Critical Game Thinking

At the conclusion of this project, I have learnt to re-look and rethink about how games are framed. It has overall been an interesting course and strongly recommend others to look at ludology not just for the game aspect itself, but also to understand consumerism, human nature and behavior, among others.

First project: Understanding and redefining L4D2

Second project: A dynamic tower defense game concept, LoopD

Original idea by Ryang Ho Sung

Games and Architecture have always had a relationship that translates to different experiences for the player. Whether architecture is used to as accurately as possible represent a setting, such as Assassin’s Creed and the representative architecture of Israel in the 12th Century, or to provide a setting for an emulation of the real-world, such as Snake and how the game comes to an end when the “head” crashes into its “body”, just like how any vehicular crashes occur).

Architecture in game is created so that one is able to quickly and easily identify itself to something of similar bearings in the real world. For example, in Super Mario Bros, we understand that falling into a hole in the ground may very likely kill the player, or at the very least, sustain certain damage. This is because it emulates what happens in the real world when we fall into a pit. Or that if we crash a plane in a game of Call of Duty, we are most certainly likely to do. As Salen and Zimmerman puts it, “we know something is a simulation, in part, because we are familiar with the thing that it is simulating”. This familiarity allows developers to play with ideas while using real world situations, physics and familiarity to introduce games that are not too confusing or difficult to pick up, understand and play.

1) Maplestory - Henesys NPC Town by Nexon

Figure 1.

My first favourite area comes from the 2D side-scrolling Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) called MapleStory. MapleStory always fascinated me because despite it being an eleven year old game with limited engine capabilities and design limitations, it has always somehow enabled to emulate a real world with relatively believable architecture and game physics. Despite some advancements in their mechanics, certain aspects have remained the same, and today my focus will be on their towns.

I was impressed by how they gave the illusion of 3D with only a 2D side-scrolling game engine, by implementing different overlapping layers to emulate a 3-dimensional game field, or map. This is similar to another 2D side-scrolling game, “Little Big Planet”. As explained by Alison Gazzard in her paper, “(Re-)Positioning the Senses: Perceptions of Space in 3D gameworlds”, she highlights that through the layering of space, “the platforms of the game are not only arranged along the x and y axis, but also along the z axis, layering the architecture into the depths of the game”. MapleStory, despite being published 3 years before Little Big Planet, already understood the power of using layering to produce depth and utilised it greatly to create a deeper sense of immersion for players.

They also used objects that are easily identifiable by anyone of any age, such as taxis for indicate travelling at a cost, ropes and ladders to indicate some form of platform movement and different colored platforms to match the theme of the map. In this map “Henesys”, which is the Non-Playable Character “safe” town map and considered the hub of the MapleStory world, it is greeted with pleasant greenery and uplifting, light music. The immediate impression is that this zone is safe and welcoming to everyone. By making further uses of depth of field in the background, it gives an illusion that this place is meant to be a populated city of sorts.

In short, in this aspect, the architecture plays the role of architecture-as-spaces, focusing on giving players a different experience for different spaces they are involved in. Though visually they may be different, the physics and our real-world interaction is very much detached. For example, in the real world, we may find climbing ropes a lot more difficult than climbing a ladder, yet both can be climbed of the same speed. Players’ characters move across different terrain in the same manner, be it on grassland or on lava paths. Obviously, normal mortal beings will find it near impossible to walk on lava paths without some sort of scientific help. As such, the space here is not so much about it being experiential space, but more of symbolic space used to help users identify what is the theme of the space they are indulged in, without the abstraction of real world simulation such as the deadly heat from lava.

2) Disgaea by Nippon Ichi Software/NIS America

Figure 2

Disgaea is a typical Turn-Based Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) playing in a fantasy setting, where the protagonist attempts to reclaim his lost title of being the Overlord of the Netherworlds. The gameplay revolves around the central “hub” (the protagonist’s castle) and different thematic maps. All maps are isometric grid-based maps with variations in terrain palette, texture and variances in altitudes.

The terrain system is different from my previous example, as this one is based off 3D architectural design. The architectural space here is not only serves an aesthetic purpose, but as an experiential space as well. It represents the current progress of the map order development, which as shown in Figure 2, is the entrance of the castle to a boss monster.

The walls, pillars and other architectural details hint at the era, or at least the theme of the map, as well as allowing players to infer the scale of the entire chapter, which begins with this map and ends with the boss fight for the relevant chapter. The scale allows us to realise that even though this is just merely the entrance, there are to a certain extent details that will not exist in a boss dungeon of a small scale.

