Creative Game Design

This reading systematically introduces the history of game design to me. It resonates with me a lot with my own game experience. From the arcade era to the composite period, game design becomes more and more mature not only in the interactive perspective but also in a psychological way.

For an interactive perspective, arcade games provide one single operating mechanism. Players are easy to control. Sometimes the game pattern is intuitive since it is designed to be simple and understandable. However, players are easy to get bored because even though the challenges of the game keep varying, the fundamental structure or framework of the game is unchanged. I played Raiden when I was 3 years old. I really loved this game but I remembered that every time I played it, I would drop off at lever3 or level4. The reason is that I can get no more fun except just pressing arrow keys to avoid attacks.

The innovation of the composite games is the answer to the question “how to prevent players get bored before they are satisfied?”. As the author states,  “a real composite game doesn’t switch from one genre to another halfway through the game. Rather, it bounces back and forth between genres throughout the game, but the aggregate effect is still the same.” By combining different genres of games and switching back and forth throughout the whole game process, players would always change tastes and so stay in good psychological status. Mega-man, my favorite game as an example, has two modes: platform and action game. Besides, Mega-man has its own armor collection system. The design of armor collection challenges permeates through each stage, which I would be attracted by during normal gameplay.

One thing I did not notice before is that the shift of the axis of ability. As I recalled my own experience, I found out that this design occurs in some certain platform game like Mario. Really interesting.

Brick Breaker Game:

https://simmer.io/@Haoquan/my-brick-breaker-game

Video games have already been a huge industry. Every year, more and more new games come out and more and more people go into the world of the game. In this essay, I will analyze why people love playing video games from two aspects:  psychological research and my own experience.

Scott Rigby’s research company “Immersyve”, collected years of data and conducted in-house studies at game development studios in order to explain basic human needs and see what makes games so appealing. As they concluded, competency, autonomy, and relatedness are the three elements that make people love video games. Competency means the ability to achieve something. In the game field, game designers usually provide a sense of power for users. For example, gamers know that they can control and master the situation; or gamers will be pleased by the progression of their gaming skills or accomplishing goals. Also, the game designers will provide challenges with varying degrees of difficulty. Autonomy is easy to understand. When we enter a game world, we can freely control our avatar, escaping from the real world. Gamers can be off the control of reality like physics rules. Relatedness reflects the social property of video games, especially online gaming. Besides social bonding, video games can provide a relatedness to the story, fictional characters, or even the environment of the virtual world for gamers. That is what we call “immersive experience”.

From my own gaming experience, the reasons why I love to play video games are complex. Firstly, when I play video games, I can enter an alternate world and temporarily escape from the reality. This is an entirely new world that is different from the real one. I can experience many things that I cannot do in reality. Besides, In video games, I can go through an immersive experience that I can never gain from other mediums like books or tv shows. That implies the “relatedness” elements I mentioned above. Then, for me, video games are a good way of socializing. I am a big fan of Hearthstone. I always play this game with my friends in my spare time.

Most importantly, a sense of achievement will be provided! A sense of achievement will occur when we complete a game. For different genres, there are different kinds of achievements. For games like Dark Souls, the player will gain pleasure by succeeding after many defeats and the growth of game skills; for games like Zelda, people can have their own way through this game, interacting with the whole world, collecting, or beaten bosses as fast as they can.

In the following weeks, I really want to design a game to show a child’s inner world. It should be a 3d first-perspective game: an art game that allows players to explore a child inner world.  The whole game is divided into four episodes, which are children’s childhood, youth, and adulthood respectively. Each episode is a story. Players can interact with the game to experience the child’s memories and stories. I have already written out the storylines in my mind.

Reference:

https://www.psychreg.org/why-people-play-video-games/