Essential books about game design & gaming concepts - EPISODE IV

Another two good books from my particular game design library to complement the first, the second and the third posts of this subject. In the end of each topic of this post there´s a link to Google Books with previews.



•The gamification of learning and instruction by Karl M. Kapp (link)

•The Grasshooper by Bernard Suits (link)

The game and the mind

By Vince

Do you like to reunite your friends for hours of intense battles in RISK? Do you find amusing dueling against a rival in MORTAL KOMBAT for Playstation 3? Or for you the real emotion comes from an intense POKER night?

When we think about these situations, a good question arises: why do we like to play games so much?

We can find some answers in the excellent book "Everything bad is good for you" from the author Steven Johnson.



Johnson is graduated in Semiotic at Brown University and in English Literacy by Columbia University. He is known to defend the full access of games, TV series, internet and social media to young audience. The author defends that these stuff has different intellectual and cognitive features, but is not inferior to activities like reading a book.

As Johnson says “the dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused and disoriented; you may be struck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you’ve been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this mindless escapism, it’s a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?”. (page 26)

We are talking here about the game and the mind. We are talking about reward.

Where our brain wiring is concerned, the craving instinct triggers a desire to explore. The system says, in effect: “Can’t find the reward you were promised? Perhaps if you just look a little harder you’ll be in luck – it’s got to be around here somewhere.” (JOHNSON, page 35)

Why do we like to play games so much? Reward is one of the possible answers.

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REFERENCES:

JOHNSON, Steven. Everything bad is good for you: why popular culture is making us smarter. London: Penguin Books, 2006.

Story of my (game designer) life

A long time ago in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), around 14 years in the past, there was a great Comic & RPG encounter happening. I was in the event with a bunch of good nerd friends.

At the time we had the opportunity to attend a presentation of the author Michael Mulvihill, best known for publishing awesome RPG books like "Shadowrun" and "Battletech", which, by the way, were part of my adolescence.

I watched the presentation of Mr. Mulvihill, which proved extremely inspiring for all those who were there, and wanted to give life to their own games.

When the lecture ended, I asked for an autograph and asked him a question: "Mr. Mulvihill, what is required to be a good game designer? ". And he answered me:



Years later, I've found this paper inside an old drawer and realized how much truth there was in those words. I think the idea is to play games, experience games and interact with ludic interfaces all the time. The message of Mr. Mulvihill is about getting good references and repertoire because this is essential to create good gaming projects.

So we can apply these concepts in several areas of knowledge and create good experiences.

So, play games and have fun.

Interview with Espen Aarseth

We have something new in this post: the first interview of the blog. An interview with Espen Aarseth (one of my favorite authors).

Espen J. Aarseth is a figure in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1965 and completed his doctorate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor. He is currently Principal Researcher at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Let's rock!

Vince: There's a lot of definitions for "game". From Huizinga to contemporary authors we can find a lot of ideas about this subject. What's your definition of "game"?
Espen: I am with Wittgenstein on this one; '"game" ("Spiel") is a concept that cannot be formally defined, and when we try to do so, we inevitably end up with merely a definition of a sub genre. I do have a definition of games, but I also acknowledge that this is an overproductive definition, that also includes phenomena such as musical instruments: "Games are facilitators that structure behavior, mainly for the purpose of entertainment." Note that I don't use the word 'rules', but the broader term 'structure'.

Vince: What you think about the buzzword "Gamification"? Do you think it's a good concept to define the use of game elements in non-game activities?
Espen: It is an ideological attempt to make games important and useful; and a very naive view of how humans can be controlled. A scenario where gamification is successful could only be a nightmare. But in 7-8 years it will be forgotten. So do check my prediction in 2020.

Vince: In your book named "Cybertext" You said that "the concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange". In what kind of game it's possible to see it clearly?
Espen: Mechanics is a crucial aspect in almost all games. Games are obvious, almost trivial examples of what I was talking about there. As I made clear in Cybertext, games are combinations of two layers, the semiotic and the mechanical, and this sets them apart from non-cybernetic media such as novels and films.

Vince: Send a message to the new researchers of the gaming concepts and game design field.
Espen: I believe we are entering a new phase in game research, where we already see glimpses of an academic field with professional standards of quality. We are not quite there yet, but hopefully the early days of sloppy research, terrible quality control and half-baked theorizing will soon be over. Things can only get better!

Vince: Thank you!
Espen: You are welcome!

The videogame entertainment curve

The concept of cybertext

Last year (at DIGRA 2011/Netherlands) I had the honor to know personally one of my favorite authors: Espen Aarseth. Aarseth is a main figure in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature.

I really like some ideas from his book Cibertext and I want to share them in this post. I think that cybertext is an important concept inside the game design universe.

