Reality is Broken - Notes

This will mostly be quotes actually, and frankly they'll be out of context.  I have to type them up before I return the e-book to the library (and thus lose my nook notes/highlights), and this seemed like as good a place as any to keep them.

Reality is Broken - Jane McGonigal

"gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression." p. 33

"When we realize that this reorientation toward intrinsic reward is what's really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither surprising nor particularly alarming.  Instead, it's overwhelming confirmation of what positive psychologists have found in their scientific research: self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier.  More importantly, it's evidence that gamers aren't escaping their real lives by playing games.  They're actively making their real lives more rewarding." p. 53

Regarding fail sequences in Super Monkey Ball 2:

"This animation sequence played a crucial role in making failure enjoyable" p. 67

When the 2008 Prince of Persia came out there were a fair number of complaints about how easy the game was.  The complaints mostly boiled down to how easy it was because you never die.  Every time there would have typically been a death sequence, Elika comes and rescues you.  The sequence serves the exact same function as a death sequence (Elika takes you back to the last safe place, or the boss you're battling has time to regenerate his health), and shouldn't actually make the game easier.  Reading this section about how the failure animations actually help the player enjoy their failures makes me wonder if the issue many gamers had with the lack of deaths in PoP wasn't really that the game was too easy, but that they didn't get that same feeling of interest in the failure animation. 

Personally, I thought the idea of replacing a death scene with a rescue scene worked very well.  When Elika gets knocked out, the player as the prince goes to help her.  That exchange of assistance goes a long way to develop the relationship between the prince and Elika in a game without a ton of dialogue.  I imagine there is, however, a certain type of gamer who isn't particularly interested in the relationship between the avatar and sidekick, and who might even find the experience of being saved by the sidekick humiliating or at least not as interesting as a gruesome death.

"Meaning is the feeling that we're a part of something bigger than ourselves.  It's the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives.  When something is meaningful, it has significance and worth not just to ourselves, or even to our closest friends and family, but to a much larger group: to a community, and organization, or even the entire human species." p. 94

"An epic environment is a space that, by virtue of its extreme scale, provokes a profound sense of awe and wonder"  p. 100

"In a series of ten challenges, gamers beat the world's most sophisticated protein-folding algorithms five times, and drew even three times."  p. 215

Regarding Albert Einstein and Chess:

 "Einstein ... once famously said, 'Games are the most elevated form of investigation'"  p. 272

 "To play chess as a more than casual player is to become a part of this problem-solving network.  It means joining a massively collaborative effort to become intimately familiar with an otherwise unfathomably complex possibility space."  p. 273

 Regarding the Lydians:

"This was [the dice games] primary function: to provide real positive emotions, real positive experiences, and real social connections during a difficult time

This is still the primary function of games for us today.  They serve to make our real lives better.  And they serve this purpose beautifully, better than any other tool we have.  No one is immune to boredom or anxiety, loneliness or depression.  Games solve these problems, quickly, cheaply, and dramatically.

Life is hard, and games make it better."  p. 299

"Moreover, when we play games, we consume less.  This is perhaps the most overlooked lesson of the story that Herodotus told.  For the ancient Lydians, games were actually a way to introduce and support a more sustainable way of life."

"We are starting to question material wealth as a source of authentic happiness."  p. 300

Planning a sample level

I've been planning out a self-contained level.  So far what I have are fairly disparate elements spread across several prototypes.  Here I am trying to combine them in a way that makes sense, and also implement some changes to the map view that I've been considering. 

Hole in the Ground

Tile Flip Puzzles

Planning Sketches

After spending some time planning out more complex mechanisms for surviving a tile flip, I went back and created prototypes of the easiest survival methods.  The first is simply walking to another tile.  I've added the idea of walking up to something in the world to get to the map view back into the prototype.  The map/landscape tile flip mechanic is faked for the time being (the landscape tile flips regardless of whether or not you've flipped the map tile).

The next one doesn't have a tile you can get to, but you can walk around the tile as it flips.  The white plane was added in because it's rather difficult to understand how the tile you're on is moving without a horizon to orient you. 

