j. mendoza

There’s no context readings for this week as we start to think about our game jam. For the next consecutive weeks, we will be working on our game prototype before the 10th for this semester’s paper.

I wanted to do something that’s interactive storytelling. Visual novels and dating sims were one of the main genres of games that got me into video games in the first place. I started out thinking about a game that’s like a regular Sunday comic set up and have certain dialogues that can change the outcome of the next panel.  

But I figured that it’s going to be a lot of work to do on something that I’m not entirely familiar with. I wanted to work on something that’s easy for me to do within the small timeframe for experimentation and prototyping. As I was looking for more projects to work on, I remembered one of the games that we had to do a reading on during the past weeks.

My father’s long, long legs was one of my favorite games that I’ve played for one of our readings. Not only was it up my alley but it was horror, one of my interests. It was simple and subtle with it’s storytelling, which makes each click compelling. The occasional sounds and it’s set up was amazingly well done and very effective. It didn’t have any visuals but it’s enough to make my skin crawl just by its simple presentation. That’s when I got the idea to make my own interactive story on Twine as well. Seeing that Twine is the program that it’s made on and the format on how to make it is familiar to me as I had experience with Javascript HTML before.

Another reference that inspired me reminded me of this infamous comic called the ‘Bongcheong Dong Ghost’ by Ho-rang, submitted to the Korean webcomic site called Naver. Although it is well illustrated, it’s transition and audio cues where what made it well-known. You start out reading it normally as a regular webcomic until an audio cue drops and a script plays to make the page automatically scroll down to the animated ‘jumpscare’.

Designers Speak

Blog Prompt: What are Steenhuis’ 3 design pillars that can attract people to engage with a work?

Awareness, “noticing that something out-of-the-ordinary is happening”. He uses the example of colour coded teams. As it’s said, a consecutive group with similar coloured shirts tend to attract that curiousity. That the first step. And once they attract that curiousity, they notice the organised/disorganised fashion which then gets them interested. This is called the ‘ludic recognition’, “acknowledging the ludic nature of the activity”. They see the colour coded shirts and that’s what he calls the ‘ludic markers’. People then get the idea that it’s a game and be motivated to join. Lastly the ‘invitation’, “accepting an opening to engage with the ludic activity”. It’s pretty self explanatory as players within the ludic activity sees the interest, there is the chance to invite them over into the ludic space.

Practice

Blog Prompt: Taking from Cleese and Price, what are some things that a creator can do to enable creativity and output? From Blow and Gray et al., what are some things to keep in mind when you are trying to prototype something quickly?

From Cleese and Price, they both emphasise how creativity isn’t something that you force and/or push it. It takes time and to tackle it in an open mode (Cleese), take a break from it and a solution will form rather than spending hours upon hours of struggle to find that solution. On Cleese’s side, he makes a point of ‘play’ and how creativity could not essentially form within that ‘close mode’ where we systematically do our jobs in a more logical way. To enable creativity, we have to ‘play’. He makes a point of humour and relaxation and losing the feeling of pressure to invite that creativity and solution. But to make that creativity form into what we want, we have to go back to our ‘close mode’, where we piece it together and create the output of what we garnered from our ‘open mode’. It’s a two way street from my understanding where we need to put those modes hand in hand.

Price on the other hand has given us a list. It’s not necessarily in chronological order but it’s something to keep in mind to do. It’s a lot of reverse psychology (in a good way) to keep artists motivated and have that inspiration to do better. One thing that really gets me personally is that I’m a perfectionist and that always hinders my creative process and admittedly, diminishes my motivation to do art. He makes a point where you just keep on doing and not focus too much on the perfection in practice and that you’ll get there. I haven’t done full illustrations in a while but I can for sure say that my best works recently were art that I don’t put too much of my perfectionist thoughts on, where I just drew for the kicks of it.

What I’ve noticed from Blow and Grey is that a lot of prototyping comes with a lot of failure and experimentation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the final game but it showcases a lot of thinking and a ‘could-be/would-be’ scenario for the final game. Blow talks more about his game with Braid and I couldn’t really garner how I can make a prototype that fast other than the main focus about prototyping is experimentation. Grey, however, emphasises failure in one of his key points when it comes to prototyping. The article lists out tips and tricks to do for our game. I really find this the most helpful for me and a reminder to get into that ‘rapid’ state of mind as well as welcoming that plause for failure.

