playing.

Think about the game interface.  How does the type of interface influence your experience of the game

The game interface is somewhat 3D. It is hard to move because the environment is quite messy.

Think about the game mechanics.  How do they affect your experience with the game?  Do they contribute to the kind of feelings the game tries to invoke?

It is a quite rich game in terms of game mechanics. Player can move any direction that she wants. She can jump. She can shoot the enemies and some other object in the game environment. The player collect items throughout the game such as flower, box and side.

What educational affordances do you see with this game (for example, game mechanics, genre capability, content, role playing, etc.)? I could not see any educational affordances.

I could not see any educational affordances here unless you are a student in the police academy. There are some real strategies in the game to kill the enemies. Being aware of those stratejies and doing practice about them can be helpful for police academy students.

What other thoughts did this game provoke?

This game did not seem to me very realistic for the first time; however, they used sound effects very well to make the game realistic. The sounds really made me excited about the game as well as afraid of the game. Also, using keyboard is not convenient for this game and sometimes push buttons did not work. I played almost an hour, but I really could not go further.   

[aybukegul]

Pyramid of Djoser where the first built pyramid called ‘ Step Pyramid’ (El-Haram el-Mudarrag) placed.

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Week 10 Gamifying learning experiences:

Domínguez, A., Saenz-de-Navarrete, J., de-Marcos, L., Fernández-Sanz, L., Pagés, C., & Martínez-Herráiz, J. (2013). Gamifying learning experiences: Practical implications and outcomes. Computers & Education, 63380-392.

I feel like having some game features in the learning settings can contribute to students learning experience in a positive way. A learning environment which designed by considering gamification can be more motivating. However those pozitif effects cannot be right for every single students. As we see from the article, while it is working for some of the students, it did not work for others. Also there were another limitation because of lack of technology and method. For example, student do not get immediate feedback which is important for motivation. Sum up, gamification should consider the features of video games to keep students on focus. In addition, in order to have a productive teaching process by using gamification, technological shortcomings should be eliminated.

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Week 9 Are Boy Games Even Necessary?

Lazzaro, N. (2008). Are Boy Games Even Necessary?

In this study, the author of the article mentions having games which apply to both girls and boys player. It is argued that good games on the market are all for males such as role-playing, fighting, war and sports games. When it comes to gender issue in games,  I do not like saying games for guys and games for girls. Instead of trying to genderize games, putting them into different categories and having both female and male characters is a better way of making games available for everybody.

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Week 9 Working with System Dynamics

- Fullerton, T. (2008). Chapter 5.

"A system is defined as a set of interacting element that form an integrated whole with a common goal or purpose.”(p.111). The basic elements of system is objects, properties, behaviors, and relationships. It is emphasize on the chapter that in order to understand a system, researcher should study it as a whole meaning putting it in motion. Because system itself is the combination of its component. If one of those component is not considered, the system will not work and the system will not be truly understood. If it works without having some of its component, we cannot call it as a system. When it comes to game systems, the designer should make sure that system works without having any problem. In order to know if the system works, having players to play test can be a good way. However, As far as I know from other readings, this process should be very repetitive. Later designers can test for fun and challenge. These two segment change from person to person. While designers tuning the game, they should be able to isolate the objects or relations that are making problems from gameplay and then they should fix them without causing a new problem in gameplay.

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Week 9 Violent video games and the Supreme Court

Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Violent video games and the Supreme Court: Lessons for the scientific community in the wake of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. American Psychologist. ( 57-59 & 63-65)

People might think that if video games cause violence in the society because of their violent content. It does make sense because we always mention the intuitive learning which happens inherently. Even the players themselves do not know if they learn anything while they are playing. However, as far as I know from the reading that I read for my other classes, learning has to be purposeful activity. Therefore if we want players to learn things by playing, we should embed this knowledge into the game. This embedding should be in order and make somehow sense to players so that learning can occur during game time. Unless a game aim to teach how to kill a person or being an awful person who spread violence all around himself, considering video games as a harmful experience is not right. As I read from the article, researches also show that videogames are not teaching to people to harm anything. As a supportive outcome, I would like to qoute from the reading that “Despite claims from some scholars that violent media might explain as much as 30% of societal violence (Strasburger, 2007), some scholars began to note that the video game era saw approximately a two-thirds reduction in youth violence, not an increase, which appeared to conflict with some of the statements of harm (Olson, 2004), at least on the societal level.”

