Posts Tagged play
Team play
Posted by Adriaan in game design on September 23, 2009
It is this one magical experience that drives players to play games for days, months or even years. It is the most proved and addicting aspects of games. What is this ‘team play’ and how is it used in games? What makes team play such a powerful game element?
Imagine yourself setting a goal that is far beyond your capabilities. You can either try to accomplish that goal and fail or… you could ask for others to help you. Every person that is going to help you reach your goal will extend the capabilities of you and your group of people we call a team. So to work as a team basically means to use the extended capabilities of every individual. Every individual must act on the behalf of the team or else the capabilities won’t add up to the people who do. If the full capability of the team is required to reach a goal, you need real team work, something that is not as easy as it may seem and something that needs a lot of preparation and organization. This part of team play is what we call team strategy or tactics.
In many recent video games, this last thing is where most games are based on. Think of an MMO like World of Warcraft where 25 individuals team up to defeat dungeons, or Left4Dead where 4 players all take a role in defending themselves and their teammates. Or think of almost any team sport – soccer, baseball… even tennis with 4 people is mostly based on strategical positioning and shooting.
Is there a difference between teamwork and team play? Is there a difference between working together and playing together? Which term you could use would depend on the context, on the goal of the team and whether that goal is brought to the team with a cooperative mind or setting. Both terms suggest interactivity between the team members. Team play would suggest that the team members have fun doing their part of the work that has been done, but why can’t team work be fun?
Anyway, we can conclude that the goal is what makes team play so powerful, impossible as an individual but possible as a team. The accomplishment of difficult tactics or strategies only add to the reward of achieving the impossible. Even if there are no explicit tactics, is can be a huge reward for the team members to accomplish implicit tactics. But are there also other factors that strengthen that sense of being part of a team?
If you have ever been part of a (successful) team, you would know that there is always this one team member that is better at what he does than everyone else in the team. I would like to call these people team heroes. These people inspire others to do their own task better, whether that task is the same or completely different. Beside respecting each person’s individual capabilities, strong team members also trust in each other in acting with their full capability.
So to wrap this up, a team is easily created by gathering some people together and giving them the same goal, but for a stronger sense of team play, a lot more is needed. Tactics make sure the process of achieving the goal is done organized, team heroes inspire team mates to do their work (better) and team members being dependent on one another will create trust in all the team members.
Achieving the impossible is possible. You just can’t do it by yourself.
Play – what is a game?
Posted by Adriaan in game design on April 8, 2009
Play pt.1, Play pt.2 and Play pt.3 have been real eye-openers for me, and even while I can still discuss about these definitions for ages, I’m going to come to a conclusion in this article.
Where I stopped last was where I said that ‘serious games’ were games with it’s purpose not being ‘fun’, games in which you could not imagine being someone else and games where the consequences would affect real life. So what are examples of serious game? Anything obvious?
Learning games you (have most likely) played when you were 14 years old: you would write down a word on one side of a piece of paper and the same word in another language on the other side, with which you could test yourself by only showing one side of the paper. Or maybe even more simple: put your hand on the words in your book and test yourself. It’s the same principle as hide and seek, but then with words and a different purpose: you find a word and then try to remember it… the next time you play the game you should remember the word and if you don’t, you will have to remember it for the next time.
And what about Russian Roulette? That definitely has real life consequences! And as for digital games, I’m redirecting you to Globetrotter XL on Kongregate: it’s purpose being ‘to improve your geographic skills’ – and hell it works, it is fun and you learn from it – a serious game. Serious games are there, they are just hard to find because the big mass doesn’t know what they are!
What have I learned?
A game is not what defines play, play is what defines a game.
A game is a challenge with its purpose being ‘fun’ where a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome.
The question is not how to make fun games serious, it’s how to make serious games fun.
A serious game is a challenge with its purpose being not ‘fun’ where a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome and where the player can’t imagine being someone else.
