December 23, 2004
San Andreas & board gaming
Dear gaming diary, I'm so sorry that the last months have been so hectic at works that I haven't reported my habits. I'll make up for it after the new year, as the holdays will give plenty of opportunities for board gaming. Not least because we're traveling over to Oxford to see Heidi and Syksy :)
I bought a couple of horror-themed board games for the Holidays: Fearsome Floors and Betrayal at House on the Hill. I'm looking forward to trying these very much!
On the digital front, I've enjoyed GTA: San Andreas quite a bit. At first it seemed same old same old, but once you get going, it's really cool. There are too many glitches remaining from the previous installments, but mostly the gangsta stuff and hip-hop/soul soundtracks and wonderful voice acting make up for it. The truth is however, that some 10+ percent into the game, the missions start becoming quite difficult for me, so we'll see how long my enthusiasm lasts. And the first girlfriend is terrible. But OG Loc makes up for many lacks :)
Speaking of SA, I've been enjoying a HBO series called The Wire which portrays same themes, albeit situated in Baltimore, in suitably gritty fashion. There was this episode where a couple of young gang members killed their long-time friend because he was suspected of snitching to the police. The scene was quite heart-breaking, and even though SA is fine, it fails to capture these kinds of moral ambiguities. And I believe there will be a way for digital games to do that.
Also, there should be GTA: Hill Street Blues where you start as a beat cop and progress to a detective, with moral choices - corruption, loyalty etc. - along the way. Definitely.
the premise
Because my thesis is strongly aimed for practical applications in game studies and design, one of its case studies is a game that demonstrates the theory and its concepts. The approach is somewhat similar to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: a theory of comics in the form of a comic book.
Respectively, the ‘Game Game’ is a card game where the players design games by collecting elements that make up a design for a game. The elements are represented by various types of cards.
Ok, let's start with an introduction to the game itself:
The objective of the game is to come up with a rudimentary design for a game. Players collect cards in order to achieve this. There are mandatory cards that each design should have, and extra cards that the player may use to make his/her design more effective and sophisticated.
The cards and their combinations give points, and after three rounds – ‘milestones’ – the player with most points is the winner. The game ends once the third milestone is completed. In practice, this happens when the third and final deck of cards is depleted.
The cards are implemented according to mytheory of game elements, i.e. there are goal, component and theme cards, etc. In addition there are also cards representing the compound elements: specific rule cards, such as victory/end condition cards, and a number of cards representing game mechanics which can be combined into whatever combinations the player desires.
So-called behavioural elements are represented by ‘emotion cards’ which incorporate another theoretical topic of the thesis to the game: a so-called mood typology which aims at producing a theoretical framework of the emotional spectrum that games in different genres afford for their players.
There are also deliberately scarce resources in the form of budget and asset cards. Managing these resources helps the players to progress from one milestone to another. The milestones encourage the players into role-playing as they have to ‘pitch’, i.e. verbalise, their design idea for the player that possesses the ‘producer card’ at that time. The selling mechanic is implemented for pedagogic purposes so that the players would also learn something general about game structures, and so forth the theory, in the process of playing the game.
This is meant to illustrate the rhetoric nature of game design, i.e. game design as persuasion, which is another topic of Games without Frontiers. A specific design solution is adopted in order to support pleasurable social interaction among the players: in the end, the players allocate their points into a vote for the winning concept and its designer.
That's it for the intro: I'll return shortly with some experiences from the first play-testing session!
Happy Holidays :)
Phew. Another year has passed and I haven't stll completed my thesis. It's kinda grim, but hopefully things will work out come spring.
Still, at least the Game Game is in progress. Check out the first actual entry!
Merry Xmas & New Year to all my fellow game researchers & designers - I hope to see you guys next year!