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Week 9- PLAY JOURNAL

Wolfenstein 3D & DOOM &  STREET FIGHTER 

1.Think about when you entered the game for the first time.  What did the title screen invoke? How did you feel about the game during the first few minutes of playing it?

Screen is pretty simple. As always first minutes, I tried to understand game without reading any instruction so I was just exploring the game and hitting the buttons randomly to see what happens. But I could not really get the point of the game, so I went back and read the instructions.

2.Think about the game interface.  How does the type of interface influence your experience of the game? (For some games, please be sure to note you are playing them on a different interface than originally intended.  In these cases, do research on the original interfaces and how the games were intended to be played, and discuss the differences between the two).

The interface is simple and easy to understand. It is colorful so  i is eye-catching. The objects are placed very well in the game.

3. Think about the game mechanics.  How do they affect your experience with the game?  Do they contribute to the kind of feelings the game tries to invoke?

Game mechanics are shooting, walking, running, clicking. Yes, they affected the game experience. For example the game let you run instead of walking which makes it better because there are long empty halls which you just want to get rid of this place as soon as possible. So having ‘run’ mechanics makes the game more fun. After shooting people literally die like you see blood, so it does contribute to invoke the feeling that

4. What educational affordances do you see with this game (for example, game mechanics, genre capability, content, role playing, etc.)? I could not see any educational affordances

5. What other thoughts did this game provoke?

Once you got hit and your avatar face gets bloody, I liked it.

DOOM

This game is very similar to ‘Wolfenstein 3D’. So in the very first minutes even though i knew what to click. I always hit the wrong one because I just played ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ before Doom. Everything is so similar to Wolfenstein 3D  but the buttons that you want to hit. Game mechanics are walk, shoot, press the buttons. I could not see educational features. I just played for ten minutes so I could not see any main differences between those two games. Anything what I said for Wolfenstein 3D is the same for Doom, so far.

 STREET FIGHTER 

This game is meant to be played with X Box therefore it was hard to play with a computer because all the buttons are very close to each other.  The interface is quite clear and understandable. There is not any educational point in the game. However, I remember, when I was a kid , I played a similar game to street fighter and I was kind of addicted to that game. Therefore I can see many people are playing this game. There are some realistic effects which increase the motivation of the players.   

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Week 8 Play Journal Diner Dash, Portal & Starcraft

Diner Dash

Think about when you entered the game for the first time.  What did the title screen invoke? How did you feel about the game during the first few minutes of playing it?

  From the title, I assume that it is going to be something about restaurant. The screen was quite nice. Also for the first level , they simulate the game instead of going through instruction. This is a quite good idea. It takes less seconds to know what to do in the game because of this helpful demo.

Think about the game interface.  How does the type of interface influence your experience of the game?

  The interface is quite engaging. They simulate a real restaurant environment. I do like how the avatar looks like. Once customer start to wait, they become angry so seeing that is also engaging and makes the player hurry up.

Think about the game mechanics.  How do they affect your experience with the game?  Do they contribute to the kind of feelings the game tries to invoke?

  You have your avatar which can walk up-down and right -left. You really don't determine which way to go, you just tap where you want to go and your avatar directly goes there with a predetermined way. In this case I would like to be able to pick my way to make it shorter. I wish there would be run as an option. In addition, the avatar can clean the table, serve the meal and get the check.

What educational affordances do you see with this game (for example, game mechanics, genre capability, content, role playing, etc.)?

  There is not any theoretical educational affordances in the game. However, this could be a good game for waiters to practice their job . In additional, it can help people to make an empathy when they are in a restaurant, waiting for to be seated or to be served. They would know they are not the only customers and be patient.

What other thoughts did this game provoke?

  Overall, it is a fun game and I do like how they teach what to do in the game in the very beginning of the game.

Diner Dash vs Starcarft2

In the complex game, there are more tools to build a new environment. It is an open ended situation. For example for Diner Dash, you just do whatever you are supposed to do, the way you will play the game is already determined by somebody else, and you are just repeating the exact same thing. However, for the complex game, you have the opportunity to build your own game play. Of course, there are rules but they do not mostly the player to direct their game play. 

Portal 2

Many of the games applies to learning by doing theory as portal 2. Portal 2 is a quite amazing games in terms of game logic and mechanics. From the examples that I saw, those teachers taught mathematics and physic to students. Later, they took students to a field trip where students can create a level in Portal. This activity lead students to implement what they learned into the designing of the game.