September 2009

This week we had to choose a board game at home in which we had to clearly identify the objects and their properties. (Strategy board games often have objects with properties that are easy to identify). We also had to make a list of all of the objects and their properties in our game

Objects and Properties: My game is called Ludo. It is played by four players who can choose to team up as 2 a side or can play individually. Each player has four pawns of similar color. Apart from the pawns, the board with the path marked towards home is other object. Everyone is at the same level of hierarchy. You can rest on the way to home on designated stops owned by you or your team which are marked by four different colors (Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green). You are safe only in your zone or designated spots. Your goal is to get all your pawns to home before your opponents.

Behaviors: How many steps you move depends on the rolling of dice. You get out of your compartment (ghetto) when you roll a six on the dice. Rolling six gives you maximum reward of getting out of your ghetto, to getting a chance of rolling the dice again and thus pacing towards home. Each of these pawns move only in a forward direction. You can rest on star spots which are of the same color as your pawns. On these spots, you are safe from harm and nobody can kill you. On rest of the path to HOME, you can be killed if the opponent steps on you. You will then have to begin a fresh journey from your ghetto. On your way, you can choose to protect yourself and your team member and at the same time kill the opponents pawns and send them back to maximize your chance of winning.

Relationships: Relationships are defined by color and position. You can team up with diagonally opposite color. All the pawns have same value and power, so it is important to save the whole team and not just your pawns. When playing singly, everyone apart from your pawns are your enemy. So you have to kill others to have more time for yourself to make it home.

Visibility: Completely visible game. Everything is on the board but the only thing that is not visible might be pacts that you establish with your opponent.

Serious Warp: The game can be very easily converted into a corporate game. There could be two teams in the same domain (lets say Coke and Pepsi). Your game is to march ahead to home earlier than your opponent. You can do so by either marching ahead very fast or by killing and inflicting injuries on your opponent, which will slow them down. Everything that you do is visible and thus will have serious repercussion on your business too. So I would change the killing part in this game. You have to compete but you cannot stab your opponent. So there would be a symbiotic relationship between the two and still both of you grow. (However by this move I am not sure how much of the fun component will be left in the game).

This week we had to invent a game to teach about composting and recycling. “It can be for adults, kids, or corporations. Your game should incorporate story and characters. Refer to concepts discussed in Chapter 4 of Game Design Workshop such as character, story, and dramatic arc.” Here is my response.

It is a Mountaineering and Hiking game. It is both a single and multiple player game. It can be played on a PC or a gaming console.

Target audience: Children and Environment conscious NGOs

Character: First person character. You model your own character in Poser, which either resembles you or has special characteristics. The trick here is to balance your Body Mass Index with the goal that you want to achieve. If you are too heavy, you can have high strength but will have less agility and vice versa. Depending on the mix and match of the characteristics available, you have to figure out the best body suitable for mountain climbing. Or you can choose to play as yourself, by putting in your own height, weight and characteristics.

Story and Game play: The play begins in the base camp of Mount Everest. There are two teams that begin hiking together. But the opposite team will take a lead and your team will follow them. As you are climbing the mountain, you will be faced by the boulders and other obstacles that the previous team drops on you. The goal is to save yourself from the obstacles so that you are safe and continue to hike and defeat the other team. The opponent team keeps dumping rubbish that you need to collect. If you collect recyclable materials, you gain points. But collecting rubbish will add to your weight and would slow you down. But when you dump the recyclable items in the correct dustbins which are placed all along your journey, you gain points. These points will give you strength and you can climb faster and defeat the opponent team. Every time you drop a recyclable material, little information about how you are saving the earth will be provided along with the recycling process. If you choose to ignore the rubbish, your uphill journey would become more difficult. The number of trees on which you could throw your rope around would become less as they will be dying due to the pollution and lack of nourishment. When you are climbing through snow, the snow would melt due to the pollution. Thus steep slopes without ice/snow would become very difficult for a climber. You will have to recycle enough waste before the snow begins to harden. Every time you collect and deposit composite material at the base of the trees, you get points and the trees become stronger. So you can jump from one tree to another and have a larger leap. The stronger the tree, the larger would be your leap. By the time you conquer Mount Everest, you not only know about recyclable products and processes but you are also exposed to the larger goals, i.e, hazards of environmental pollution, global warming and how it is affecting the ecology.

Dramatic Arc : In the story you begin as a simple climber, but soon become a super hero as you are leading a team who is set to change the world’s problem of pollution and lack of resources. In other words, you are saving the world. Because other people are expecting a lot out of you, you would want to maintain your image (fighting for a cause). You would soon realize the hazards of littering and subconsciously you become aware of your own actions in the daily world. You realize that just climbing the mountain is not the solution. Realizing that you can stop pollution only when you can climb ahead of the opponent team and stop them from littering. Realizing that stopping people from littering and at the same time recycling not just the materials used by you but others as well is the solution. After all you live in an ecosystem that gets effected, even if you are not the one who is polluting the atmosphere. So it is a collective responsibility to keep the atmosphere clean by recycling non degradable products.

This week we had to revisit your favorite game from last week’s blog and analyze that game on the basis of the formal elements Fullerton describes in Game Design Workshop (book).

Players: The game has a single player mode and multiple player modes. Single player would compete against the challenges offered by the game. He would also compete against time. In the multi-player mode there is one more dimension of Human Intervention added. This adds to more complexity and more challenges as the players need not think in the same manner as the computer thinks.

Player Objectives: The player’s goal is to win the race by not just defeating the opponents but also by maintaining good condition of the car. He has to keep in mind that there are no major accidents and the condition of the car is maintained. Damage to the car results in deduction of points. He also has to save himself from being busted by the police and should not kill people on road. In the Knockout mode he has to make sure that he never comes last in the race or the game would end there. Similarly in a Tournament mode the objective is to have a better average performance.

