mygamestudies.com

The guys at the Finnish gaming magazine Pelaaja are writing a feature about Xbox Live Achievements, PSN Trophies, badges, and such. They asked me to comment about the matter, and my notes grew into this post. Let's look at the motivations behind amassing all that cultural capital of gamerpoints and completion percentages.

With this new blog, I have started to incorporate a design takeaway or inspiration into each post. The plan is to accumulate a database of design principles, hypotheses, challenges, provocations, and insights drawing from both my play experiences and my game design projects. However, as a half-academic, there is a tendency to over-elaborate - which might take away the whole notion of a take away. Therefore, from now on, I will try to compress the takeaways into 140 characters, i.e. into tweets which I will post to Twitter, as well as archive them into Tumblr.

I have been playing Far Cry 2. I find it fascinating, not least because of that old experiential friend of ours: Immersion. In terms of emotional game design, Far Cry 2 is a fine example of a particular set of eliciting conditions for emotions, designed into a seamless simulation of a world with events, agents, and objects. I'll spend a few paragraphs stargazing at how Africa has been designed for game play.

Jason Rohrer's Passage has a quality to it that one feels the need to call it Jason Rohrer's Passage instead of just Passage. This game certainly has an emotional design blueprint unlike any other. Passage's release for the iPhone in gives a good opportunity to stargaze at Passage's emotional design.

I purchased Aquaria after frequently coming across it in indie gaming websites. The singing gameplay mechanic in the game is definitely an interesting one (see video after the break). It got me thinking how audio game mechanics - i.e. 'verbs' of a game based on sound, music, or rhythm - have been so prominent if we look back on the recent couple of years. Is there a particular human affinity in responding to sound and interacting with it, and what would be the design angle to this? Let's have a quiet reflective moment.

I've been playing some Left 4 Dead on co-op with a friend, and it's great, hectic fun. An interesting design detail in the game is the glowing outline that your fellow survivors have. This feature arguably does have consequences for the game's emotional design - but how, exactly? Let's stargaze at L4D, i.e. try to understand the game's design in terms of emotional play experiences, with a design takeaway conclusion to boot.

Thanks to the highly enjoyable Bytejacker video podcast, I found Seppukuties at Kongregate. It's an interesting little platformer, not least because of a particular design decision: Instead of giving you 30 lives as, well, 30 pieces of life, it embodies those lives into 30 cute little animal characters who have a bit of personality each, thanks to pixel-cute visual design.

Phew, I just started playing Mirror's Edge. I finished the prologue with the helicopter only minutes ago. It's hard to take an analytic attitude towards such a thrilling gameplay sequence, but well, that's what I'm here to do. As a result of my studies in psychology of (game) goals, and gameplay sequences as emotional sequences, I have come up with the slogan 'the road to goals is beset by emotions'.

It's feels sort of awkward to revisit the old narrative/story vs. gameplay issue. At least in the academic circles it has been flogged to death. Yet, the guys at the Joystiq podcast (warmly recommended, it's the most sophisticated and fun game journo podcast out there!) have been discussing the matter in connection with Mirror's Edge lately, and perceptively. Therefore I decided to take this opportunity to revisit the issue briefly.

I used to blog about my Ph.D. writing process at gameswithoutfrontiers.net. Well, after the dissertation being done for some months now, and stepping into new challenges at both ITU and my one-man consulting business, it's become time to air out the new game design thinking me!