The difference in altitudes also suggests that players are able to move along the Y-axis of the game, and that too great a difference on altitude suggests impassable terrain, adding to strategic and tactical depth of the game, such as finding workarounds to reaching an enemy, or using “stacking” of characters to reach an otherwise unreachable terrain.

The type of terrain, however, does not impact the gameplay, and only serves purpose adding to the thematic immersion of the whole gameplay.

3) Left 4 Dead 2 by Valve

Figure 3

Left 4 Dead 2 is a vastly popular First Person Shooter game set in the modern era. As survivors trying to fight through a zombie horde to reach their extraction point for safety in various yet familiar settings such as urban city and piers, players encounter various familiar obstacles and pathways, such as the drainage systems and a field of warehouses.

This familiarity to everything real life such as boats, guns, chainsaws and molotovs work just as how they do in real life. Various aspects of reality are as similarly replicated in the game, such as when a car crashes on top of the player, the player gets instantly killed. Or when the player falls off a cliff, he is instantly killed as well. There are modes to further emulate this reality, such as a Realism mode where friendly fire kills allies, stronger zombies kill off players in a single hit and players do not respawn. All these construct into a very believable game, and players are easily immersed due to the familiarity. Even certain objects have some degree of physical interaction, such as shooting a cup will cause it to be shot off the table it is on (obviously in the real world, the cup would have blown up, hence emulation being only up to a certain degree).

Today, I’ll be talking about the starting phase of my favorite real time strategy game, Starcraft: Brood War. This is the first 1 minute of the game that may dictate how the rest of the game will turn out - is it going to be an early game aggressive guerrilla style micromanagement game or a long drawn-out macromanagement game.

This is the starting of the game. The game takes place in a fictional map called “Fighting Spirit”, a 4 player rotational symmetry map. For convenience sake, we’ll take it that player 1 spawns at top right corner and player 2 spawns at bottom right corner. The game begins with a starting central command center building where resources are gathered at, and starts off with 4 workers that have the ability to:

1) Build buildings,

2) Gather resources and

3) Move.

Now, at the start of the game, we can decide what we want to do with these 4 workers. We can choose to either

1) Gather resources to allow ourselves to build more workers to gather more resources, or to build an army, or

2) Use one (or more) of the workers to scout the map. Take note that the map is blind to the player until explored, and enemy movement and location is unknown.

If one wants to play “standard”, he can continue to gather resources, but if one wants to play a “safer” route, he can use one of the workers to scout for enemy intel.

So I decide to scout as I want to know what my enemy is doing, so that I can take the appropriate next step of action.

Now, I have to decide my route.

I can either:

1) Scout for enemy location (indicated by blue color), or

2) Scout for enemy proxy (forward-built/advance) army production buildings. Sometimes, the enemy may play aggressive and this is to reduce such possibilities or uncertainties before it is too late.

For example’s sake, let’s say we went ahead with option 1 and discovered enemy’s base at bottom right corner’s starting position.

A player who has some experience playing may notice that certain buildings may not be present at the enemy’s base when it should, based on the timing (45 seconds into the game). At this point of time, a player should have a “supply” building (allows for more production of units by increasing the supply limit) or a production building. If either is not found, one can presume that many scenarios can be happening, but we will narrow it down to two possible scenarios for convenience sake.

1) The enemy has proceeded with a “proxy” tactic - meaning they have built an army production building away from their main headquarters. This allows for faster and swifter attacks against the enemy at the expense of their economy. Or,

2) They have just hidden their necessary building out of sight of the enemy but still within the safeguards of their headquarters, and have made such building placement just to play mindgames with their foe.

To reduce uncertainties and to find out what is happening, one needs to scout for information again.

As you can see from the simple, dissected tree diagram, one can easily see that even for a game that can be simply boiled down to “gather resources, build army and win”, there are many levels of intricacies and psychological factors going on, and every decision can cause a different outcome. If I had not scouted and continued to play a greedy economy-based build order while the enemy played for an early game-ending tactic, there would have been a very high likelihood that I would lose this game.

All this is just within the frame of just the first minute, and multiple processes and process-eliminations must take place throughout the whole game, in a game where the average game time is approximately 25 minutes. As the size of the army, the number of headquarters and the playing field expands, such decision makings increase exponentially, and it is no wonder than real time strategy professional gamers have a higher brain activity than most people.

America’s Army and its effectiveness in conveying a message through gameplay

America’s Army is a series of first-person shooter games that aims to bring out the experience of being a United States Marine as much as possible via the virtual world. Games have often been used to convey messages or deliver a point - an objective in which we may or may not derive enlightenment and better understanding of our real world through experiences in the virtual world. America’s Army (or more commonly referred to as AA) was made in conjunction with the US Army, and it attempts to emulate a real marine experience as close as possible without physically entering it, to enable wannabes and potential future Marines to experience and understand what they may be signing up for without much real life repercussions.

