For this post Iâm doing exercises from Tracy Fullertonâs book Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovation Games.
Exercise 1.3: Your Life as a Game: List five areas of your life that could be games. Then briefly describe a possible underlying game structure for each.
With the way this exercise is phrased Iâve thought of three different ways to interpret it:
imagining ways in which some areas of my life could be gamified, adding a playful structure to an otherwise boring, difficult or routine task,
coming up with ways some of the aspects of my everyday life and experiences could be incorporated into a game,
or basing a game off of the interests and proficiencies Iâve gained throughout my life (the flimsiest interpretation of the literal phrasing of the exercise, but the most fitting with what the Fullerton chapter itâs located in describes).
Instead of choosing one interpretation, I decided to think of a couple of examples for each of them.
Iâve been presenting with a lot of ADHD symptoms throughout my entire life, which is one of the reasons I was intensely interested in gamification back around 2012 when it started getting increasingly popular, so gamifying my life has been a thing Iâve been doing since I can first remember having responsibilities. This is also one of the ways I learned through personal experience that simply adding rewards and achievements to pursue through a game-like structure only helps with tedious tasks for about a month at the most.
The two most obvious areas of continuous gamification efforts for me have been:
Exercising â the first gaming console I ever owned was Nintendo Wii, and the only game I played on it regularly was Wii Fit. I had to come up with my own additional challenges on top of the ones the game already provides to continue playing â e.g. I had to get a particular pattern on the graph that kept track of the types of exercise I did each day, or I had to get a certain number of stamps on a calendar in a row. These days Iâm attempting to go through the Age of Pandora fitness quest to stay somewhat functional throughout the pandemic.
Food â preparation and (more importantly) eating. Healthy eating is a struggle, but one of the ways I managed to alleviate some of it for a while was keeping a food journal online â I would set challenges for myself (such as drink enough water or consume enough iron), and they would help me keep going.
The Youtube channel How to ADHD has many other suggestions for the various ways in which real-life routines can be turned into games to be more manageable.
Two areas of my life that are already (quite unfun and frequently unfair) games in their own right are academia and immigration â it would be relatively easy to formalize some aspects of them into an actual ludic system. For example, âpublish or perishâ sounds like a perfect description for a timed arcade game where you need to manage and rearrange bits and pieces of writing and descriptions of various projects and send them off to publishers before the timer runs out and you inevitably âperishâ.
Similarly, immigration involves a lot of âjumping through the hoopsâ to complete tasks you didnât even know existed, let alone were necessary, which makes me think of memory games that make the player repeat a constantly increasing number of arbitrary actions in a particular order.
(By the way, check out Papers, Please â a famous game about the inhumanity of being a border officer for an authoritarian regime)
Previous life experience as inspiration
One game that I would really love to play would be a literal walking simulator. I was a member of a hiking club back when I was in middle school â the club itself being somewhat of a holdover from Soviet times when hiking was a recognized sport (it still is in Russia, but a lot of the underlying rules and classifications date back to USSR). It would be interesting to spend the majority of the game walking around and admiring the scenery (we all already use Skyrim and Assassinâs Creed: Odyssey for this anyway), while dedicating some time to resource management, path-finding and route-creation, making sure that the hiking trip you propose to the responsible governing body adheres to all regulations and brings you closer to the coveted title of a Master of Sports.
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Exercise 2.6: Challenge: Name three games that you find particularly challenging and describe why.
While thinking through this I realized that I canât name any particular computer games I find challenging â when I find a computer game too difficult, I simply lose interest. However, I can name a few board-games that Iâve played many times but find too challenging for me, since I usually play board-games with other people for the purposes of socialization rather than simply to enjoy the gameplay.
Three of these games are:
Cyclades â I find it extremely challenging because the core mechanic of the game revolves around an auction (players vying for the favour of various gods), and itâs hard for me to gauge the relative value of resources and to not ridiculously overpay or bid way too low from the beginning and quickly lose the chance to participate.
Dune â a classic boardgame based on the famous sci-fi novel of the same name, whose social mechanics are made specifically to make me cry. I find this game very challenging to the point of being incapable of playing it more often than once a year, because the politics of the in-game system require players to make alliances (as itâs near impossible to win on your own), exploit their allies for resources and then betray them when theyâre no longer of use. The developers recreated the novelâs atmosphere of always expecting a knife in the back so well that the game is nearly unplayable for me.
