Developing a New Major

Image by l0ckergn0me via Flickrlearn several games and compare

1st 8 weeks – boardgames/cardgames

Videogames get all the advertising dollars (ok – most of them). Create ads for your games for the upcoming holiday season. You need to include specifics about the game, you canwrite consumer quotes based on your playing of hte game. You have to understand the rules, what makes the game fun in order to advertise it. SO you have to have played the game at least twice yourself and then watch other people play it at least twice. You might take photos of your play session for the ads. You can find pictures on the web. If you plan ahead,you can contact the publisher (or the US distributor) and see if they have any literature they can send you to use in your ad. Write up a little analysis of the game to tuurn in also – describe the general game mechanics, describe any problems you found with the game/instructions/packaging, describe the target audience. Make 3 ads for 3 different outlets

OR

(from Ian Schreiber’s blog) – Take a relatively complex board game (say, Puerto Rico). Design a player aid for the game.

This forces students to exercise the following skills:

• Reading and understanding the rules! This is actually a difficult task, and going through the process involves understanding that games are composed of rules, and learning how the different rules can work together. Students who play through the game instead of merely reading a rule sheet will learn that the dynamics of a game set in motion are sometimes very different — and sometimes easier to understand — than the static nature of a written document.
• Learning how to explain the rules to someone else. This doesn’t just mean writing a manual, it means making the game easy enough to learn that you don’t need a manual. (Consider all of the video games today that do such a good job of teaching the player in the first few levels, that the written manual is superfluous.)
• Evaluating the User Interface. Players must decide what parts of the game are the most confusing or intimidating. What is hard to use? What aspects of the game are unclear? This also requires the ability to conceptually divide the game into its component parts, and see the relationship between the mechanics and the UI.
• Improving the UI. Once a problem is identified, the student must come up with a superior solution. In this case, it involves adding a new component: a player aid or quickref sheet of some kind, meant to simplify some confusing aspect(s) of the game. Oh, and of course you have to design the player aid so that it is itself easy to use, and doesn’t make things more confusing.

And for all this thinking, the actual work output is simple: a small piece of cardboard or a single sheet of paper, perhaps. And that’s the beauty of it: students learn that sometimes, a huge amount of work goes into a very small component of the game, but that component ends up making a huge difference in the player experience.

As an alternate, more advanced assignment, find a game with long, difficult or confusing rules and have students rewrite the rules to be more clear and concise.

OR

(from Teach Game Design blog) – play a commercial traditional game and a less well-known traditional game and answer these questions about each. – probably go over these questions with some commercial games – goal is to point out that many commercial games are random – roll and move, no strategy – game mechanic in many of these commercial games aren’t good, not really fun (like candy land – fun for kids, not grownups)

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face?
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges?
3. What can players do to affect each other?
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming “just the same” over and over?
5. Is the game fair?
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type (consider “take that”)?
7. What is the “essence” of the game?

Here’s how he analyzes Monopoly

Monopoly

As this is the game people often think of first, I’ll discuss it first. Monopoly is a “family game” with a leaning toward adults. It is an average game at best, though quite despised by many boardgame experts. The “roll and move” mechanic is the first point of complaint, but there are others.

There is a dominant strategy–buy everything you land on, if you possibly can, early in the game. This leads to the strong possibility of stalemate, as players may choose not to trade properties to make the sets that allow house building. Consequently, there is a strong possibility that the game can go on for many hours with experienced cutthroat players. In any case, it is a long game–-my students often say they’ve never actually finished a game.

Further, the game works poorly with fewer than four players.

Let’s examine the questions:

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? The player must get sets of properties, construct buildings to raise the rent, and avoid big payouts.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Not much. Movement is random, and decisions are fairly simple. Trading is a major action, as is management of funds (how much to spend on buildings, how much to hold against the possibility of paying large rents).
3. What can players do to affect each other? Trade properties. Otherwise, next to nothing.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming “just the same” over and over? Replayability is low, I think. The game quickly becomes repetitive. Few people actually play Monopoly a lot in a short stretch (say a year), but they may play a lot over a very long period, where they will forget how repetitive it actually is.
5. Is the game fair? It’s symmetric, and the advantage of moving first doesn’t seem to make much difference in the long run. There are no “take that” cards to drastically change the game, though a bad roll or two can be deadly.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game? It’s a family game, and there can be big changes in fortune depending on the dice rolls, but it seems appropriate to a “game for all ages”.
7. What is the “essence” of the game? Theoretically it’s a real estate trading and development game, but the emphasis is on the chance of movement rather than on the trading, unfortunately.

There are many variations of Monopoly, in fact most people don’t play according to the rules. I’ve never thought about how to “fix” the game, but one notion that comes to mind is this: instead of playing through rolling around the board a few times, why not allow players to choose some properties to start with? This could be arranged to remove the advantage of playing first, as well. So players might write down a list of five properties (no two from a particular group such as the red properties or the railroads). All are revealed, everyone pays for their first choice (or next, if there’s a tie), etc. until all have three (not five). Then play proceeds.

An interesting variation from Boardgamegeek is, every unowned property landed on is auctioned! The “lander” does not get an opportunity to buy before the auction.

As with most traditional games, Monopoly has a very poor score on Boardgamegeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/1406.
2nd 8 weeks – videogames

play 2 different games (have to be the same genre – could be same title but on different platforms, could be same genre but different titles on teh same platform) = they need to be games you haven’t played before

compare – play each game at least 2 hours, answer the following questions – describe the genre of the games you picked (in general), now describe the genre as it is implemented in these 2 gamesAa describe the games you played and how far you got (points earned, levels completed, skills earned…), how did features of the platform (the hardware) affect how the genre was implemented, which game was easier to learn, who’s the audience for these game (what are you basing your description on – be specific about things in the game, packaging, how it’s advertised, if they’re for different audiences – how is it iplemented in the different games)

Trackback URL