Blog - Mission Accomplished
Tuesday, August 5, 2008At one point during my time teaching EGD this summer, one of my students asked to try playing some of my games. I bought some index cards and made up really quick and dirty versions of both 50 Pace Duel and Rats.
I was reminded of this moment just now, when talking to an old friend of mine who was also interested in trying out Rats.
When playing Rats with a few of my EGD students, however, I was very amused when witnessing how things went down. First of all, they really had a blast playing it, which is great to see.
But secondly, it was neat seeing how well the game worked at what it was supposed to accomplish. Rats was the result of a class project wherein we had to use the MDA framework to make a game that made players feel a particular emotion (or aesthetic, in MDA terms) and the one our team chose was paranoia. (Interestingly, most of the teams in our class inexplicably also chose paranoia...)
Man alive, were my students ever getting all wired up and making some extremely paranoid exclamations and choices. It worked all too well.
I even later remarked to them that the game was intended to make them feel paranoid and they agreed that it had indeed worked quite beautifully. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:38 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
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 0 Comments Links to this post