Context Reading List

Brenda Romero On Games Design (BAFTA Guru, 2017)  

Jason Rohrer Interview (Indie By Design, 2017)

Copenhagen Play Festival GameTalk #10 (Sylvan Steenhuis, 2013)

John Cleese on Creativity (1991)

 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Artists (Price, 2016)

 How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (Gray et al., 2005)

Feelings

Describe your experience after playing this game. Play the game twice. (Passage, Jason Rohrer)

I played this game around three times. I didn’t think there was a scoring system until after I finished the game for the third time and looked into the page and comments about it. I was more focused on how far I can explore and how much I can fit into every different crevices within the map. Each playthrough, I had always chose to interact with the female character, which is supposed to be the love of our life. I do find it annoying to have her tag along whenever I wanted to go through passages where it requires one person to go through and I had to go around and find another way through. But I never considered leaving her alone for that matter. I did get the message around the second playthough, seeing as the game is an allegory for life as I’ve noticed my player ageing and my wife dying by the end of it. What I found curious is that on my third playthrough, I was eventually blocked by the blocks at the every end and it wouldn’t let me go through no matter how far up or down I go, I think that’s how the game tells me that it’s my character’s time. I waited… until the gravestone appears for him.

It’s a very interesting game and I really liked the subtle meaning behind it.

Describe your experience after playing this game. (Slave of God, increpare)

Just thinking about this game already makes me feel nauseous. I’ve played this for at least 15 minutes or so. I really can’t tell how long I’ve played it. It’s nauseating, which is the point of it. I wasn’t sure what to do in the game and blindly went around and navigating the area as best as I could. I was slow and avoided moving too much to get a grip of my surroundings. I did, however, interacted with a character in the dancefloor and a heart appeared right at my face when I try to go near them. I didn’t stick around for too long, unfortunately. After that, I just explored more and tried to get to the very top of the tower. Feeling sick, I closed the game and never played it ever again.

Discuss your opinions of narrative and storytelling in play and games. Does it create more immersion, meaning, and engagement? Or would you rather engage more with mechanics, possibilities and choice?

As someone who loves narrative centric games, I do think it creates engagement. I suppose it depends on the person whether they like reading or not. There are a lot of different ways you can create atmosphere within a game but there is something about writing that makes it so compelling and it just leads it up to the imagination. With my father’s long, long legs, I think that the lack of visuals is what makes it so interesting. Sometimes images and visuals for a game that tries to be mysterious and unknown tend to disappoint or even not land very well. This, however, with the detailed description of the narrator’s perspective, the mystery of it all is literally dependent on our imagination and it’s quite effective. We don’t know what’s going on and the narrator doesn’t know either. And I think we both don’t want to know what really goes on.

Types and Personalities

Give examples of games or playful activities that could be enjoyed by each of the 5 personality types listed by Ferro, Walz and Greuter.

I personally think that Minecraft is possibly the best answer to this that can accommodate each five personality types. From personal experience and observations, there are a wide variety of personality types that engage in Minecraft and had portrayed these exact types on how they like to play their games. I remember when Minecraft was at its peak I binge watched Achievement Hunter’s Minecraft series and the regular players all portrayed these types perfectly, ranging from a peaceful to neutral and just straight up chaotic gameplay. I do think that games that provide an extraordinary level of freedom and creativity can be enjoyed by all five types. Games such as MMORPGs for example. There are goals that the game or you can set yourself as an Objectivist, there is a big emphasis on multiplayer and advertising social interaction and quests immensely between players as a Humanist, a big open world to explore and find items, ingredients, new characters to interact as an Inquisitive player and Creative most certainly get the freedom in crafting anything.

Innovations and Technology

Reflect on the intersection of physical play and technology; in your view, what are the most interesting possibilities?

There is the idea that technology tends to be more introverted and stationary. Everything tends to be digital and we don’t need to do much to get much as technology advances further and further. But bringing physicality into it makes the experience unique in it’s own way. Whether it be as simple akin to a game of tag is definitely a step forward to the realisation of “Wow, we really are in the future”. The physicality of it is thinking that is certainly ‘out of the box’. It’s experimental until something sticks. That’s what I like about it is that experimental creations have such a unique outcome that opens up a world of possibilities for future designers.

Context Reading List

Passage (Jason Rohrer, 2007)

Slave of God (increpare, 2012) [ Content Warning - Seizure/Flashing]

my father’s long, long legs (Lutz, 2013)

Game design, personality and player typologies (Ferro, Walz, Greuter, 2013)

Musee Mecanique in San Francisco (Sutadji, 2013)

Johann Sebastian Joust: Making a video game without video (Polygon, 2012)

DROPMIX | firstPLAY (screenPLAY, 2017) 

Found this game while scrolling through Tumblr and found that one of Undertale’s leading artists, Temmie, has made a game. Curious as I was, I downloaded it and played it. As she said in the after-credits of her game and in her itch.io that it’s her first game and I’m honestly amazed with how it turned out. This game serves as a ‘feel’ for RPGmaker and some kind of a prequel to the game she plans on making in the near future.