Galaxy Trucker â a game about spending a few minutes building a semi-operational spaceship out of random parts and then flying it into random space adventures where itâs inevitably broken into pieces. While I like games that require you to connect random tiles to adhere to certain patterns and limitations â I find it satisfying to build something compact yet complex in those situations â I absolutely cannot do something like this on a time limit and then spend half an hour being shamed for not making the construct perfect. So the challenge in this game for me comes not from the core mechanics, but from the fact that I need to deal with the consequences of my imperfect designs for the rest of the game.
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Exercise 2.7: Premise: What are the premises for the games Risk, Clue, Pit, and Guitar Hero? If you donât know these games, pick games that you are more familiar with.
As out of the four I only know the premise of Clue, I decided to instead describe four games that I know well and whose premises I find enjoyable.
Firewatch â after your wife develops early-onset dementia, you seek out a lonely contract job as a fire lookout in the wilderness of a national park in Wyoming, spending time alone in your watchtower or completing tasks directed by your supervisor reachable only through a walkie-talkie.
Elsinore â you are Ophelia in the world of Shakespeareâs Hamlet. After discovering the tragic death of your father and drowning in a river under mysterious circumstances you wake up a few days earlier to discover that you are stuck in a time loop that allows you to relive the events of the play and untangle the web of causes and consequences that lead to the tragic ending. Armed with this knowledge you set out to prevent the death of your father and resolve the mystery of your circumstances along the way.
Spirit Island â you are a god granting your favour to the indigenous population of an island in the Pacific ocean, and your home is being invaded by European colonizers. You need to use your powers to scare the invaders into leaving and cleanse the island of their influence.
Tobago â you are a treasure hunter possessing bits and pieces of treasure maps pointing you towards particular landmarks. You are competing against other hunters like you to combine the hints you all have in order to triangulate the location of various treasures to a single spot on a map.
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Exercise 2.8: Story: Have any stories within a game ever gripped you, moved you emotionally, or sparked your imagination? If so, why? If not, why not?
Indeed they have, I even wrote a Masterâs thesis about it. One of the games I discuss there is Beyond: Two Souls â a Quantic Dream game in the genre thatâs sometimes called âinteractive movie,â or a largely cinematic piece of media that the player can subtly influence through performing quick-time events. This game follows a young woman, Jodie, who possesses a mysterious connection to a disembodied entity she calls Aiden, through the extremely traumatizing events of her life, as sheâs first sent off to a research facility by her adoptive parents, and then forcibly recruited by the CIA to work as a secret agent due to the superhuman abilities she possesses thanks to her connection with Aiden.
Beyond: Two Souls has been heavily criticized for its apparent lineriality and the low level of agency it affords its players. However, when I played it, I found it extremely touching specifically because of how it incorporated its mechanics with its narrative. The lack of agency and the feeling of disempowerment are important parts of Jodieâs story â as a matter of fact, almost every vignette in her life the player gets to interact with portrays some way in which her life robbed her of a chance to make her own choices and live her own life. This (unusual for games) way Beyond approached player freedom made me empathize with Jodie more and caused me to celebrate the little ways she reinforced her own agency even more fiercely.
But in addition to this approach, and even more importantly, the game features a two-player mode where one player can take the role of Jodie, while the other plays as Aiden â the disembodied entity that follows Jodie around and proves a frustratingly ubiquitous presence, but at the same time frequently defends her and protects her from harm. As I played Beyond with a good friend of mine, the scenes where Jodie was disempowered and had to be protected by Aiden didnât feel victimizing â instead, I felt supported and cared for by the player sitting next to me, just as invested as I was in Jodieâ well-being. In a way, this combination of narrative and mechanics made the argument Anna Anthropy based her game Queers in Love at the End of the World on: âIf we have each other, we have everything.âÂ
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Exercise 3.2: Three-Player Tic-Tac-Toe: Create a version of tic-tac-toe that works for three players. You might need to change the size of the board or other elements of the game to do this.
I came up with two different versions of tic-tac-toe for three people, with different player interaction models.
The first version is the three players playing in pairs on three different boards simultaneously: every player plays separate games with their two opponents, with the caveat that whatever move you make, you make it on both boards youâre playing on at the same time. So if you put your token (say there are now three of them â naughts, crosses and starts, for example) in the upper left corner on one board, it automatically materializes in the exact same spot on the other board. Every playerâs goal is to win as many games out of the two theyâre playing as possible.
The second version is two players (naughts and crosses) playing cooperatively against the third player (the board). The two cooperative players use the regular rules, while the players who plays âthe boardâ during their turn has to swap two tiles on the board with each other. The goal of the naughts-and-crosses players is to force a draw, while the boardâs goal is to make one of the token sets (naughts or crosses) win.