The Den of Games @thedenofgames - Tumblr Blog

Moving

I'm moving my detailed blogs to:

http://thedenofgames.wordpress.com/

I have also opened a Twitter account at:

https://twitter.com/DenOfGames

I will still update this blog with a summary of my main blogs at the above website, together with a mix of random images occassionally.

Will update on Twitter as soon as possible!

Thoughts on Gaming - The Sexism Debate

So this is my first post regarding a topic which is quite the rage these days and that is the issue of sexism in gaming. I felt that I should write this post to share my thoughts on the matter.

As if it isn't already obvious, I played quite the number of games since childhood. Of course, as a child the topic of sexism didn't occur to me, both because the gaming industry itself was quite new, along with the usual ignorance that comes with being a child.

Personally, I never considered gender to be an important part in the playing experience as....well who gives a shit if a girl plays a game right? Apparently, wrong.

Originally, gaming has had the image of nerds living in basements with their mothers (it has died down but that is for another topic). In a way, this meant that female gamers weren't viewed as people who would enjoy the hobby (which also later lead to the 'gamer girls are fat and ugly' stereotype). Basically, sexism was in there from the start, due to the fact that sexism in general is still an issue in general today and it has obviously carried over to the gaming industry as well.

Here is a video from Anita Sarkeesian's channel which is being shared online, showing how male gamers are pretty much immune from gender issues:

I can go into more detail if I were to dissect every point mentioned in the video but I think Anita's channel is full of information regarding this subject and regardless if you hate her or whatever, she DOES do her research. Heck, the situation where Anita got threatened out of her home due to death and rape threats pretty much proves her point.

I have also encountered sexism on multiple occasions, either when playing online, browsing the web or in real life. Regardless if a lot of remarks are considered as jokes, those jokes are used as actual tools for harassment for women. I also have to say that I have made a joke about it unconsciously which was so out of character for me. Guess I heard so many of these 'jokes' that I got infected, for lack of a better term.

I was watching the Super Smash Bros. Documentary which came out recently. It was about how the Smash Bros. competitive community grew over the years as it is a series which I greatly enjoy. At one part of the documentary, many veterans of the series were introduced among which was female, known as Lilian Chen or her alias 'Milktea'. A fan of the series like any other, she had been part of the competitive push for Smash Bros. as a professional player herself.

What happened? As you can see in the Ted link below, she was the target of harassment ESPECIALLY since she was practically the only female at the start. Interestingly enough, it was the first thing that came to my mind for me in the documentary since it was pretty cool seeing people of all races and genders competing. Then I realised that she no longer competed to which I assumed that she had her reasons like all professional players who quit. I later found out that she stopped competing because of the harassment, not because of the reasons you usually hear when a male professional quits the scene. More information can be found in the link below, as well as the documentary itself:

http://ideas.ted.com/2014/09/18/whats-it-like-to-be-a-woman-in-competitive-gaming-a-female-gamer-explains/

To mention another example,which by the way angers me is the controversy sparked by the IeSF gaming tournament where the tournament was gender separated. To make matters worse, the games which females were allowed to play were limited to TWO games where as the male tournament had FOUR. According to people involved, this was done to be in accordance with the sports federation since gender separation is done in physical sports as well.

Seriously, I can't even believe the stupidity involved in this decision. Why do video game tournaments have to follow those rules?? It is quite obvious to me that these women have great skills and deserve to compete with everyone else. This gem was also said by the people involved:

“In accordance with the International e-Sports Federation’s (IeSF) tournament regulations, since the main tournament event is open to male players only. This is to avoid possible conflicts (e.g. a female player eliminating a male player during RO8) among other things.”

How was this even said? Regardless if they really are fighting for equal rights in tournaments, I cannot understand why this is even a thing in the first place. More details in the below link:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/07/male-only-video-game-tournament-sets-off-controversy/

To conclude, as an aspiring game designer/developer AND eSports fan, I would really love to see both genders enjoying the hobby equally in ANY way they choose to. If I could play and discuss games with my female cousins back in the day on equal grounds, I don't see why this cannot be the case for everyone out there.

I will also re-visit this area in future posts regarding game design.

URL Change!

As part of the ongoing re-design, the URL has been changed from http://projectsmokescreen.tumblr.com to http://thedenofgames.tumblr.com

While the previous one fit the theme of developing a game which would not be revealed until the end, that project has been completed and thus the new URL makes more sense for the content moving forward.

I will be covering what I had created in future posts and will be working on organizing the links to the left of the page to link to specific blog content such as reviews, technology, design, etc.

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A Fresh Start!

Throughout the year, I have been writing about my thoughts regarding certain topics in game design which was quite a fun experience, not to mention that it was a huge success!

However, I have decided to expand this blog to cover the world of gaming from my perspective which is something I have been wanting to do for quite some time now (but was too lazy to actually get to it...).

