Geo-locating for mobile games

A few years ago, we had a boom of mobile games with geo-locating features. The idea of using this feature to put some “real world” component inside the gameplay is good but, sometimes, bureaucratic for some players. It’s cool to imagine a game that the player needs to reach real locations to achieve some prize, but, on the other hand, it’s a little bit limiting for lots of people.



Whether it be good or bad, we will discuss three interesting cases in this post.

The first one is “Jetset: a game for airports”. The game has a tapping gameplay and the player must prevent certain passengers from entering the flight with prohibited products. The game could be played anytime/anywhere but has a special function: if you play Jetset inside an airport you gain new stages, levels and powers.



The second one is “Zombies, run!”. This is funny but complex for most off players. In this game you need to run (for real) from imaginary zombies. The interface is created with audio features and puts the player to run through real locations to discover special items and, sure enough, avoid zombies. Check the video case below:



Today's third and last example is “Shadow cities”. This one is very curious because it takes the player’s location (with the maps function) and creates a medieval scenario to play fantasy battles.



Despite all the difficulties involved, I still see the geo-location feature as a good opportunity for strategies with mobile entertainment. Let’s think more about this subject.

PONG animation

Old but gold.



Everything about PONG here.

A new way to play a memory game

Last year I wrote a post about the importance of recreate gaming mechanics using my card game Álmok as an example. Just to recap, the game used as an example in this post uses the classical mechanics of a memory game with special powers and new card moves (click here to read the content).

Few weeks ago, I was talking about causal games with my friend Terence Reis and he showed me a great mobile app that also recreates the game mechanics of memory: Dizzy Fruit.



Dizzy Fruit is a linear memory game. The interface is very simple and it only shows a drawing of a fruit; the challenge is to say if the next fruit is the same or different than the previous. The more you advance, the faster the game becomes. Check the gameplay below:



Dizzy Fruit is another good example of how we can reinvent a new game using a classic framework. As Juul says (2010, p.2), we are living a “moment in which the simplicity of early video games is being rediscovered”.

Go Gamers!

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Reference:

JUUL, Jesper. A casual revolution. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010.

Horror and terror in Silent Hills’ playable teaser

Few weeks ago, the gamer community was excited about a mysterious game demo available in the Playstation Network named “P.T.”. Sony announced the creepy game in the Gamescon Conference without more details and broke a record of downloads that day.

After many hours of puzzle solving and collective work in the Internet, gamers discovered the enigma behind P.T., the demo was a Playable Teaser of the new Silent Hill, entitled “Sillent Hills”.

The teaser is a mysterious first person experience inside a haunted house. You walk through the same door in a repetitive way. Each time you pass the same scenario, little details are altered and you need to investigate some puzzles to find clues about why you are jailed in this nightmare. There’s another sick element in this ambient: a kind of evil spirit that appears randomly (and trust me, it’s really creepy).



Check the end of the playable trailer and the moment that we discover the protagonist of this new adventure (Norman Reedus from Walking Dead) and the title of the new game (Silent Hills, now on the plural):



This playable teaser balances horror and terror to create a frightful atmosphere. Terror comes in tense moments of exploration and horror comes with the appearing of the ghost. As Ghita (2014, p.58) says as a “refining of fear, ‘terror’ constitutes a multifocal aesthetic emotion, whose main feature is the state of anxiety, brought about by a well-balanced series of artistic elements: plot, atmosphere, characters. As an intensification of fear, ‘horror’ represents a unifocal aesthetic emotion, whose main feature is the state of revulsion, brought about by the paroxistical development of the afore-mentioned artistic elements.”

In summary, “horror games have a strong tendency to use the uncanny in monster design, sound design, and level design (architecture) in order to induce fear and anxiety. Furthermore, the less the odds are of overcoming an immediate threat the greater the emotional response may be” (NIELSEN; SCHØNAU-FOG, p.45, 2013).

The playable teaser is available for free in Playstation Network. It’s a must play.

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References:

GHITA, Catalin. Discussing Romanian Gothic. IN: KATTELMAN, Beth; HODALSKA, Magdalena. Frightful Witnessing: the rhetoric and (re)presentation of fear, horror and terror. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014.

