Procedural rhetoric in Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy, an iconic indie game*, is a perfect example of procedural rhetoric. There’s a constant difficulty in every single stage of the game and it forces the player to discover the right way to solve the different types of challenge.



One hit, you die. So, it’s important to memorize each step inside the phases. When a stage ends, it’s possible to see all the deaths of the charismatic Meat Boy happening at the same time. Check some examples of the game dynamics and mechanics below:



The idea of learning from fails dialogues with the concept of procedural rhetoric. According to Bogost (2007, p.3) “just as verbal rhetoric is useful for both the orator and the audience, and just as written rhetoric is useful for both the writer and the reader, procedural rhetoric is useful for both the programmer and the user, the game designer and the player”.

*Watch the creative process of Super Meat Boy in the documentary INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE.

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REFERENCE:

BOGOST, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, 2007.

What is Gamification?

Some definitions from the book "Gamification of learning and instruction":

"Process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences and solve problens." - Gabe Zichermann, author of Game-based Marketing

"Using game tecniques to make activities more engaging and fun." - Amy Jo Kim, author of Community building on the web

"The broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change." - The Gartner Group

"Is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also know as 'funware')." - Wikipedia

Combining elements from these definitions and getting rid of the emphasis of getting people todo things they ordinarily consider boring, results in defining the term gamification as:

"Gamification is using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems." - Karl Kapp

What Gamification is not

Only badges, points and rewards; trivialization of learning; new ( the military has been using "war games" simulations, and goal-driven experiences to train personnel for centuries).

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REFERENCE:

KAPP, Karl. The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. Pfeiffer: San Francisco, 2012. pages 10 & 12

Game design process: a third approach

By Vince

In this present post I want to discuss the details about the creation of my new board game, PYRAMYZ.

PYRAMYZ is an independent title that will be hopefully launched next month. It is an abstract game for two players that uses pyramidal dice (D4) as pieces and has an area control game mechanics.

The inspiration for part of the game mechanics came from “Chinese checkers”, a very traditional abstract game where the pieces jump other pieces (or a row of pieces) to reach the player’s side on the board.

(Art by Marcelo Bissoli)

In PYRAMYZ, first of all, players must choose the color “black” or color “white”. This part is important because each player earns points by having the dice on top of their color spaces. It is possible to get points joining dice with the same color adjacent (orthogonally), when this happens the players achieve the number of points of the dice upon the respective color spaces.

The objective is to achieve the higher number of points.

In this game a player can put the dice from a bag on the board or move a die that has been placed on the board. A roll is required to put a die in the game , because the random number on the D4 will be the number of spaces the piece can move (orthogonally) by the board. A die will spawn from five special areas with different color.

For this game I created four prototypes with different dynamics, layouts and rules. It’s important to have many views in a game design process to choose the bestconnection between them. I started with a triangular board but it was not good, the traditional orthogonal grid proved to be the best option.

In this part of the creative process I defend the use of simple prototypes. It’s essential to use simple drawings, ordinary material and have total focus on the game mechanics.



After a lot of tests and a minimum certainty about the functionality of the game I recommend to generate a better prototype/layout. And remember: beta testing is not about playing your game alone by hundred times, it is about putting one hundred people to play once and have a lot of different feedbacks.

In two previous posts I’ve talked about the process to create another board game and a SMS mobile game (links here and here). I recommend the reading of both posts to complete the idea of this one.

Wait for news about the PYRAMYZ’s launching!

Keep it simple

By Vince

This post is a kind of an advice for new game designers and game developing enthusiast.

Nowadays, we have a broad market for many categories of games and this is very good because we can target different kinds of players. Every game designer one day, possibly, dreamed about the chance of developing a complex console/PC game for a very specific type of player: the heavy user gamer.

But, don’t forget that a wide part of gaming consumption comes from casual gamers. The high numbers of casual/simple game downloads from platforms like App Store (Apple) and Play Store (Google) give us a clue of the enormous potential in this area.