Therefore, I will be covering my thoughts on games I play as I go along, together with some posts describing certain games from my past which I felt had a big influence on myself. Random topics which I feel the need to address will also be part of my new blog.

Of course, this does not mean that my journey towards game development/design will come to an end. On the contrary, I will be broadening the subject with blog posts regarding the technical side of game development and the discoveries that come with it.

More information will be coming soon! I may decide to change the blog URL in the near future. For the mean time, please bear with the new theme as I re-design my blog! Credit goes to http://zeldacrazethemes.tumblr.com/ for the current theme!

Hope you enjoy my blog and what is to come! Stay tuned!

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Closing Thoughts

This course has taught me quite a number of valuable lessons, particularly about arrogance and the importance of empathy with your audience in my design.

I covered the topic on arrogance in a previous blog post so I will focus more on the empathy aspect.

I had always wanted to make certain games based on my own ideas and ambitions and that is still the case as I have my own interests as well to take into account. I took it a bit too far by only trusting myself and did not try to search for other ideas because I thought I knew best. It feels good to finally adapt a different mindset.

However, if it comes to making something for a particular audience, I have learned that you can take away a lot of crucial ideas for your game from your audience. Of course, some filtering must be done in order to keep the design in line with your vision.

I have always wanted to design a game that strikes other people in the same way that a lot of them struck me, particularly in my childhood.

I also realize that the world is constant state of flux and with new generations of people having different perspectives and tastes in games, I have to adapt instead of getting stuck in my traditional egotistical train of thought.

I would just like to say that I am very proud to have been a part of this course and have seen the effect of making someone happy by creating something that resonates with them with my own eyes, something which I want to replicate to other people.

Constructing the Narrative

I have to say that for such a seemingly simple game concept such as text-based adventure, it proved to be quite challenging to structure the narrative.

I realized earlier on that the more choices, you include, the more scenes you have to create which end up being a nightmare to control and fix later on due to all the complex interactions.

I decided to go for the more focused and polished approach rather than flooding the user with choices just for the sake of it. I wanted to balance all the elements which I decided to use for my game rather than simply focus on choices.

I have never written a story before which made me very nervous when it came to thinking about whether this is appropriate for my muse. He is well versed in game narrative and is well aware of many common tropes used for game choices.

Near the end of the story, my writing skills changed as there was a clear different between the first part and second part of the narrative. The more I wrote, the more I got into writing the story and it kept becoming clearer and clearer. I found that the best approach is to sit down and write, check whether what you wrote makes sense for what you want and if it is consistent with the prior texts and go with it.

In the end, I'm pleased to say that my muse really liked the story and wants a continuation of the story.

Participatory Design Thoughts

Before delving into this area, I found it pretty difficult to figure out what type of game my muse wanted. This is because a person wishes to have something that tailors to their tastes but find it difficult to break down into individual elements.

As a designer, I encounter the same problem with myself when it comes to creating something. You become dedicated to achieving the fuzzy goal post you have in mind and you set out to follow some mental tasks to break down your work into smaller elements.

The same idea is applied here as you are going through this process with your muse to gather information that will ultimately give you direction to make a game with the muse's interests in mind.

Simply put, I couldn't really do without participatory design as I would be trying to create a game without any sense of direction in any sense. I wouldn't have figured out that the muse placed narrative above all else, let alone the cultural elements that would please my muse.

I wish I had played a Participatory Design Game with my muse but due to time constraints at the time, it was not possible. Even though I felt that this part of the process was not very crucial in a lot of games, it would have definitely helped in giving me a direction for the story.

You can never really extract every possible detail from the user but it is important to make great use of the information that is available and to develop good communication skills to ask more relevant questions in the future.

Aesthetic Design

Due to the very limited ways I can improve the graphical fidelity of my text-based game, I had to resort to the simple things such as atmospheric backgrounds, images showing the current area, music to compliment the images and sound effects,

Finding the sound files was a simple task but searching for those that fit with the theme I'm trying to portray wasn't. Some files were either too long or too annoying while others would make the user laugh instead of tense.

Another problem I found with collecting the images for the prototype was that I couldn't find the precise images I wanted for certain scenes.and even then I had to make sure that the sound and music matches with the theme of the image.

However, it was worth it in the end as I really liked the prototype which I created, along with my muse who praised the whole package and aesthetic selection.When I tried playing it without the aesthetics, it felt very lifeless, even though the writing was the same.

It goes back to my blog post about 'Making the best out of simplicity'. The user interaction is very limited which means there has to be other ways to engage the player, like reading a book compared to visual media which manages to involve readers without the use of aesthetics but rather a well-written narrative.

Of course, I was designing a game as well as a narrative which meant that there was the element of interactivity involved. With enough creativity, the users will forget that the game isn't animated and engages with it in the same manner as one which is.

Making the best out of simplicity

On the topic of UI design, it has been quite an important element for my Twine prototype. This is because due to its textual nature, I cannot depend on cinematics or animations to 'wow' the user which means that the aesthetics are limited.

The advantage however is that the UI is simple and intuitive by nature because still images and simple text lead to the user not having to constantly search for information that the game has communicated previously.

In reference to 'Usability' by Jakob Nielsen, the five attributes are still present in a text-based game but in a more subtle manner:

Learnability - The objective of the user is self-explained through the in-game narrative due to its exploratory nature.

Efficiency - The user only has to read and respond via simple mouse clicks to proceed. It is a potential problem for users who can't read well however which is a natural problem of text games.

Memorability - For the purpose of my game, the narrative is not long along with the added text showing the user how much resources they have alongside a potential choice, if they have any. This allows the user to know what they can do at that moment, rather than giving them a choice which does not work because they forgot what they had picked up previously.

Errors - Due to the complex relationships of Twine structures, errors can arise from the dependencies of previous scenes in the narrative. Careful care has to be made for calculation of the player resources and system variables, otherwise the damage will be irreparable unless the user starts over.

Satisfaction - I changed the default interface to resemble the style of old text adventure games, splitting the screen into an image of the scene and the text describing the situation underneath. In addition, there is a smooth transition between one scene and the next along with a subtle special effect for aesthetics.

As can be seen, due to the simple nature of the game, the aesthetics depend on images, sounds and transition animations. Great focus has been made on user friendliness to grant the user, in this case my muse, an experience which is focused solely on the element he desires, the narrative experience.

Game Design and Arrogance

For this post, I would like to reflect on my experiences on game design thus far.

Even before starting this course, I held a certain arrogance towards game design where I thought I had better ideas than a lot of game designers out there. This was in part due to my long history of playing games coupled with my lack of experience in making them (none at all).

Like many practices out there, it is very easy to criticize something without knowing the methods and effort required to build the artifact. Of course, this does not mean that you have to design or develop games in order to criticize an experience but it allows us to view something from a different perspective and come to understand certain design decisions.

I admit that I was quite arrogant and often dismissed a lot of games harshly simply because of my belief that I knew better than most of the people in the industry.

Now when it came to actually having to design games, my perspective completely changed. I fell into the trap of assuming that whatever I created and thought of as "great", will be great for everyone which is far from reality. Certain "failures" allowed me to reflect on what game design is all about and that there needs to be consideration for the people you are targeting.

In hindsight, I should have reached out more to other people to evaluate or give feedback on what I was designing or developing. Some people did help me and I am grateful for their opinions and advice which would have resulted in me going down the wrong path had I ignored them, holding on to my arrogance.

In closing, I would like to say that I hope to approach game design with a more open mind and thanks to this course, I feel like I'm on the way there!

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The Tale of The Muse and the Friend

When looking at the word 'muse', what comes to mind is a source of inspiration for our ideas. However, what happens when the this source of inspiration is also your friend? Does the person become a design aid or someone you want to create a game with?

I will give my personal view of the matter in this post and I will start by giving some background on my 'partner in design', as I like to call him :)

Having known each other for roughly 5 years now, we took part in a lot of play-sessions together in games such as Left 4 Dead, which is the game that made us know each other for the first time, moving on to games such as Borderlands 2, Path of Exile and more recently, Dota 2.

Apart from having been my partner in the mentioned games, he has also been a source of guidance in the past few years and that puts him in a position close to me.

Of course, in terms of game design, this would mean that I would have some assumptions in my head about what he enjoys which would obviously not be ideal as that would mean doing something akin to 'oh I know he likes RPGs so I'll just make an RPG and he will be happy' which I wanted to avoid.

Even with that danger, my mentality was that if he is that close to me, then I should try my best to make a game that would please him for sure and doing that means that I should give my best to understand him by getting to know values and beliefs.

My approach is not to treat him as an experiment but as someone who I want to design a game with, while at the same time, designing something that would really please him. This would allow me to approach game design from a non-selfish perspective, learning and exploring things which I would not have though of otherwise and to make a game that makes someone happy, which is something I always like to do throughout my life.

Of course, this blog post details what my view of choosing a friend for a muse seems like. Designing a game with someone I did not know previously is something I wish to explore in the future and would allow me to give a better comparison. Many people would jump at the opportunity to get to dictate the direction of a game someone is willing to make for them which is something I am curious about.

One thing is certain in both cases: I should never assume what a person would like and project those assumptions into my game as this has been the shortcoming for a lot of game designers today. What I would like in a game is not the same for someone else which means I should always take other people into consideration and this exercise gives me the opportunity and motivation to see the effectiveness such an approach has as opposed to going "hey I always thought this is cool, I should put this in my game I'm sure everyone would like this!".

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