As Aarseth says:

The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path”. In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages. (page 1)

I believe this is a fundamental concept to apply in game writing.

What do you think about that?

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Reference:

AARSETH, Espen. Cibertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Maryland, 1997.

Experience – part II

By Vince Vader

I really enjoyed writing my last post (link here) about experience of players inside the games. So I've decided to write a little bit more about this fascinating subject. In this post I want to highlight some ideas to complete this thought.

I think there are three great aspects that help us understand the involvement of the players with the game universe: the idea of a labyrinth, the concept of virtual presence and the concept of flow.

I like to use the idea of a labyrinth of games as a metaphor. I think it's important to offer the player a chance to get lost inside the game world. But it's very important to offer this as a challenge to be completed and not as a bad sensation that leads the player to nowhere. As Kerényi wrote, the concept of a labyrinth is possibly a cultural good of all humanity whose origins date back to the Stone Age (page 66) and possibly all the ludic activities results in a kind of maze (page 72). So we can conclude that the idea of a labyrinth is - in some way - a mythological heritage of us all.

Continuing the thought, it's important to study the concept of "presence" inside the game world. Offer the player a labyrinthine environment is easy but the great challenge is to put a virtual presence of the player into the game (using narrative resources, coherent game mechanics, good graphics, etc.).

Nitsche (page 203) in reference to Slater (1993) talks about forms of presence and argues that “presence” is understood as the mental state where a user subjectively feels present within a video game space as the result of an immersion into the content of the fictional world. It is a mental phenomenon based on a perceptual illusion. In reference to Lombard and Diltron (1997) Nitsche (page 203) says that a great number of researchers have concentrated on the idea that a state of presence should be connected to the illusion of a nonmediated experience. In this case, players do not see the interface anymore because they feel present in the world beyond the screen.

The last concept I want to discuss is “flow”. I’ll go back again to the author Michael Nitsche to complete this thought. Nitsche (page 204) citing Csikszentmihalyi (1991) says that “flow” has been introduced as a state in which a person is fully immersed in an action and highly focused to the extent that one can experience, for example,

a loss in the feeling of self-consciousness and time experience. A player who reaches this level is clearly immersed in the game but not necessarily “present” in the virtual space.

All these features help us to create good experiences involving games.

In a future post I want to discuss some ways to generate the idea of a labyrinth and the concepts of presence and flow. Szia!

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References:

CSIKSENTMIHALYI, Mihaly. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Perennial (HarperCollins), 1991.

KERÉNYI, Karl. En El laberinto. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2006.

LOMBARD, Matthew & DITTON Theresa. At the heart of it all: the concept of telepresence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3, no. 2 (1997): 1-39.

NITSCHE, Michael. VIDEO GAME SPACES - image, play and structure in 3Dnworlds. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008

Experience

By Vince Vader

I want to discuss in this post the importance of creating relevant experiences for players inside the video games. The idea of writing about this subject came from a brief discussion I had with a game designer friend.

Nowadays we have more complex tools to create amazing experiences in video game platforms like 3d graphics, complex soundtrack and interaction with motion devices (like Kinect). But if we think about famous video games from the past, it is possible to notice that game designers created amazing experiences with few resources, too.

Technology changed a lot of things in this area, but the essence of creating a good gaming experience is still the same: players want to have fun.

I always like to use classic games as examples, and I want to use Space Invaders (Tomohiro Nishikado, Taito, 1978) as a good case study in this subject. Space Invaders had limited resources in its creation but it’s a great game still today.

Space Invaders has all the things a game needs to give the player a great experience:

1) Simple and elegant interface. You just need to move left/right, shoot aliens in the sky and try to protect your ship in the limited energy fields;

2) The game has tension. As the invaders come closer, they get faster;

3) The game has no soundtrack, but it has a constant and scary sound (like a heartbeat) that gets faster as the invaders come closer.

As we can see, limited resources did not prevent the creation of a great > game.

As Nitsche wrote: “the narrative perspective emerges from the available interactive options, but also from the way the space is told to the player. The mediated plane works like a narrative filter between the rule-based plane and the play space” (2008, page 145).

So? What do you think about that?

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References:

NITSCHE, Michael. VIDEO GAME SPACES - image, play and structure in 3Dnworlds. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

A quote from Reiner Knizia

I really like the work of this guy. Knizia is one of my favorites game designers. Born in Germany, he developed his first game at the age of eight (!). He has a PhD in mathematics, and has been a full-time game designer since 1997, when he quit his job from the board of a large international bank. Knizia has been living in England since 1993.

This quote below has a good concept about game design:

“When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.” ― Reiner Knizia

Think about it.

Szia!