More than 200 million people worldwide play casual games via Internet, and it’s impossible to forget the high numbers of casual gamers in mobile devices too.

The essence of the success in this area is the mantra: keep it simple. But “simple” (or casual) is not a synonymous of “poor”, and creating good simple/casual games is a great challenge for game designers. The “Angry Birds”, “Temple Run” and “Draw Something” are good proofs of this idea.



Keep the casual player on your mind all the time and don’t forget that a casual game requires good content, intuitive mechanics and well defined interface. It must be wonderful to create the new “Battlefield” complex FPS game, but it must be wonderful to create the new “Angry Birds” casual game too.

To finish this post I have a good hint for you: visit the site of the “Casual Games Association” (LINK HERE) to get more information about this growing entertainment market.

And I want to share this excellent presentation from Newzoo: the “Trend Report: Casual Social Games - February 2012”

View more presentations from Newzoo

Go (casual) gamers!

Health & games

By Vince

I want to dedicate this post to my friend Marcelo de Vasconcellos (link here), a brazilian researcher with an interesting work with the theme “videogames as means of communication in health”.

I’ll talk about DIDGET in this text. DIDGET is a medical apparatus with blood glucose monitoring system launched by pharmaceutical company Bayer in a partnership with NINTENDO. It was launched in 2010, but I think it's still a good case for discussion.



This health project highlights the concept of “ludification” and reinforces the idea of the use of elements from the ludic universe in another areas of knowledge.

DIDGET connects with the Nintendo DS system and rewards consistent testing with unlockable minigames. The system does not require a Nintendo DS to operate but has this special feature with the videogame. The site GamaSutra describes better the functioning of the medical apparatus: “when connected to the Game Boy Advance cartridge slot on Nintendo DS and DS Lite systems, DIDGET converts blood glucose test results into reward points”.

My friend Marcelo de Vasconcellos posted another good example of games in health area in his site. It’s about Intera, a software that works with Microsoft’s Kinect to be used during surgeries. The video below is in Portuguese, but the images speak for themselves.



I believe in a near future full of ludic interface interaction in the health area. I think we’ll see more and more uses for game mechanics and gaming concepts inside this field. Why? Because game is not only about fun, game is a language to be used in different and unusual fields of knowledge.

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Source:
GamaSutra (link here)
Marcelo de Vasconcellos (link here)

Game Design Exercises

By Vince

The idea of this post is present two game design exercises. I want to entice the audience of my blog to create new games from classical game mechanics. It can be difficult in a first moment but don’t put a muzzle in your creativity; slight changes in traditional game mechanics could generate something new and fun.

The first exercise is from a very good book named “Challenges for Game Designers” and the challenge proposed is: try to create a TIC-TAC-TOE for three players. You can modify rules and put new elements (like cards or dice) but the core of the game must be the same. Try to make a digital or analogical prototype of your game.



Following the previous idea, in the second exercise I want to propose the creation of a new dynamic for the classic game PONG. I’ve made this exercise and created the PONT, a solitary flash game. Check the project online (link here).

In my version of PONG there are two basic modifications:

1) the ball is an asterisk that changes color all the time (sometimes the color of the ball is very similar to the background color) and the player needs to pay double attention to the interface.

2) the racket horizontally changes size and does a wave movement (up and down) all the time. It’s another factor that requires more concentration from the player.

The image below shows these features of the game:



And let’s work! I’ll be glad if the exercises help you having new ideas and build good prototypes. Make yourself comfortable to send me your ideas in the mail vincevader@gmail.com.

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•REFERENCES:

BRATHWAITE, Brenda & SCHREIBER, Ian. CHALLENGES FOR GAME DESIGNERS: non-digital exercises for vídeo game designers. USA: Cengage, 2009.

Knowledge from Reiner Knizia

Some good stuff from the Twitter of Reiner Knizia, one of my favorites game designers:

1.) My First Principle of Game Design: Start somewhere new and you have the greatest chance to end up somewhere new!

2.) Lead a game to worldwide success: keep it simple that people understand it; make it different that people recognize it; but keep it familiar.

3.) To design good games, you need peace in your heart - even for a first-person shooter.

Follow Knizia on Twitter (@ReinerKnizia), click here.

Common elements between games

By Vince

In this present post I want to discuss a wide notion of essential elements that we can find in any kind of game. Take a few seconds to make a brief reflection: Which are the similarities between “Quake” and “Poker”?



Quake is a classic first person shooter with a deep story about a massive alien war in a high technological future. Poker is a traditional and abstract card game about creating card sequences to earn points.

Both games are very unique but – in a first moment – have nothing in common. But I think it’s possible to establish a list of common elements amongst two games. Let’s check some possibilities:

1) First of all, both games have a purpose. In Quake You need to destroy aliens and in Poker You have to make the best card sequences.

2) Both games have players and rules. In Quake You can play against the computer alone or in a multiplayer session; Poker needs at least two players and gets better with five or six people playing. But essentially all the players need to follow the rules that define boundaries. If You are not following the rules You are cheating and this is not fair play.

3) Both games have limited resources. In Quake are life, stamina and ammunition. In Poker is the deck of cards with four cards of each kind.

4) Game mechanics: in Quake your character aims and shoots to kill aliens stage by stage with a wide range of weapons. In Poker you pick cards trying to create the best combos and eliminate opponents.

5) We have conflicts and possibility of fun in both cases.

I think it’s possible to generate a wide list with a lot of similarities, but instead of it I want to purpose an exercise to You: search your memory and try to find two games of very different categories; in the next step, try to create a list of common elements as You saw above.

Good work!

Szia!

Infographic: A portrait of the new gamers

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Source: MaRS

Games + Brazil

by Vince

Last week I was checking old posts from the blog when I noticied a great fault: there are very few information about brazilian videogame market here (and I'm from Brazil).

So I've decided to write more about this subject, even with the low number of official researches we have in brazilian territory.

I want to share a good information in this post. It's about the number of brazilians with videogame consoles at home.

One research presented in an important brazilian videogame fair named "GameWorld" revealed that 60 million people have at least one videogame console at home. It is almost 33% of Brazil's population.

The research revealed another curious fact: 48% of the players buy illegal games and only 17% of the sales occurs at game shops.

The company "NC Games" with an important research institute (IBOPE) did the survey.

So, its good news to our market and more than sufficient to prove that is possible to develop a brazilian videogame industry.

Szia!

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Notes:

Click here to read about the research (portuguese)

A new book for my library

Arrived today another title for my game design shelf. I want to discuss more about gamification and I think this book has a good point of view. Buy here (link).


And below the book description:

"What do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patterns, and meaningful code samples to a create fun and captivating social environment.

Whether you're an executive, developer, producer, or product specialist, Gamification by Design will show you how game mechanics can help you build customer loyalty".

Szia!

Ludificator

In this moment I'm writing a book named "LUDIFICATOR". It's a quick reference guide for the newbie game designers. I hope someday this content will be translated to english.

In the third chapter of my book I bring an idea I've discussed in the first post of this blog (link here): the idea of Ludification.

And now I have a good graph to illustrate this concept, as you can see below:

I'm trying to explain that the idea of Lufication is better than Gamification because in my point of view, the Game is inside the Ludic Field.

In my book I tried to demonstrate that it is more adequate to call activities with game mechanics as Ludic Interfaces.

Hang on! The book is coming out soon!

Think about it

The Art of Video Games 2012

Photo by Blake Patterson

Transmedia Storytelling & Games

I want to delimitate in this short post the concept of transmedia storytelling (JENKINS, 2006): a kind of narrative which develops into multiple mediatic platforms, such as internet, books, video games, comics, television and movies. I want to highlight one specific use of this strategy in the entertainment industry.

I'm going to show to You the strategic appropriation of transmediatic narratives in the industry of entertainment using an established example: the Star Wars fiction series transformed into a Lego board game.