Rules: The primary rule is to have the least damage to the car while racing. Better car condition will let you unlock levels. You should not meet with accidents and kill people. Killing people might have heavy penalty and you will be behind bars. The whole race is kind of a secret event and thus you have to keep safe distance from the police. Certain cars can move at only a particular speed. The maneuvering and controls vary with different cars. There is Nitro boost and there is a limit to it.

Resources: Cars, money, map are the resources. Better timing and handling results in points. Nitro boost and secret shortcuts that are embedded in the map will speed you up.

Conflict: In order to get a better car and be able to race in a different location you have to win the races with the available resources. The better you are at saving your car from damage, the lesser money you pay for its maintenance. The money saved will let you buy a better, powerful car and will let you buy accessories for the car which might be particularly important for that track. You might be winning a race but lots of damages to the car will actually not help you get more points and you cannot unlock the higher level. Even if you unlock the next level, you still will be competing with an old car in a new level, and thus will have a bleaker chance of winning in that level. So the essence is not just winning the race but to drive properly and still win.

Boundaries: The race track is the boundary in itself. You cannot actually go anywhere apart from this. You cannot actually race in a wrong way as the game prompts you constantly. As the goal is to move from the starting point to the ending point, there is not much room for exploring. Some locations allow you to detour a little on the landscape but that will slow you down and the main objective is to finish the race in least time. The tracks are bordered by buildings, trees, and water bodies. As soon as you move to a different surface, you experience a change in speed. You can surely choose to explore and find a shortcut on a map.

Outcomes: There are two outcomes of the game. You either win a race or lose it. Though winning is the ultimate goal and is absolute, losing has different levels and varieties. You can either be the last of the lot or you can be somewhere in between, may be 2nd or 3rd. Though you are not first, you can defeat other opponents. You can have the best lap time in the game and still lose. Till the time you keep defeating someone, you keep progressing and there are different degrees of winning and losing which makes the game more interesting.

Change 1: Make the game a team effort. You win the race when all the team members win it against the opponent. This will result in collective effort. Strong racers would have to help the weaker ones to come up to their skill level. Only when all the drivers in the team are at a similar skill level, your team will win. This will result in off the game interaction and how they need to collaborate to win the race.

Change 2: Give them unlimited Nitro Boosters. When people get unlimited resources they tend to oversee other problems. The players will now race harder and land up in more accidents and lose more points and effectively will not gain much from the change. This change will allow them to realize that ends can be achieved only when you make optimum use of the resources available to you.

This simple assignment begins the process. For this week, we had to blog about our favorite electronic game, using the following structure below.

My Favorite Game: It is not my favorite game but this is what comes to my mind when I think of PC games. I have not played much PC games as I have been very active outdoors (played all sorts of games that could be imagined) and liked playing in the field, much more than just playing indoors. However I have played Need for Speed during my Engineering and that too because of peer pressure. That is when I realized that games on computers can be as or more interesting than outdoor games. I have played Need for Speed Underground and seem to like it more than some of the other games that I have played online and on PC.

Platform: Mac or PC or game console.

Description: Need For Speed is a racing game. You begin by choosing a car. You have a lot of options and you can compare the cars under different categories from horsepower to cost peak speed, ease of maneuvering etc. You can also choose cars of different companies. Sometimes you need to have enough money to choose a car, which you need to earn by winning the game with other cars.

After you have chosen a car, you can choose a track. The tracks are from different locations and have different levels of difficulty. Once a track is fixed, you get to choose the number of opponents. You can play against the computer or multiple players can play it on LAN. You can choose to increase the difficulty of the game by adding or reducing traffic on the road. Once the race begins, you are marked on your driving abilities. Correct drifts and drags will give you more points. More points will allow you to buy parts for the car. Maximum points are earned when you win the race. You can choose to play the game as a Single race, Knockout or Tournament. Different modes will have different rules and different levels of difficulty. The realistic graphics and motions give you a feel of a real race.

Player Objective: Your aim is to complete all levels by winning all the races. With every level, the difficulty of the race increases and thus you master them by honing your driving skills. You can choose to spice up each race with more added challenges and rules. Especially when you play it on LAN, you can frame your own rules which the game might not be having. Final goal is to defeat others and win the race in the least amount of time. You can actually just race against time and still improve your driving skills.

Challenge: The challenges are many. You not only race against opponents but also against time (analogy from real life). You race under various conditions. Sometimes wet roads and at other times the slope and curve of the road proposes challenge. Just getting the most powerful car will not solve the problem. Which car is suited under what condition and mix and match of these features would actually let you win a race.

Forms of Fun: The act of winning, achieving is in itself fun. Racing in simulated environment that matches the real world makes it more enjoyable. Competition and challenges along with analytical ability to choose a correct car for correct situation is challenging. Visual perception and matching your speed along with the banking of the roads is also fun. Finally learning from the mistakes and continually improving to defeat opponents is my definition of fun.

Get Serious: The game can be tactfully changed by introducing engineering mechanics and highway planning into it. To begin with we can educate the drivers about the banking of roads. At what speed you need to travel so as to prevent the toppling of cars at the curves. The angle of elevation can be explained through this. “Toppling effect” could be taught. The concept of speed and distance could be introduced wherein the racers not just make visual perceptions but can calculate the speed that they need to maintain at a particular situation. Management and Ecommerce skills (something similar to decision making on Ebay and other E com Sites ) can be inbuilt into it while choosing cars so that they make informed decisions. On a later level even concepts of  liquid propulsion and internal combustion within an engine can be introduced. Even jet propulsion and higher level automobile engineering can be taught if we can achieve a balance between fun and learning.