Styleclash - drawing game for IPad2

Visual artist and game designer Jochem van der Spek created Styleclash – The Painting Machine Construction Kit – a competitive abstract drawing game for the iPad2. Each player can construct a virtual drawing machine whose main properties can be manipulated, thus influencing the machine’s visual expressive output. By choosing your type of brush, pencil or crayon and specific drawing technique, your machine creates a unique drawing. Not the players but the machines battle against each other for stylistic dominance in the playing field.

Styleclash - drawing game for IPad2 from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

Interesting approach and simple interface. I think that's a perfect use of iPad for games.

And you? What do you think about that?

Merry Christmas

And a new year full of games!

Simple and elegant: the essence of game design

Two days ago I've visited (again) a video game exhibition in my city (São Paulo) named GAME ON. There's a lot of good stuff in the place from all periods of the history of video games.

From ATARI till Xbox 360 with Kinect the exhibition gives to us a complete panorama of evolution, technology, design, language, mechanics and market in the video games universe.

The visit inspired myself to write this post. I've played a lot of classics of my childhood in the fair: Pitfall (ATARI, Activison, 1985), Space Invaders (Arcade, Taito, 1978), Donkey Kong (Arcade, Nintendo, 1981), Pac Man (Arcade, Namco, 1980) and many others in different platforms.

But I want to talk about a particular one. I want to talk about PONG, one of the first well succeed games in the history and a game with a great importance in the contemporary scene of communication. PONG is part of a series of experiments in which people began to interact with screens and became more than mere spectators.

PONG it´s an example of simple and elegant game design. It´s simple because there´s only one rule printed in the arcade: "avoid missing ball for high score" and it´s elegant by the minimalist design/idea of a table tennis made with few elements in the screen.

Salen and Zimmerman in the preface of the book Rules of Play (page XIII and XIV) explain why PONG is a successful game. The authors explain that the game despite its almost primitive simplicity, creates meaningful play. PONG is simple to play, every game is unique, it´s social (requires two players to play) and finally it´s fun and cool.

PONG still alive today. We can see the idea and mechanics of this game in new versions, new layout, internet ads and a lot of other places. PONG is a proof that good game design can survive the time.

And you? What do you think about that?

Game over! =)

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Reference:

SALEN, Katie & ZIMMERMAN, Eric. Rules of Play: game design fundamentals. Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 2004

Games and movies. Movies and games.

A few posts ago (click here to read) I've published an interesting point of view about the key difference between games and movies in the words of the game designer Sid Meier.

In this post I want to highlight this idea with some quotations from the book Video Gane Spaces. In the words of Nitsche (page 57) the filmmaker says, 'Look, I'll show you.' The spacemaker says, 'Here, I'll help you discover'. And Jenkins suggests that we should "think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects" (page 129) who "don´t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces" (ibid., 121).

I really like the idea of denominate the game designer a kind of spacemaker. In fact we are talking about spaces with interactions, rules and players.

Despite the differences is undeniable that the films strongly influence the games. And it is undeniable that games also greatly influence the films.

In a future post I want to discuss this aspect. I want to talk about the dynamics of how movies become games (eg Iron Man) and how games become movies (eg Silent Hill).

See you!

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References:

NITSCHE, Michael. VIDEO GAME SPACES - image, play and structure in 3D worlds. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.

JENKINS, Henry."Game Design as Narrative Architecture" In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, edited by Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrup-Fruin, 118-131. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2004.

A good quote for today

"Playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" - Bernard Suits (in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia)

Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place

By Gonzalo Frasca (Thanks for share the text in my blog!)

ABSTRACT
During the last few years, a debate took place within the game scholars community. A debate that, it seems, opposed two groups: ludologists and narratologists. Ludologists are supposed to focus on game mechanics and reject any room in the field for analyzing games as narrative, while narratologists argue that games are closely connected to stories. This article aims at showing that this description of the participants is erroneous. What is more, this debate as presented never really took place because it was cluttered with a series of misunderstandings and misconceptions that need to be clarified if we want to seriously discuss the role of narrative in videogames.

Keywords
Ludology, narratology, ludologist, narratologist, narrativism, narrativist.

INTRODUCTION
This is an unusual article. My original intention was writing a paper on the role of narrative in videogames (through cutscenes and instructions) for conveying simulation rules. When I mentioned this to a colleague, he was shocked: he thought that, since I amknown as a ludologist, there was no way I could accept any role for narrative in games. Of course, I told him he was wrong and that such idea of ludology is totally erroneous. That misconception is, I think, a direct consequence of the so-called narratology versus ludology debate. I believe that this debate has been fueled by misunderstandings and that generated a series of inaccurate beliefs on the role of ludology, including that they radically reject any use of narrative theory in game studies.