So the next question is, how do I apply this to my game design? How can I make use of this definition to make great games? I guess… welcome to the wonderfull world of game designers!
A ‘tutorial’? Ha!
Posted by Adriaan in game design on April 6, 2009
I often notice that some developers just don’t get the meaning of a tutorial. At the very beginning of some games, they give you a whole manual of text that you have to go through before you can start playing. This is something almost no gamer is interested in and anyone would try to go through the text as quick as possible, something that could totally ruin the game experience.
Have you ever played a board game where you read the whole manual before you started to play?
(Video) games are interactive, which means that the player can have input and constantly receives feedback. Same goes for the game itself, the game gets input and gives feedback (or simply output). If you take away the input of the player by presenting him with a bunch of text, nothing else then a manual, you basicly ignore the fact that games are interactive! Also, as a designer you should note that a player does not want to learn the rules as quickly as posible, but he or she wants to play the game as quickly as possible!
A tutorial is all about learning. You want your player to know how to play your game before he or she starts to play. You want your player to master your game when he is playing it. As a game designer, you can design how your player learns to play your game. When presenting your player with different elements of your game while he is playing it, you have a tutorial.
So, INSERT * INTO _game WHERE _tutorial = ‘interactive’. I hate databases.
Imagine a world without play
Posted by Adriaan in game industry on April 2, 2009
No humor, no movies, no sports, no fantasy, no games, …
I can see the importance of games in this world. It’s much bigger than we realise… This is probably why the ‘gamer-generation’ is growing so rapidly, playing is something we have been doing for generations and is something we are now evolving in. Feel the responsibility!
Play – part 3
Posted by Adriaan in game design, game industry on April 1, 2009
This article continues from Play – part 2 – Yes, I’ve still not figured out what every game is and isn’t!
Where were we? Right, I stated the following:
Not everything you play is a game, only play of which it’s purpose is fun.
After my previous articles, I got a pretty clear idea about the value and importance of fun. But… I also know how little I can tell about fun. I know what fun is, but I´m not the neurologist that could let you understands what fun is.
For now, I´m going to split ´play´ in two different types. Play in the context of a game, with it purpose being fun, and play in the context of… something else with a purpose being more serious: yes, I see these as totally different things. If I look back at one of my examples, the Flight Simulator, one way you could play it was with its purpose being fun and the other was training your mental skills for flying a plane. There is a term for that ‘something else’, a games with its purpose not being fun and untill now I have sworn to not use it: Serious games.
So, what do I find so weird about the term ‘serious games’?
Let’s take advergames as an example. These games are known by the industry as serious games because they seem to have another purpose then fun. But if you look closely, the purpose of these advergames is still fun, and by having fun the company or developer can use the game to advertise. The developer or company is practicly being serious in a fun game! The industry just doesn’t know what a serious game is… This is why I find it dangerous to name a game as such.
So, what is a serious game then? Let’s put all pieces together:
A serious game is a challenge with it’s purpose being not fun where a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome.
Note that a player can still have fun in a serious game, depending on the player’s personal purpose of playing the game.
After a second thought, this can’t be all. According to Randy Smith, a game designer who writes articles for the Edge, serious games are games in which we would be confronted with all the consequences of your action, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. And I think he has a very good point. You could say that in any ‘not-serious game’, you imagine yourself as being someone or something else. If you can’t be someone or something else in a game, you are probably playing a serious game.
Would people play games where they had to face all the consequences of their actions? Are there any serious games so far?
Enough to think about for now. The final part!
Play – part 2
Posted by Adriaan in game design on March 24, 2009
This article continues from Play.
We have come to a point where we could ask ourselves, is everything you play a game?
Lets talk about a presentation of Stuart Brown about Play. In the first part of his presentation, he says:
Play doesn’t always have to have a particular purpose.
I must disagree: I believe that every form of play has a purpose, whether it is a purpose of which the player is conscious of or not. I even believe play can have neurological purposes, like Stuart Brown himself even explains in later parts of his presentation, but I’m not a neurologist. Lateron, Stuart Brown says:
If it’s purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it is probably not play.