NIELSEN, Danny Langhoff; SCHØNAU-FOG, Henrik. In the mood for horror: a game design approach on investigating absorbing player experiences in horror games. IN: HUBER, Simon; MITGUTSCH, Konstantin; ROSENSTINGL, Herbert; WAGNER, Michael G; WIMMER, Jeffrey (Eds.). Context Matters! Proceedings of the Vienna Games Conference 2013: Exploring and Reframing Games and Play in Context. New Academic Press: Viena, 2013.

Iterative design for games

One important point about games is the process for an error-free product. To achieve this challenge many studios/publishers uses the iterative design. Iterative design is a methodology based on constant testing of a particular product, game, interface etc. The iteration process consists of: prototype, test, analyze and refine the object to be created.

The process of iterative design for games, according to Fullerton, Swain and Hoffman (2008, p. 249) can be divided into few stages: A) conceptual phase: consists of generating ideas, formalizing and testing them; B) pre-production: here the ideas are reviewed to evolve and be tested again; C) the production stage: the game is tested and revised with different groups of play testers to locate errors; D) phase of quality assurance: where the game is tested to be launched with zero errors.

The image below synthesizes the main idea about iterative design and it’s a perfect reference to our gaming projects:

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Reference:

FULLERTON, Tracy; SWAIN, Christopher; HOFFMAN, Steven. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.

Who are millennials gamers?

Source: Twitch - The New Face of Gamers, February 2014.

Tks to Marcelo Spina for the content. =)

Interview with Jesper Juul

This week we have a special post on Gaming Conceptz. Jesper Juul, the video game theorist, gave this blog a special interview. I had the honor of meeting the author last year at the F.R.O.G (Future and Reality of Gaming) Conference. Enjoy the content! Thank you so much Mr. Juul. May the force be with you. =)



Bio: Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - The School of Design, and a visiting associate professor at Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. He has been working with video game theory since the early 1990s, at the IT University of Copenhagen, MIT, and at New York University. His previous books are the video game theory classic Half-Real and A Casual Revolution. He recently published The Art of Failure, a book that combines personal confessions about failure with philosophy, game design analysis, psychology and fiction theory.


1) In your last book 'The Art of Failure' you talk about 'the pain of playing video games' in a very interesting way. What was your primary inspiration source to write about this subject?
Two things: 1) That our interaction with video games is clearly filled with frustration and unhappiness, yet we tend to talk about video games in purely positive terms - good, great, awesome, deep etc.. Why are we not talking about this darker side of game playing, and why do we play games even though it is there? 2) My personal experience as a very sore loser of all types of games. Losing makes me very frustrated, yet why is losing so important to me?

2) 'The Art of Failure' is about video games. Can we use the same ideas for board games and card games?
I used mostly video games as examples, but most of the discussion applies to all games. Video games then add some particular twists, especially in terms of single-player games, where the designer can closely follow the progress of the player and tweak the difficult and failure rates to match the player's current skill level.

3) In your keynote at F.R.O.G. 2013, you talked a little bit about "Gamification". This buzzword became very popular recently. What do you think about this buzzword? Do you think it's a good concept to define the use of game elements in non-game activities? Do you think it's correct to use 'game thinking' instead?
Like most buzzwords, gamification is overused, overhyped etc.. We could try to introduce a different term, but I think we should rather try to live with "gamification" and then explain what its problems are, what the advantages are etc.. I.e. the important thing is not the word itself, but what we use the ideas for, and how we implement them.

Gamification is a good idea in some activities.

It works best for situations where users / students / employees are in need of feedback, and when the gamification system allows the user to exercise sound judgment.

It works very badly in situations where users are meant to be creative, or if they are already deeply, personally committed to doing the best job that they possibly can. In such situations, gamification can become deeply demotivating.

We could call this the paradox of gamification: we associate games with fun and freedom, yet if we implement the wrong kind of gamification system, it becomes 1984, instead, by closely monitoring and punishing everybody who deviates from the path decided by the leaders.

4) The world is going mobile. How do you see the field of mobile gaming for the next years?
For a while, it seemed that traditional games would keep playing on consoles and PCs, and the broader public would be playing on mobile devices. But now this division seems to have almost disappeared. I think we will continue to see more, "deeper" game experiences on mobile devices.

For phones and tablets, the question to me is still whether external controllers will at some point become mainstream.

5) What are you playing at this moment?
My summer playing has mostly been Clash of Clans - there is something deeply compelling about the strategic multiplayer clan experience.

6) Send a final message to the new researchers of the gaming studies field.
There are many, many things that we don't understand about games, players, development and so on. What is the question that you are in a unique position to formulate and then answer?