Working on these more simple survival strategies lead me to think about another way to walk from one tile to another:

Survival on a flipping tile

When thinking about how to improve the tile flip mechanic in the map view, I was considering choosing a constraint similar to the board game.  In the board game the player has a marker which can be moved only to certain spaces.  The spaces where the marker has been is always flipped.  For the video game, I was thinking that the marker could start on the tile where the player is, and be moved similarly.  However this would mean that every time the player goes into the map view, the tile the player is on will be flipped.  Which makes not falling off the tile a much bigger part of the game than it previously was.  This then lead me to think of the various ways to survive a tile flip.  One of the comments I've had repeated from players is that they would like to see the underside of the tile field.  So I created this simple prototype showing a possible "safe space" one might seek out after triggering a tile flip:

Here's what it looks like from a distance, so that you can see how it works:

Thumbnail Sketch

Book of Lenses

The main problem that I have with Schell's book is that he has a tenancy to occasionally get fairly unimportant things incorrect, which then throws everything that I don't have at least a bit of prior knowledge of into doubt.  The most egregious example of these mistakes is on page 117 where Schell makes the claim that we can understand line drawings because our brains draw lines around important objects.  In fact he says that "When we are presented with a picture already drawn with line, it has been 'pre-digested' in a sense, matching our internal modeling mechanism perfectly, and saving them a lot of work."

If you are interested in the actual reason that line drawings are understandable to us, there's a readable scientific paper on it here, but suffice it to say it has nothing to do with a tiny rotoscope artists in our heads. 

However there are many very useful insights in the Book of Lenses.  One that I found particularly helpful when developing a game board was the idea of thinking of a game space as a series of zero dimensional cells.  The below image is of two diagrams I created.  The left shows my first attempt, and the zero dimensional diagram of it, and the right is the revision I made.

Particularly because I am working with an irregular grid, it was difficult to see how the spaces related to one another.  Removing the extra dimensions made those relationships very clear and helped me to evaluate what I liked and didn't like about the design. 

One very interesting concept Schell discusses is the possibility for this type of diagramming to work with imaginary spaces.  For an example he shows a diagram of the game twenty questions.  One space is the mind of the answerer, another the mind of the questioner.  Another space, the conversation space, exists between the two.  I think this is a very interesting way to think about game spaces, and I would like to explore it farther.

Book of Lenses: Players

I will admit that considering my audience is one of my weak points as an artist.  I tend to find it very difficult to think about the audience without losing sight of what I'm trying to express which tends to make whatever I am working on into an incoherent mess.  So I was looking forward to the chapter on the player in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and was disappointed to find that it is mostly a discussion of demographics.  To make matters worse, the demographics are discussed in terms of fairly tired generalizations, and the chapter focuses a lot on the differences between male and female players.  There is a danger to focusing to much on the differences between male and female players. 

Men and women actually have much more in common than not.  The differences tend to stand out because they are so rare compared to the similarities.  Since those differences catch our attention so easily, there is an understandable tenancy to ascribe more importance to the differences than is wise.  Schell seems to fall into this trap.  While his points are not completely incorrect, he makes it sound like it is an impossible task to create a single game that will appeal to both men and women because the things men and women like in games are all polar opposites.  But clearly it is not impossible for games to appeal to both genders.  Schell even gives an example of how both boys and girls enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold experience at DisneyQuest.  Boys and girls may have had slightly different motivations for "blowing up bad guys" and slightly different style of play, but the game accommodated both with the same gameplay. This segment would have been much more interesting if it had focused on how to achieve that kind of gameplay, instead of making it seem like a hopeless task.

The one item in Schell's list of gender differences that I take issue with is the idea that female players shouldn't be given spatial puzzles.  While it is true that women on average have a harder time with spatial reasoning, as it turns out video games can actually help erase that problem.  Usually when we talk about the transformative quality of any particular media, we're talking about something intangible, but in this one case there is a transformative effect that has been scientifically studied.  That someone writing a book about game design presumably in order to influence the future of game design would discourage game designers from making spatial puzzle games that appeal to women seems very irresponsible to me. 

I thought it was interesting that the only demographics discussed in this chapter were age and gender.  Schell does mention that there are other ways to group people, and then talks briefly about psychographics.  Psychographics seem like they would be more helpful and nuanced.  However there's simply not much information about them. 

The chapter ends with a list of the types of pleasure one might find in a game.  The list is well thought out, and it has nice descriptions.  I feel like this is the part of the book where it should talk about catharsis, but it doesn't.  I'm not sure if I think catharsis should be included as a pleasure in itself; experiencing a tragic story is not always pleasant, but it can be cathartic and there is a sort of pleasure in that.  However from what I understand catharsis is also about relieving positive emotions, and therefore it could be the result of the pleasures in a game.