Errrr…. Let’s think of something that has always been on the edge of being a game: ‘simulators’. Let’s take Flight Simulator for example. If I think of it, there are two ways of playing Flight Simulator: you can play with the purpose of having fun, or you could play Flight Simulator with any other purpose. When you are playing with the purpose of having fun, the act of doing is the only way to achieve this feeling and Stuart says it’s play. But when you are playing Flight Simulator with any other purpose, lets say, training your flight skills, its purpose would be more important than the act of doing it and, according to Stuart, it would not be play. But would it still be a game?
From here, all remains a very unstable theory of my own. Please comment if you totally feel something is off!
Lets state the following:
There are two types of play where the only difference between those is it’s purpose, ‘fun’ or anything else.
Let’s say this is true. Now, the only question left before we could come to a conclusion is whether all games are fun. Let’s get out of this mental slug for a second and think of our own past: not talking about your personal feelings, were there any games you remember of which it’s purpose was not ‘fun’? This is a very hard question since you might have been playing games without knowing it! And to use my definition of what a game is, ‘a challenge in which a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome’, we can conclude that we have been playing alot of ‘games’ that were not fun! Your history tests at school, buying new shoe’s, even riding your bike home could be a game!
Or not. Maybe it isn’t that weird to think that there is no game without fun. Maybe there are indeed two types of play in which play with the purpose of fun is a game and play with the purpose of anything but fun is not a game. Maybe not everything you play is a game.
That is what I claim. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
Continue to Play – part 3.
Play
Posted by Adriaan in game design on March 20, 2009
With this being the first post about games and many to come, I start with saying to myself that while I am writing this I am totally going to reinvent my vision about games. I’m going to try to write down all my thoughts about games and what defines them… How else could I be making a game if I don’t even know what it is?
So, where do I start? I asked my little brother what he thought that defined a game and while he was making a joke, he came directly to the core of what a game is.
A game is something you play …
You must be thinking ‘Oh really?’ right now, but the solution is right there. Play. What does it mean ‘to play’ something? What makes play possible? Again, my little brother helped me out by saying that he plays with the mouse and the keyboard. Now, not every game plays with a mouse and keyboard, but the core of what he is saying is right: part of what playing is has to do with what you put in to it, with input and feedback, with interacting. Note that it doesn’t even have to be digital: imagine all the war games you played when you were young, in times we would still get out of our house to have fun.
Okay, so… Let’s say I’m going to interact with a small rubber ball. First I’m adding myself to the game, a player. I’m throwing the ball to the ground, expecting it to come up again. It indeed comes up, I position my hand to the location of where the ball is going to fly and I catch it. Alright, that’s all good, but it is not a game. We could make a game of it by adding a goal or better said, a challenge! Lets say I will have to throw and catch it 20 times in a row without dropping it, making use of my focus. Or maybe I could make an endurence game of this setup by keep on throwing and catching the ball for as many times as I can for an hour long! Now it’s a game!
A game is ‘something’ a player can interact with and which challenges the player.
‘Something’? I missed one step somewhere. I went from ‘nothing’ to ‘a rubber ball with physics’ and it seems that without these, there would not be a game. There wouldn’t be chess without a board, chess pieces, an opposing player and your hand. There wouldn’t be a Yeti sports game without the Yeti, his club, the gravity pulling the penguin down and the air velocity of the penguin. There would not be soccer without a ball! All of these games have something in common: They would not be games if they did not have objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome. It explains the rubber ball with physics, the ground, the hand and maybe even the air.
And there we are, at my current vision about a game. Only time will tell me if I’m right. Or you.
A game is a challenge in which a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome.
Continue to Play – part 2…
My name is Adriaan de Jongh and I am a student at the Utrecht School of the Arts where I study Game Design. I like to sail, to kite surf and to play drums.
I worked on games including:
