More contextual studies

     For our next piece of contextual studies we were required to read through the article "I have no words, I must design" by Greg Costikyan, and highlight the some parts we felt were particularly relevant to us in our experience of playing games.
    

Almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving; even a pure

military strategy game requires players to, e.g., solve the puzzle of making
an optimum attack at this point with these units. In fact, if a game involves
any kind of decision making, or trade-offs between different kinds of
resources, people will treat these as “puzzle elements,” trying to devise
optimal solutions. Even in deathmatch play of a first-person shooter, players
will seek to use cover and terrain for advantage – ‘solving the puzzle’ posed
by the current positions of opponents and the nature of the surrounding
environment, if you will. You can’t extract puzzle from game entirely.

And he responds as best he can to achieve his objectives – his goals.

Does every game have goals? Most do, very obviously; most games have
an explicit win-state, a set of victory conditions (to use a term from board
wargaming). The basic transaction we make with games is to agree to behave
as if achieving victory is important, to let the objective guide our behaviour
in the game. There’s little point, after all, in playing a game without making
that basic commitment.

Just so SimCity. Like many computer games, it creates a world that the

player may manipulate, but unlike most games, it provides no explicit
goal. Oh, you may choose one: to see if you can build a city without slums,
perhaps, or one that relies solely on mass transit. But SimCity itself has no
victory conditions, no objectives; it is a software toy.
That’s true – and in a sense, that is a failing.

In both types of games, character improvement is a key concept;

through play, your character can become more powerful, gaining hit points,
skills, spells, equipment, whatever. In many games, power is achieved by
killing things

I’d agree this is vastly important. There’s been many a game I’ve played religiously just to earn some tacky bonus suit that I barely used but just had to have because it was in this season’s colours. The second I finally earned it, the game lost all appeal and I sold it. How do you like me now?

Here’s a game. It’s called Plucky Little England, and it simulates the

situation faced by the United Kingdom after the fall of France in World
War II. Your goal: preserve liberty and democracy and defeat the forces of
darkness and oppression. You have a choice:
A. Surrender.
B. Spit in Hitler’s eye! Rule Britannia! England never ever ever shall be
Slaves! Which did you choose? You chose B? Wow, good choice. Congratulations.
You won! Wasn’t that satisfying? Ah, the thrill of victory.
There is no thrill of victory, of course; it was all too easy, wasn’t it? There
wasn’t any struggle.

With action games in particular I like my struggle in the game to be worthy of an action film fight scene. Close enough that I feel the pinch and tension of the situation, but not enough to leave my character dead on the floor with his brains sprayed across the walls every time I turn a corner. It ruins the realism for me. So don’t do it. Please.

That isn’t to say that we want them too tough, either. We feel frustrated

if, despite our best efforts, we wind up being slogged again and again. There
needs to be game balance – a term, incidentally that means very different
things for solitaire and multiplayer games. In a multiplayer game, it means
that the players need to feel that they’re on a level, that no one has an unfair
advantage; in a solitaire game, it means that the player has a reasonable shot
at winning, and that the harder he works and the cleverer he is and the better
he’s mastered the game, the better chance he has of winning.

As stated I find it infuriating to repeatedly lose at a game. I feel the worst culprits are those that force you to replay a long yet childishly simple part of the level for nearly half an hour, before your abrupt and untimely death ten seconds before finishing. Racing games do this to me a lot. The screen of my PSP bears bitemarks as proof.

What you cannot do is assume that order will spontaneously arise

through the good will of players – at least, not when the rewards for murder
are intense and personal, while the rewards for acting like a good citizen
accrue mainly to others, are slight and diffuse.

Whilst I immensely enjoy playing games with a moral choice element or righteous/sinful path narrative- a key problem I have often come across is that the potential rewards can be slightly one sided. For example when playing a Fallout game, do I break my back working endlessly without complaint for the rich old lady, praying that the tight old cow will eventually show some gratitude by handing over the treasure/weapons/money that I so dearly crave? Or do I quite simply slice and dice her on the spot, and take all her worldly posessions without a backwards glance. Hmmm let me think….

Yet when you’re playing Monopoly, Monopoly money has value; Monopoly is

played until all players are bankrupt but one, who is the winner. In Monopoly,
the gaily coloured little bills that come with the game are the determinant of
success or failure. Monopoly money has meaning endogenous to the game
of Monopoly – meaning that is vitally important to its players, so much so
that you have to watch your little sister like a hawk to make sure she doesn’t
swipe bills from the bank when you aren’t looking.

The value of in-game materials/good seems to me to have become vastly more important recently, to the point where game companies stand to severely boost their income by including an online market system, encouraging their customers to hand over real life money in exchange for these game items. Personally I feel that the majority of the time these can be a detrimental factor towards the game, and quite often comes across as a cheap and thoughtless tactic to earn some easy revenue with minimal effort.

Good visuals provide one form of sensory pleasure; we like pretty games.

Audio is important. For some games, tactile pleasure is important, too;
sometimes a game’s controls just feel right. For some games, muscle pleasure
is important as well – sports, obviously, but perhaps that’s part of the appeal
of Japanese arcade dance games, like Dance Dance Revolution.
As an example of the difference that mere sensation can make.

     Something I feel about new/modern gamers is that we have been somewhat spoilt in recent years with the sheer graphic quality that accompanies our games. While this is clearly something gained, the down side would be that it can become very easy to start judging games, at a glance, on nothing more than their visual quality. Resulting in certain other important factors that could easily make or break a game, being simply overlooked.