There are some benefits to educating via this way - ANYONE can experience what it is like to train as a Marine. Anyone of any gender, race, sizes and physical limitations (bar playing from the gaming platform, such as lack of hands). This allows more people to easily look into the life of a Marine and gain interest - thus directly and indirectly creating more interest and amassing future potential recruits. In a way, it is a win-win situation for the US Army; they get to educate the public and harness some good publicity for the Army.

However, one downside is that the experiences are merely virtual. The pressing of buttons and clicks from a mouse differ severely from the real life training. And yes, while the game offers people insight into what is to come, from basic military training to fighting in war zones, the actual experiences of US Marine veterans and recruits differ severely - there are many untold stories, from losing mobility to losing friends, to making mistakes of killing innocent civilians and so on. In a game, BECAUSE it is the virtual world, even the loss of such things may not impact us truly deep enough. Yes, we may sympathize but we will never truly understand until that experience crosses over back into the real world - and for many, that may be already too late.

Serious games as a mean of education and social change?

Can we save the world by playing games online?

3 billion hours a week playing games. Wait, that is not enough!? 21 billion hours a week is what we need!?

Ridiculous, you might ask yourself. But as Jane McGonigal explains in her TED talk (below), there are more to games than just the impacts being confined to its virtual magic circle.

HOW we utilise games and the time spent is what kind of impact that will be made. Take this for example, where scientists who spent years trying to figure out a biogenetic problem received help from online gamers, and together, their corroborated and collaborated results helped to solve the problem in mere three weeks. How is this possible?

Games give us (depending on the gameplay) multiple or even infinite tries to resolve a problem. As highlighted by McGonigal, gamers rarely feel a sense of frustration, panic, urgency or defeat, as contrary to real life experiences when faced with an epic problem. This is due to the problem being contained to the virtual world, without real life consequences when we lose. As such, we are able to detach ourselves from the consequences and therefore elevate our sense of responsibility for our defeat. Combined with multiple tries, this motivates gamers to push forward more than we ever thought possible. And with the ease of access to internet access and connectivity across multiple continents and brilliant minds, we can become a hivemind of sort to work towards a common problem.

On top of that, as we are solving these problems virtually, we are able to set aside our real life differences such as race, gender, age, education levels and such, as it is easy to acknowledge each other’s contributions fairly and just. Examples of this would be Reddit, where readers acknowledge a user’s contribution and its accuracy via “upvotes”, and the higher the upvotes a post gets, the more exposure it receives to be further corroborated. This ensures a system of continuous check for legitimacy and accuracy, be it common knowledge to even academia.

Unit operations are modular processes that may eventually converge into a single system. Each modules, or “unit operations” play a part, no matter how insignificant it may seem, in ensuring that the system remains intact and functional.

There are many ways to look at unit operations, and today we’ll be focusing on unit operations in games, in particular in the digital and non-digital realms.

Let’s take the digital realm for example. One of my favourite games of all time, Starcraft: Brood War has limit unit diversities given to each of the 3 factions - Zerg, Protoss and Terran. Zergs rely on cheap, mobile masses to overwhelm the enemy, Protoss relies on expensive, slow but strong units and Terrans are somewhat in the middle of the two, but are strong when in position. I’ll take my favourite race, Terran for example.

An army in the game consists of multiple units, whereby the army composition (the “system”) changes as the game progresses towards the later game, whereby more resources and land is available. The most basic fundamental unit, the “Space Construction Vehicle” (SCV) are the worker bees of the colony. However, in the early stages of the game, they can be also used in combination with attacking units. This is the early game system that can be used to fend off early game aggression.

Workers defending in the early game

In the later game, when there is excess of resources and the workers are taking up food supply, and the player feels the need to expand his fighting force more, the SCV workers can be used as buffer units to soak up damage, or in gaming terms, “meat shield”, to reduce damage done to the fighting forces. We can therefore see that unit operation in games may not be always restricted to one singular role, and that situation and time can bring changes to it.

As for the non-digital realm, we’ll look at a fairly recent card game, called “Exploding Kittens”.

Exploding kittens is a game whereby you draw different cards with different purposes. Some can be combined to give you a chance to steal a card either randomly or of your choice, and some can be used as “lives”.

