Exercise 1.2: D.O.A. Take one game that you’ve played that was D.O.A. By D.O.A., I mean “dead on arrival” (i.e., a game that’s no fun to play). Write down what you don’t like about it. What did the designers miss? How could the game be improved?
A game that I played in the past is Sim City 3000. The original game was interesting and fun since it allows normal people to build real world things which they wouldn’t normally be able to do (i.e city construction). However, the 3rd installment, Sim City 3000, took the concept too far which resulted in an overcomplicated boring game. Things such as having to build water pipelines or designating small specific tasks gave too much control over facilities. With all this complexity, it felt random when people started to leave my city, without me having any control. This could be improved by have a function of certain responsibility/ duty where the computer handles the authorization, having a sliding scale of what the game player and the computer controls, making the game more user-friendly. This way, people can decide how much control they want over the small details when they are building their city. Instead of adding more tasks for the players to do, it would’ve been better to upgrade the current tasks. For instance, in the original game, you can build residential, commercial or industrial blocks. It would be more fun to choose what type of residential commercial or industrial block you want to build, instead of little details like water piping and phone lines. Instead of piling on more tasks, the creators should have upgraded what had originally worked so well.
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.
1. Career: As an elementary class teacher, the theme of the game could be about classroom management that involves a frantic teacher and a classroom full of misbehaving students. A possible underlying game structure for this game could be like “Whac-a mole”, but instead of a hammer, the teacher could assign different tasks to each student to “keep them calm and busy” until time runs out.
2. Relationship: This is my third year being married and as a female who needs to balance career and family, the underlying structure of the game can be role playing. In the game, there will be different tasks to achieve and various simulated situations to respond to. The player will get points according to his/her choice and answer, the higher the score, the more successful the player is in the virtual world.
3. Hobby: I like to dance in my spare time, and I like various styles of dance. Hence, it would be interesting to design an interactive game where players can learn dances from using motion sensing devices. When the dancer in the screen moves, the player can move along with the character, knowing how the body works and how the movement is done properly, instead of simply visualizing it on the screen. The game can include various dance styles as well as levels (novice to advance).
4. Finance: Math and calculation is not my strongest suit; however, my goal is hoping to purchase a house someday, decorated by myself. A possible game structure for this could be an agent-based model where a player will have to complete various levels of simulated experiences to save money and invest in the stock market to accumulate wealth.
5. Fashion: Fashion is another area which I’m not very familiar with. Therefore, it’d be interesting to have an interactive game where players design their own avatar and collect items such as hair styles, bags, clothing, accessories etc. to dress up their avatar. These avatars can then be shared on social media and players can exchange items with each other. This will be a great way to learn about fashion and interact with players from various places.
Exercise 1.5: List ten games you played as a child, for example, hide and seek, four square, and tag. Briefly describe what was compelling about each of those games.
1. Red, yellow, green light: This is another variation of tag where players can shout out: red and stand still to prevent the tagger to tag him/her. Other team members can “save” their teammate by tagging their “red” teammate. This version of tag is interesting since players need to think strategically on how to avoid being tagged and collaborate with their team members as the game goes on.
2. Hide and Seek: Aside from choosing a place to hide,the anticipation of being discovered by “it” is what makes the game exciting.
3. Playing house: To be able to choose your own setting, using tools and role-playing different characters is what makes this game compelling.
4. Catching goldfish using a paper net: This is a popular night market game in Taiwan. Each player is given three paper nets to catch swimming goldfish in a huge tub. The challenging part of the game is to avoid breaking your net while trying to catch the swimming fish. Players will need to think strategically (angle of the net, timing in the water etc.) in order to succeed in this game.
5. Bouncing Ping-Pong ball into tubes: The player is given a container full of Ping-Pong balls and the goal of the game is to bounce the ball off the table and into different colored tubes. The tubes are color coded and represent scores the player can earn. This is an interesting game since the player needs to think about getting ping-pong balls into the tube without having them bounce off the edge of the tubes.
