Intro:
First time since around 1970 that words like "accessibility" and "family friendly" have been used so frequently. This was greatly established when the realisation that Space War was too complex for a general audience and wasn't as successful than its main competitor because of this.
Casual games - games that can be picked up and player by anyone.
"Casual game design really does borrow several elements from games past - but a quick Peggle session after playing the classic version of Tetris shows that there is, indeed, a lot to be learned."
"Pop Cap leads PC Casual gaming market."
Related work:
-John Rose (2008) - How the space of possibility related to player experience.
-William Willing (2006) wrote series of articles on an online blog about casual game design.
"Casual games are not necessarily of smaller complexity" e.g. Plants VS Zombies is very complex, very quickly.
For this article casual forms is based on the notion of "Pick Up and Play"
"Through a complex iteration of smaller objects in the system that the casual game builds its own kind of "Complexity.""
Pacing is a key focus when creating casual games.
Pop Cap's success is due to:
Superb pacing, fun and polished mechanics, impeccable interface design, good balancing, great attention to detail and "a process of Q and A and iterative design that is visibly well-established after almost 10 years of maturing and is applied to all their products"
Peggle included a 9 month development process of playing and testing, then 1 year of production then finally another 9 months of polishing.
"Pacing is a concept related to the overall rhythm of the game... by indirectly crafting the player experience - through mechanics, aesthetics and dynamics - to create relaxation, tension and repetition, the designer "Paces the game"".
Four Concepts involved in Pacing: (Davies 2009)
*Movement Impetus *Tension * Threat *Tempo
These happen in the lower arcs of pacing (see below)
"Conflict as a contest of powers"
Threat and Tension:
"For the purpose of this work, "Tension" is perceived danger that a player might become the weakest side on the conflict, while "threat" is the actual power of the opposing forces on the conflict a concept directly related to game balance. Aesthetic resources such as graphics and sound can be used to increase or decrease tension, but not threat."
Movement Impetus:
"The will or desire of a player to move forward through a level but in this work is is not limited to its application in level design."
The key is making the player wanting to advance by using "advancement decisions."
Tempo:
"Intensity of play. It is the time between each significant decision made by the player."
"Lower tempo represents more frantic decision making by the player" and higher tempo is opposite.
Designing a space possibility:
"Designing a game is designing a space possibility".
Space as possibility and player experience:
"When playing a game, the player is trying to figure out patterns."
"The destiny of games is to become boring not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination (...) all of this happens because the human mind is goal driven."
"It's not safe to assume that simply making a game with more patterns will turn it into a good experience." This is because the player will get frustrated and annoyed so will give up. When designing games it's the balance of the amount of difficulty and patterns is key to a successful game.
"Simple put giving players more things to choose from increase the tempo of the game".
Increasing difficulty as the game progresses makes a game more appealing and not boring so keeps players challenged and wanting to finish the challenges set to them.
"All games are destined to have their patterns completely absorbed by the player and, after that, become boring. On the other hand, if the patterns cannot be absorbed, the player becomes frustrated and the experience will still come to an end."
Ways to keep players interested is to completely change the patterns in a game through the mechanics e.g. every 5 levels there is a mini game making the player want to reach the next mini game more. "This keeps tempo low and movement frantic and fluid".
"The mechanics are replaced and new patterns arise, hopefully before boredom takes place, breaking the seduction and ending the experience. When such a marvellous thing happens, Player Impetus is kept constant throughout the upper arch, thus providing the sensation that the game is "impossible to stop playing""
"The quality of an entertainment experience can be measured by the extent to which its unfolding sequence of events is able to hold a guests interest" (Schell 2008)
No comments:
Post a Comment