Do game developers seek to shame certain player choices? Are they teaching players about the importance of making the “right” choice? These are some of the questions I had after our last class. I thought about my experience playing both The Last Of Us and Undertale in comparison to others in class. Some people in…
So far in this class, we have played a variety of games dealing with moral choices as well as discussed them in class. As I see it, it’s possible to divide games with a moral aspect into three categories: (1) social issue games, which deal explicitly with issues with a moral dimension, and make this…
Games have space. This is one of the core components of game design, and something that every designer must consider. What is the space of your game? What are the rules? What are the challenges? How do they interact to form a system that is compelling? Space is one of the more ambiguous categories, as…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the comparison between films and video games–why is that we allow such diversity in movies but only have one way of thinking about the “successful” video games? Reading burlison11’s post, Taking Fun Seriously, reminded me of some of the themes we covered in my Digital Africas course. In it, we…
I’m writing this post because I don’t play video games. The only game I can remember playing is Spyro on PS1 when I when I was in middle school (I’ll let you figure out how old I am) . I’m barely even a casual gamer–I did play a little Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja when…
How implicit or explicit should a game developers message be so that it may be impactful and understood by the player? Often this question arose in my mind after playing Grayscale and Redshift and Portalmetal (Redshift). If developers seek to convey a message the player should be able to walk away from the game…
Considering the endings of Queers In Love At The End of The World and The Stanley Parable in conversation with each other reveals different ways of determining what to value in games. There are multiple endings in the Stanley Parable, and the end that Stanley meets is determined by player choices. Once an ending…
In the article “Videogames of the Opressed,” (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/Boalian) Gonzalo Frasca says of the Sims: “The fact that the best-selling game of the year 2000 was about people is a clear sign that videogames are on their way towards maturity.” He goes on to repeatedly make the connection between humanity and maturity in games. This intrigued…
As, perhaps, the first obvious choice presented in The Stanley Parable, the choice to enter the left or right door presents an opportunity for the player to adhere to what has been dictated as the game’s story, or rebel against the narrator and assert their own volition. While this offers the opportunity for a player…
It seemed that, as a class, we generally believed that in order for videogames to be successful, they need to have some sort of “fun” component in them. Of course, there are many different ways to define “successful” but in this context I’m using 1) How wide of an audience does the game capture and…