6. Popping Balloons using darts: The game is compelling because players only have a limited number of darts and their goal is to pop a wall of balloons. The more balloons you pop, the bigger your prize will be. Players can also decide whether they want to accumulate their number of popped balloons to get the grand prize.
7. Tiger v.s bat v.s chicken v.s worm: A variation of rock, paper, scissor where items are replaced by animals. Instead of playing with hand gestures, this game uses animal gestures. In order to win, players need to understand the basic concept of the food chain, hence, chicken eats worm, tiger eats chicken and the bat can injure the tiger. What is compelling about this game is the anticipation of what the other players will act out at the same time as you, which makes the game exciting.
8. Tamagotchi: What makes this game interesting and fun is to raise a digital pet. Players will have to deal with simulated experiences such as feeding the pet and clean up their feces until your digital pet passes away peacefully. (that’s when you know you have completed the game successfully).
9. Chinese yo-yo (Diabolo ): This game is challenging yet satisfying where players need to balance the rolling yoyo on the string. Once you master the basics, there are other levels of tricks you can challenge yourself with.
10. Paper airplane: Still a popular game among kids in elementary school, paper airplane is fun because it’s easily accessible with various designs to make. Most importantly, racing with friends to see whose paper airplane can stay in the air longer is always great fun.
Exercise 2.3: Objectives List five games, and in one sentence per game,
describe the objective in each game
1. Donkey Kong: To rescue the princess abducted by King Kong while avoiding the obstacles being thrown at you.
2. Coin Master (mobile app): To win coins by playing a slot machine and construct various villages using the coins you earned.
3. Snake (Nokia mobile game): The snake chases the food particle with its body getting longer every time it consumes the particle.
4. Bubble Bobble: To align bubbles of the same color in order to make them disappear, before the wall of bubble crashes down on you.
5. Dr. Mario: To terminate viruses by arranging vitamin capsules of the same color or pattern together
Exercise 3.3: Interaction Patterns For each of the interaction patterns, create a list of your favorite games in each pattern. If you can’t think of any games in a particular pattern, research games in that area and play several of them.
1. Single Player versus Game- a single-player competes against a game system.
Ex:
1. Solitaire
2. Pac-man
3. Space Invaders
4. Snake (Nokia 3310 mobile game)
5. Tamagotchi (raise digital pet)
6. Pinball Machine
7. Arkanoid (single paddle that deflects a ball to clear all the colored bricks)
8. Home Alone (game for the PC: player sets trap to capture the burglars and avoids being caught)
9. The Legend of Zelda
2. Multiple Individual player versus game- multiple players compete against a game system in the company of each other.
Ex:
1. Bingo
2. Roulette
3. Jeopardy
4. Hungry Hungry Hippos
5. Crocodile Dentist
6. Jenga
3. Player versus player- two players directly compete.
Ex:
1. Street Fighter
2. Chess
3. Tennis
4. Boggle
5. Dr. Mario (Gameboy)
6. Tetris
7. The King of Fighters ‘96
8. Wave Race
9. F-1 Race
10.Mario Kart
4. Unilateral Competition- two or more players compete against one player
Ex:
1. Tag
2. Dodgeball
5. Multilateral Competition- Three or more players directly compete.
Ex:
1. Monopoly
2. Battleship
3. Connect 4
4. Clue
5. King of the Dice (board game)
6. Scrabble
7. Mario Kart
8. Super Smash Bros.
6. Cooperative Play- two or more players cooperate against the game system.
Ex:
1. Overcooked 2 (Nintendo Switch)
2. Minecraft
3. Bubble Bobble
4. Heroes of Might and Magic III (PC)
5. Portal 2
7. Team Competition- two or more groups compete.
Ex:
1.Charades
2.Pictionary
3. Cranium
4. Rugby
5. Volleyball
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