Since I guess that I have been in a privileged position to witness the development of this debate over the last four years, I decided to write down a list of the most common misconceptions that it generated. It is not my main intention in this paper to support ludology but rather making explicit all the contradictions that prevented this debate from taking place. However, I do not pretend to be totally objective neither: I do not favor narrative as a privileged means for understanding videogames for reasons that have been previously exposed by several authors and are beyond the scope of this article. Finally, I would like to make clear that I will be speaking only for myself and I am the only responsible for all the opinions expressed in this article.

CLICK HERE to download the complete document.

Essential books about game design & gaming concepts - EPISODE III

Another six good books from my particular game design library to complement the first and the second posts of this subject. In the end of each topic of this post there´s a link to Google Books with previews.

•Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace by Janet Horowitz Murray (link)

•Game interface design by Brent Fox (link)

•Killing monsters: why children need fantasy, super heroes, and make-believe violence by Gerard Jones (link)

•Man, play, and games by Roger Caillois (link)

•Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age by Dorothy G. Singer, Jerome L. Singer (link)

•Video game spaces: image, play, and structure in 3D game worlds by Michael Nitsche (link)

The game inside the game

By Vince

I’m playing Batman – Arkham City. Without a doubt – in my humble opinion – it’s the game of the year (despite some bad points of the script). I still prefer the first one (Batman – Arkham Asylum) but I’m really happy with the experience of Arkham City.

I think the game offers a good experience because of a lot of good features: excellent combat mechanics (with very funny combo sequences); beautiful ambient (the streets and buildings of Gotham are awesome); good selection of villains (ok, it’s easy with Batman); clever extra challenges; the mini games inside the main game - and I want to talk a little more about this last feature.



In Arkham City, like in Arkham Asylum, you have one main mission to accomplish and a lot of parallel missions hidden in the scenario. Some examples of this side missions are: solve puzzles from Riddler scattered around the map; find Azrael’s mystical signs; save political prisoners; save victims from the villain Deadshot; destroy gallons filled with poison; get skilled in the virtual reality flying training, etc.

This kind of extra content offers the player more hours of fun, more challenges to finish and more trophies/achievements to his or her social network. And offers the experience of the metagaming.

As we can find in Wikipedia metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.

And going beyond the extra games, Arkham City presents a very funny web tool: a searching engine (like Google) managed by Alfred Pennyworth (Batman´s right arm) in this address: http://alfredatyourservice.co.uk/ .In the first Batman game it’s possible to access a “real” website of the Arkham Asylum in this address http://arkhamcare.com/ to expand the experience of the game outside the television screen.

I think this kind of practice is necessary nowadays to attend a very wide public. In “Collective Intelligence”, Pierre Levy offers a compelling vision of the new “knowledge space”, or what he calls “the cosmopedia” that might emerge as citizens more fully realize the potencials of the new media environment. The members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore... Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negociation, and development.

And you? What do you think about that?

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References:

LEVY, Pierre. Collective Inteligence: Mankind´s Emerging World in Cyberspace. UK: Cambridge-Perseus, 1997. p.217.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming

Interview with game designer Reiner Knizia (DIGRA 2011)

Games need to reflect our high-paced way of life. That’s what Reiner Knizia thinks. And if there’s someone who knows about these things, it’s Knizia. He designed over 200 games. Mostly board games, for which he received numerous awards. Submarine Channel talked to the enthusiastic game designer about the new dynamics of today’s games.

Board game designer Reiner Knizia interview from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

This interview was recorded at the THINK DESIGN PLAY // 5th DiGRA Conference on games and play, 2011.

Sid Meier speaks

"There's a key difference between games and movies. In a game, the more attention that's focused on the player, the more successful it is. In a movie, you're really watching somebody else's story, so the better the story or the better the actor, the more interested you are in the movie. In a game, the more interesting you are as a player, the more successful the game is. So, in a way, things that work in movies are designed to impress you with what somebody else is doing. A good game impresses you with what you're doing. I think that's a fundamental difference that I as a game designer need to recede in the background. The more the player is thinking about the design or the designer, the less successful I've been, because I want the player to forget somebody designed this game, forget that this is a game, and believe that this is an experience that the player is having. Whereas in a movie, the more you're aware of the director or the stars, the more you're impressed with them - that helps the movie to be successful. In a way, trying to impress people with design or personality or whatever works to promote movies doesn't work with games because it takes the focus off the player who is supposed to be the star. The more the player is the star, the better a game you have."

Sid Meier*

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*Sidney K. "Sid" Meier (born February 24, 1954) is a Canadian programmer and designer of several popular computer strategy games, most notably Civilization. He has won accolades for his contributions to the computer games industry.