Week 2 Notes

Exercise 2.1: Think of a Game

1. You and nine other players (5 on each team) are summoned onto a map as the character you have chosen. Each character has their own special abilities; a passive ability, three active abilities and one ultiamte ability. The goal is to reach the other teams "nexus" and destroy it, but to get to that you have to destroy an outer turret and an inner turret to get to their base where 3 outer turrets and 2 inner turrets defending the nexus. And so there are three lanes that connect to each team's base, a single outer base turret blocking the path of each lane approaching a base.
2. Download music maps made by players in the community. Click circles, slide circles and spin circles to the rhythm of the song. There are ranking maps and leaderboards for those maps. Each score you achieve is calculated into your overall accuracy and global ranking.
3. The first game, League of Legends (LoL) is on a PC platform and played online, which the second game, Osu!, is also played on. Moreever, they both share the feature of ranking systems. But in a way, although LoL forces you to always play against and with real people and in Osu! you are given the option to play on your own or with other people, I feel as though Osu! is much more community based than LoL. Not only in the way that you are always interacting with another online precense by playing the music map they created, but by slowly rememorizing names of map creators you like and recognizing top players within the game in a community that may feel so small but in actuality has far more global reach that you can imagine. LoL's community consists of professional streamers and other personality streamers, like Offline TV, a group of popular streamers living in the same house, on the more artistic side, there are cosplayers and artists who draw fan art or make merchandise and within the playerbase, you've got the ordinairy Joes complaining about every broken bug or "champion" (this is what LoL calls its playable characters) in the game. Osu! has recently raised community flare by putting contest won fanart on the homescreen of their game because the three game modes in Osu! have their own personified characters, so why not entice players to draw fanart? 

Exercise 2.3: Objectives

1. Overwatch: Capture points to push towards the last capture point
2. Overcooked: Work with other players to make dishes for costumers
3. CS:GO: Eliminate enemies to prevent a bomb or, if on the opposing team, eliminate enemies to set the bomb and let it explode
4. Moon Hunters: Increase your stats through the game's narrative and fight the sun god at the end
5. Puzzle & Dragons: Match colors to make combos and these color combos will calculate how much you will damage enemies or an enemy on each stage of a dungeon

Exercise 2.4: Rules

I was going to respond by say maybe "do nothing and win", but I realized even that was a rule. I'm not sure if a game without rules could even exist? What would even happen in that game? And also wouldn't what was hapenning, even if it was nothing, become the "gameplay" of the game? How could a game exist without rules, it would just transform into an mundane activity, something we do on our own distinction rather than following another system.

Exercise 2.6: Challenge

1. Deadbolt: A small health bar when going against many enemies
2. Death Road to Canada: When it comes down to the final wave of zombies, I don't have good weapons or companions to defeat the wave and I just get swallowed up (I've never reached Canada)
3. Osu!: There are ratings for music maps and I can only do 4-5 stars maps while there are maps that are exceeding 7 stars (a star difference means alot, it's very fast)

6.4: Blue Sky Brainstorm

I choose God! He's an all powerful being that controls everything above and beneath the clouds. Being a big boss he needs are very solid control in order to keep everything and everyone in harmony. But throughout the eons, he's kind of slacked off his duties as the Big Boss. And so the speedy winged messengers that fly across different worlds and homes of the skies' own goddesses and gods cause a lot of air traffic when doing their business for the Big Boss. The old rusted halo that the Big Boss used to control in order to telepathicly communicate with other beings has long been collecting dust on his shelf. Instead it's easier to order others to handle his duties as he sits comfortably in his black leather chair.

Chapter 2 - The Structure of Games

"To become a player, one must voluntarily accept the rules and constraints of a game (pg 31)."
This is what the author, Bernand Suits, calls "lusory attitude", the “curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end.”

After setting a player's attitude, next they must need an objective. "...The objective is a key element without which the experience loses much of its structure, and our desire to work toward the objective is a measure of our involvement in the game (pg 31)."

Procedures, methods that allow certain play, are one of the components that dictate the experiences we get from games

Rules define:

1. Game concepts and objects (cards, weapons)
2. Limitations of player behavior and reactive events
3. Authority over how players p l a y, which stems from a subservient stance towards the rules to accept the experience

Resources are objects, made valuable because they can help the players achieve their goal, but which are made scarce in the system by the designer, are what we call resources (pg 33)."

Conflict, the relationship between the objectives of the players and the rules and procedures limiting and guiding behavior creates another distinctive element of games: conflict, which the players work to resolve in their own favor (pg 34)."

The structure and rules of a game form a system that, almost like its own world, has its boundaries.

"The aspect of uncertainty in outcome is an important one for the playcentric process because it is a key motivator for the players (pg 35)." 