In the movie below it's possible to see how the idea of the movie "The Empire Strikes Back" becomes a board game.



Every game is an unique experience. Every game have a different end. The essence is the same of the movie but players have the opportunity to change the famous battle of Hoth with dice results.

What do you think about that?

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Reference:

JENKINS, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. NYU Press, 2006.

Games: Tools For Mass Communication

The source is Ogilvy notes: "Art, education, economics, propaganda. Games are arriving at the forefront of media to become an important way to engage entire generations of people. What's different from before? Five billion people are replacing the most common communication device, the simple cell phone, with a full-fledged gaming system in their pocket. There are multiple ways to publish and distribute games over the Internet and to the masses. For many, game creation is becoming a regular activity, as tools become both easier to use and more powerful for people without programming knowledge. This panel will cover unique perspectives on how games are becoming more meaningful forms of expression and a significant tool for communicating ideas".

Click to expand the image below:

Goals and rewards

By Vince

At this moment I'm working on my new board game named PYRAMYZ, a dice game that uses D4s as paws in an orthogonal board. I hope to cast this game by April or May of this year. I intend to write a complete review of the creative process of this new game after the launching, very similar to the review of my other board game named YN (link here).

While the production of the game is not finished I want to discuss an important point of the game design process: the creation of a logical goal/reward to the game mechanics. In the moment of conception of a new game, it is very common to think about components, complex mechanics, layout, and sometimes we forget to create a good and clear goal/reward to offer the players.

The goal of my new game is simple: to be the player with most victory points. And how can You get victory points? Putting the higher values of D4 dices in the squares of your color in the board. It's possible to have an idea in the image below:

In the book “Game Design: principles, practice, and tecniques - the ultimate guide for the aspiring game designer” there is a good view about this subject. The authors say:

“A crucial aspect of a game is that has a definite goal, and reaching this usually allows an individual to win. Goals can include eliminating the other player(s) from the game, achieving an identified target (for example by amassing a number of points), winning a race, or collecting a certain type of token.

Achieving the goal - winning - can be its own reward. A player may have defeated his opponent through his superior game-playing skill or he may simply have been lucky with random factors.

Many modern games, digital and non-digital, do not rely on winning as the sole reward but are designed so that all of the players can derive some enjoyment from the process of playing the game”. (page 13)

Another good gaming concept! What do you think about that?

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Reference:

THOMPSON, Jim; BERBANK-GREEN, Barnaby; CUSWORTH, Nic. Game Design: principles, practice, and tecniques - the ultimate guide for the aspiring game designer. New Jersey: Wiley, 2007

Good infographic

I like so much this infographic that shows the positive facts of gaming.

All information from http://www.grabstats.com/

Szia!

Kinds of players

What kind of player are you? It's a complicated question and in fact there are a lot of kinds of players. Just to give an example we can talk about the proposed types of players in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game. Schreiber (2009) citing Bartle (1996) says that in this genre of game it's possible to identify four types of players:

•Achievers >> find it enjoyable to gain power, level up, and generally to “win” the game (to the extent that an ongoing, never-ending game can be “won”).

•Explorers >> want to explore the world, build mental maps of the different areas in their heads, and generally figure out what is in their surroundings.

•Socializers >> use the game as a social medium. They play for the interaction with other players. The gameplay systems are just a convenient excuse to get together and play with friends.

•Killers >> (today we call them “griefers”) derive their fun from ruining other people’s fun.

I think it's impossible to categorize all kinds of players of all gaming genres but I really like the synthetic idea of the graph below:

The most important point in the discussion about kinds of players is: know your audience to know how to create a consistent difficult progression and a good experience to the players. The next graph (from Fundamentals of Game Design, p.345) summarizes this thought:

I believe this is another fundamental concept to apply in game design.

What do you think about that?

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References:

ADAMS, Ernest. Fundamentals of Game Design. New Riders: 2009

BARTLE, Richard. HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS. Digital article (link here)

SCHREIBER, Ian. Kinds of Fun, Kinds of Players. Digital article (link here)