This is a particularly small game, probably finished it around 15 or so minutes and there’s not a lot to it and no puzzles for that matter. However, I do think it’s very engaging as a narrative game as you’re walking around the protagonist’s house, wondering where her parents are. It’s very melancholic and the writing and the art successfully gives that impression. There are animated cutscenes that are amazingly done as a shoe in for more story within the short game. As I’ve said, it is quite a small game. You, as the player, interact with the environment and it gives a little bit of insight of your character’s situation. I don’t particularly think Temmie is going for an in-depth game and the goal of which is to have an emotional response to the story itself. I think she successfully did this well.

For week 6, we’ve briefly went back on talking about the six basic elements of play. This week, we’re covering the basic game design tools---the first four out of ten:

Constraint

Direct and Indirect Interaction

Goals

Challenge

I think these are essentially the basic of the basics, the first you would look into when you start designing your game. Constraints is the world---the playspace your players interact and move around in. It’s a grassy field for soccer or an intergalactic spaceship in the stars. Everything is put in that space and the interactables come with it. May it be a simple switch in the world for example. Direct and Indirect Interaction is a little tricky for me to explain but from my understanding, direct action is as is by name, taking a direct action which is immediate while indirect action is emergent, the response can be unpredictable. Goals goes without saying. When playing a game, you have to have a certain goal to reach. Whether it be given by the game itself or a player’s personal goal to achieve within the game to progress successfully for the set goal of the game. Challenge comes hand-in-hand with Goals where if you are to achieve goals, there are challenges that comes along to make it difficult for the players to achieve.

Flow is mentioned in pertaining to Challenge. Flow is a recurring word I hear when it comes to games, especially as I take the Context of Games and Play as a minor, this is the first thing that we had looked into. Flow is an interesting concept where players tend to go into a state, almost trance-like as they focus intensely into the game to win. There’s an academic journal that I’ve looked into by Csikszentmihalyi where he interviews not only players but people who partake in activities that experience flow is that whenever you’re in a flow, it’s fluid. But one little distraction can really put you off and it’s hard to get back into it and a lot of them experience failure if they suddenly become immensely aware of their surroundings.

The Friendsim game I’ve played last week is a spinoff to this game of the same name: Hiveswap ACT 1. It’ll be a four-act series of games which would then have a planned sequel called Hauntswitch, which would follow the series of events that transpired with the protagonist’s sibling’s perspective.

This is a point and click adventure game about a young girl and her brother being ambushed by peculiar creatures which ends the girl being transported into another planet called Alternia. I personally think that this is a great (spin-off) gamification of the webcomic it’s based on. It’s got a lot of aspects and the art styles akin to its predecessor which is absolutely amazing as someone who is a fan of the comic.

This has some turn-based battle system elements to it when it comes to fighting. Although, I could say that it is quite clunky and not smooth as I’d like it to be. The game, however, focuses more on the narrative and dialogue which the interactions of each items tend to showcase more about what kind of person you’re playing as. It’s a very, very linear game. There’s not a lot of personal freedom to progress through the game without actually having to follow the game cues for the story to unfold. I suppose that is the case of narrative games but I sorely wish that there was more to play around with in the game. That’s the main thing I want from this game is more freedom to do whatever the hell you want. Even if there is little impact into the game. I would expect kind of a Telltale game, where you pick small choices, whether it be some small dialogue or cosmetics and it would affect the player and/or the NPC’s behaviour or look throughout the game without actually disturbing the flow of the narrative.

For week 3, we discussed what are the basic elements of play as well as what makes a ‘game’. We look into the systemic dynamics by looking through the six basic elements of play:

Actions

Rules

Goals

Objects

Playspace

Players

Games are what you would consider an experience, which makes those who consume games tend to be interactively immersed with it. This applies to sports and general physical games and not just video games in general. There is a stress on the physical, intellectual and emotional responses that players get when they play the game. In turn, I personally think to use these elements and thinking when designing my game.

For the activity of this week, we’ve essentially just thought of two games and replace one basic element of the game and switch it around. My partner and I have thought of the Action element of Basketball and Football. Both games are physical and full-body contact. The action that we’ve swapped is the use of limbs, i.e. switching hands for feet and vice versa for the two corresponding sports. We’ve found that for Football, the game would essentially be… like American football with how it’s played. Granted that we aren’t experts on either of these games but from observation, we could see that the passing of the ball in this case, it gets very aggressive and full-body contact which is vital to get the ball. For Basketball, it’s a very dangerous game to play when you consider how high the goal is. There are a lot of potential injuries that can happen while playing the game as the players try to bring it to the net.