Developing a New Major

challenges expand our identity, show who we really are

challenges take part in a specific context, a “setting , the conditions under which the challenge is presented” (p. 37)

we take on most challenges are voluntary

“it’s easy to ruin a good challenge by exploiting loopholes in the rules” – can’t make reams of rules to prevent cheating, among friends we usually make a tacit agreement that people won’t take advantage of any weird tricks or loopholes

“The player’s formal goal is to beat the system enclosing hte challenge, but the player’s ultimate goal is to overcome the challenge” (p. 39) – cheating is unsatisfying

purpose of rule – keep people frm looking for ways to cheat, for ways to get around the challenge – “There are a myriad ways to play a game, but a good design enures that only the challenging ways are possible…Your job as a designer is to define the challenge in the game and then make that challenge as clear and precise as possible.” (p. 40)

kinds of challenge – cerebellar, sensorimotor, spatial, pattern recognition, sequential reasoning, numerical reasoning, resource management, social reasoning

for many challenges we want to get the reactions downt o be automatic responses (like chunking in Koster’s book) – rawford calls it pushing the pathways down into the lower brain functions – faster processing, we can do other things while the lowewr functions are happening – more experienced players have built short neural pathways from teh visual input to the visual procesing parts of the brain, instinctive decision makring, “the player sees and the player acts without conscious thought” (p. 44), exercise leads to mastery and the more exercise, the faster the processing because it’s part of the lower brain functions, it’s a subconscious act, kind of likem uscle memory for actons

we’re programmed to like learning, mastery is pelasurable, in action games we have to learn using spatial reasoning

lots of board games use pattern recognition as well as sequential reasoning, patterns don’t have to be visual

people really don’t get much fun out of lots of sequential reasoning or numerical reasoning – don’t make player crunch numbers or memorize long list stuff – however there is usually a lot of sequential reasoning in games because game developers are good at it

resource management comes more easily to people than math and memorizing, but can’t just take a game and add resource management

social reasoning – not in games much because game desingers aren’t good at it – need more of it if we want to bring in more women gamers (?? are women game developers any better at social reasoning than male developers?)

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