Chapter 3: Working with Formal Elements

"... a game designed for a specific number of players has different considerations than a game designed for a variable number of players (pg 56)."

The structure supports n amount of players. roles to be filled, and in different games there are different roles (some having their own abilities). These roles can be switched within gameplay or player defined, which encourages self-expression rather than competition. The balance of these roles are of upmost importance.

Player Interactions

1. Single Player versus Game: a player fights against a game system
2. Multiple Individual Players versus Game: many players fight against a game system
3. Player versus Player: a game structure in which a two players directly fight each other
4. Unilateral Competition: two or more players fight against one player
5. Multilateral Competition: three or more players compete against each other
6. Cooperative Play: two or more players cooperate together and fight against a system
7. Team Competition: two or more groups compete

"Objectives give your players something to strive for. They define what players are trying to accomplish within the rules of the game (pg 66)."

An objective can set the game's tone, some players may strive for different objectives, or choose an objective while still being able to form their own objective. Objectives within objectives within objectives within objectives.

General Objectives

• Capture
• Chase
• Race
• Alignment
• Rescue or Escape
• Forbidden Act
• Construction
• Exploration
• Solution
• Outwit

Basic Procedures a game has

• Starting action: How to put a game into play.
• Progression of action: Ongoing procedures after
the starting action.
• Special actions: Available conditional to other
elements or game state.
• Resolving actions: Bring gameplay to a close. 

System procedures calculate things like damage output from the player, they respond to player actions or situations.

sensitive to constraints and find creative and elegant solutions so that the procedures are intuitive to access and easy to remember (pg 74)."

Rules can close up loopholes in systems by, within a digital setting, not allowing for certain controls, and thus, certain actions.

When making rules, think of them in correlation of your players, If it's too difficult or too many rules, a player may feel alienated.

"... even if they [game objects] are based on familiar objects, they are only abstractions of those objects and still need to be defined in the rules as to their nature in the game (pg 75)."

Board Games: a centered important piece, makeup and value of certain combinations, fairly simple objects that can be differentiated from a single glance (color position)

Digital Games: Characters/ fighting units that have various elements that define their state (a program may track these elements behind the scenes), variables should be displayed to the player, even though over time they will gather an intuitive knowledge through their play experience.

Rules that restrict actions and cause other ones, keep gameplay from becoming too unbalanced.

Rules that trigger effects: various gameplay -> excitement, help gameplay get back on track

"In general, it is important to keep in mind that the more complex your rules are, the more demands you will place on the players to comprehend them. The less well that players understand your rules... (pg 77)"

Resources will help you achieve your goal, it must have utility and scarcity within the game, if one component is more than the other, the resource will lose its value.

Basic functions of resources: Lives, Units, Health, Currency, Actions, Power-Ups, Inventory, Special Terrain, Time"

"Conflict emerges from the players trying to accomplish the goals of the game within its rules and
boundaries (pg 83)."

Conflict is designed by creating rules, procedures and situations that don't allow players to reach their goal directly, inefficient procedures -> the more a player is challenged, a player will submit to this system because it is still fun or competitive in a playful way against other players.

Conflicts: Obstacles, Opponents, Dilemmas, 

Boundaries, the magic circle where players are safe and can leave whenever they want, they can be physical or conceptual

Chapter 5: Working with System Dynamics

The basic elements of systems are objects, properties, behaviors, and relationships.

Objects: 

• The building blocks of a system
• they each have their own properties and behaviors 
• defined also by the way they interact with other objects

Properties:

• qualities or attributes that define physical or conceptual aspects of an object
• they form descriptive blocks of data that are used to determine interactions of objects within a game

Behavior:

• potential actions that an object might perform in a given state
• the more potential behaviors an object has, the less predictable it is within the system

Relationships

• "If there are no relationships between the objects in question, then you have a collection, not a system (pg 129)."
• can be expressed in locations, rank, a progression of spaces that is fixed (Monopoly), fluctuating variables that define needs at particular points (dependent on needs and environment), changes can also be made by players

Tuning Game Systems

1. system is internally complete (rules address loopholes, players can resolve conflict and move on, players are given equal opportunities)
2. the designer must make sure the game is fun and challenging to play (player experience goals)

Sky: Children of the Light by Jenova Chen

From the creator himself, Sky is described as a theme park, and from the IGN LIVE E3 conference this year, it was also described as a casual, mobile MMO. Just like Journey, you meet strangers within the game and form relationships with them, the relationships you form actually becoming the "currency" or form of experience points to level up. The game sounds like a very wholesome puzzle game and I'm wondering, since you can gather up to 8 friends, will there be puzzles that require that many people (or more than 2 people)?