Blog - Mission Accomplished

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

At 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.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:38 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Rats Postmortem

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Just in time for me to head off for GDX, gamecareerguide.com published the postmortem for Rats, one of the board games I worked on recently.

So, that's exciting. :)
Especially as Rats is one of the games I submitted for the Entelechy competition at GDX, so it might even be "award-winning" too.

Congrats to the rest of the Rats team.
I'll be seeing some of you at GDX!

Now for the long drive to Atlanta...

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:05 AM  0 Comments Links to this post