Blog - Considering Aesthetics
Saturday, February 9, 2008So this weekend I'm working with another team of students to develop a board game. We're trying to develop a game under the MDA design framework, using paranoia as the aesthetic. In other words, making a game that makes the players feel paranoid. I'll post more on this game when I can.
In any case, the previous weekend, I made a quick and dirty little prototype board game with a different group of students. Brenda suggested we try a board game based on a video game. Our group settled on the Metroid series of games (although not any one game from the series in particular.) Obviously as we don't have rights to the IP, this is not a commercial venture, this was just merely a way to build up our game design skills, and hell, just for fun.
To create the game, we defined what we thought was the core mechanic of the series, which we determined to be exploration. You explore to find items which in turn help you explore more. Thus, in our board game you did that too, with a series of randomly-placed face-down tiles on specific room-squares on the map. Get to a room, flip it over and see what was in the room inside - often it was an item you needed, which also gave you enhanced abilities when exploring the map. For example, acquiring your morph ball let you use certain tunnels as shortcuts around the map, etc.
But I bring this game up because I can relate it back to the MDA framework. Although we captured the core of the video game series it was based on, we didn't capture the aesthetic. The aesthetic of the Metroid series is creepiness and isolation; one that doesn't really transfer well to a multiplayer board game. Our game was incredibly fun because it's pretty much the opposite aesthetic: a fast-paced, competitive race between players. This is not to say that the aesthetic of the video game series is not fun. It's just a completely different kind of game.
I thought it was interesting that now that I'm looking at the MDA framework for this upcoming game, it provides the clue as to why my previous game didn't quite feel like the game it was designed to emulate. Does it matter? Not really, as I see it, because we still had a blast designing and playing our board game, and I'm betting that matters a lot more. ;)
Labels: core, MDA, non-digital
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:38 PM
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