These “life” cards, or “defuse” cards as they’re called in the game, serve different purposes. First, they are the “insurance”, or the “lives” that are common in arcade games such as Super Mario Bros. Secondly, they also function as bargain chips, as having many of these allows you to take control of the flow of the game. So once again, we see that even in non-digital games where games can be less complex, units have different operations and purposes to fulfill.

“Understand the notion of magic circle and the space where gamic activity occurs. Write a paragraph or two providing examples where the magic circle might break or have its boundaries blurred.

Diagrammatize a few game examples based on Caillois’ categorization. Emphasize the areas where the concepts intersect.”

The “magic circle”, or rather, the theater of play is where what we conceive as “play” takes place. A play seems to have a few criteria to follow, namely the following:

- Contest for something

- Representation of something

- An audience

and more often than not, these criteria tend to overlap and combine into one that either becomes a representation of a contest of something, or a contest for representation of something.

The differences between the two seem similar, yet are clearly defined. The former being a mock-up, a glorification of a common entity or will. This means that even cultural and religious acts such as rites and ceremonies can be considered as plays. For example, rituals such as rain dances are representations of a society’s desire to contest for a better harvest and weather - a common will glorified and elevated to a holy status beyond the earthly realms in the hopes that we are able to contest against what nature and God had planned in store for them. Common theme is “appeasing of the Gods”, and to ensure that they are kept satisfied, and in return, the common folks - it becomes a contest to make sure that these sacred objectives are met.

The latter is the contest for representation, heavily involving the pride and glory of the individual or the masses. This involves the right to prove one’s worthiness in some form of battle and be the better being amongst the sea of contestants - an attribute that transcends time, culture and species.

But all these have a common understanding that they are to be kept within its make-believe boundaries, or in other words, “the magic circle”. Gladiators in ancient Rome were understood to only fight within the boundaries of the Colosseum (leaving aside the issue of slavery), with the general public and royalties being the audience. Professional sports athletes are known to be a different character “on the court”, when they have zoned out all other worldly thoughts and focus solely on the game. Theatrical play artists and actors are able to fully envelop themselves in a different persona to act out their required role, away from their usual selves. So is there a point when our “game” has spilled over beyond the magic circle, or had its boundaries pushed?

In my opinion, yes, especially with advances in technology.

Early examples I can think are when rituals spill over to the common masses and becomes something more - such as a movement or a revolution. But how can something that is classified as “a game” lead to serious real life consequences? What has caused reality to spill over into our fictional, reality-free zone?

It needs to be understood that behind the fictional world that we create for ourselves, this fantasy of ours.. there is always still a human operator. Our minds and emotions, no matter how much we can try to bury them in the midst of our play of the game, is always present, no matter how active or dormant it may be. When these are aggravated, our emotions start to spill over, and when they coalesce into a single entity, it can go beyond to become a movement in society, where people demand control back from a game that has gone too far. When people have had enough of the fantasy they created and want to take back their control, or when they feel that the playing field is not fair anymore - that is when the separation between fantasy and reality breaks.

This divide is unique to individual’s perspectives, and this is dependent on many factors such as social class, wealth, upbringing, social acceptance and more. What one class sees as sports may be seen as torture and authoritarianism by another of lower status. When this amalgamation of negative feelings come together, the differences and the unwillingness to accept that difference grows stronger, and the whole premise of “play” becomes abolished.

There are certain rules that Caillois identified as basis of gaming, and some examples:

- Property is exchanged with no goods produced between the players, to a prior agreed degree

- Free and voluntary activity, for sake of joy and entertainment

- Ordinary life has (almost always) no place in the realms of gaming

Thus, there are some categories he has classified games into:

1) Agôn - Balance as much as possible with focus on individual/party’s skills

2) Alea - Involving luck

3) Mimicry - Replicate/mimicry of a fictional fantasy alternative universe

4) Ilinx - Provoking extreme emotions and feelings, temporarily removing the feeling of stability and normality.

Dota 2 covers all these categories:

1) Agôn - Despite being a game where characters are able to select from a choice of dozens of unique playable characters, there within lies a system to provide balance - Players given turns to pick and remove characters, with the first order being randomised (straw draw, coin flip).

2) Alea - Pseudo-random number generator used for the element of luck in % luck based skills and movesets

3) Mimicry - Being set in a fictional world where two factions fight for dominance over the other (each faction’s head is using these characters as their personal minions). Players get to be in the shoes of their favourite hero.

4)Ilinx - Taunts, in-game provocations between characters (and even players), team mood and dynamics all build towards getting players more emotionally involved in the game, exciting their senses and emotions beyond their normal selves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08SlUCv6Mpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiOKpI-zjHY