Piyaphon Inthavong (0337589)
Game Studies
Exercises
INSTRUCTIONS
LECTURES
Week 1 | Tuesday, April 14th, 2020During our first lecture with Mr. Charles, he briefed us through the MIB (module information booklet) where he informed us upon the expectations of our upcoming exercises and projects. Mr. Charles then talked us through the basics, the keywords, and a quick summary of what Game Study is, which is essentially an investigation and research on both game creation and gameplay.
My understanding/definition of the game: An activity that provides entertainment to the player.
The 2 thoughts/directions on the types of games are Ludology and Narratology.
- Ludology aim towards creating play-driven games. Take it simple, players would play to win, play to gain, play to survive, to understand. These types of games don't depend on the complex narratives.
- Narratology on the other hand focuses on story-driven games. The objectives of players on story-driven games are more likely to find out the conclusion of the story, to develop the character in the process, and to fulfill quests. These games are dependent on the storylines.
By the end of the day, we all agreed to work on Tabletop Simulator to create tabletop games for future tasks. Viscera Cleanup Details was chosen as the first gameplay review starting this coming Friday the 17th.
Week 1 | Friday, April 17th, 2020
During today's practice session, we all tested and experimented on the Tabletop Simulator together. We then discussed gameplay reviews and streaming together.
We were tasked to do gameplay reviews and analysis sometimes during the week, preferably recorded or in the stream for documentation. The video could also be linked to our e-Portfolio later on. Playing the game directly as one of the authentic users help us understand the experiences so we should start asking ourselves questions like:
- What makes this experience enjoyable?
- What makes this game interesting?
- Most of the time, it connects us emotionally and mentally. Why so?
We’re doing something slightly different from the casual gamer as we’re reflecting on the experiences of the game. We also have to understand the different purposes of playing games; These can vary from:
- Play to enjoy
- Play to dare and be scared
- Play to socialize
- The list goes on…
Week 2 | Tuesday, April 21st, 2020
In today's lecture, Mr. Charles presented a slide about the ways to study, analyze games, and how we can do research on games. The diagram below describes the focus of game studies to understand the dynamic between the game world and ourselves (the overlapping region in the center.
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| The focus of Game Studies |
To elaborate further, the objectives of game studies are not all about knowing the reason for playing the game or to make sense of it, we need to try to understand the details such as: who's involved with the game? The architectural types, the music, and the mood, etc...
A thorough analysis will lead answers to the question: what is this game is really about? That is the reflection of the game to our own stories and situations in life.
"Challenges in-game may mirror some of our own challenges."
Game studies can be identified subjectively throughout individual's experience or perspective, as mentioned by Mr. Charles, there are no right and wrong answers to this matter; You get to choose your own style of gameplay and define it. There are no fixed answers, and it depends entirely on our own decisions. Mr. Charles then discussed the theory, history in Ludology, and the existence of strategy games ever since the times of wars.
Week 2 | Friday, April 24th, 2020
In today's practice session, the class gathered straight to Table Top Simulator for a few playtest and discussions. Abby, Ryan, Kenny, and I worked together on creating a simple board game from the simulator. Our ideas quickly evolved from a "simple snakes-and-ladder-kind-of-game" into a mashup of Human vs Monsters game which the dice is taken as the main tool of the game. The dice determine in-game actions such as a character's walking steps and the battling scene with other characters. We also changed the moving direction of the characters into a game of 8 lanes. A knight can only move vertically on the board; He must face through all the monsters to get to the other side (the trees). When land on a monster, he must compete with it through dice actions; A bigger dice number determines the huge moves in the game.
It was a great try in creating the same, much time and knowledge are needed. In the end, we ended up with a few in-game conflicts and mechanics, but we all learned a few things and discovered cool game features from it.
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| Figure 1. An attempt to create an interesting battle board game. |
We all logged out of the game and discussed our next tasks. I was grouped with Kenny for my future projects. We had to start testing our game ideas and present it to the class by next week.
Week 3 | Tuesday, April 28th, 2020
Today we had a lecture about the theory on how games connect to our personal history. We tend to seek and be involved in the imaginary world for many reasons as described from the previous session, which makes the imaginary and real-world connected. Research has yet to identify the logical explanations on how games shape us indirectly as games are continually evolving, hence the way in defining it in words (games are what you think it is, no one can change that).
Analog games have since existed from the ancient times where its origin is yet uncertain. It is encountered that some origin such as the dice game was discussed back in the times where people with certain beliefs (ex. druids) would throw bones, stick, runes rocks to see the outcome of their fortunes depending on the chances. We then presented our personal game history in turns and proposed our tabletop game.
Week 4 | May 5th and 8th, 2020
There was no specific theme for a lecture this week, the class met up Tabletop Simulator and did a game test from both teams on Tuesday session (May 5th). We spent hours playing and discussing gaps in the game (details are listed in the "Project" section).
On Friday's session, we presented to the class our slide on the 2nd exercise on the development of analogous board games (refer to exercise 2). Once done, Mr. Charles briefed us through the next exercise which is an investigation of story-driven games. We were to examine the genre by picking one of the old games and analyzing its development and changes over the years. It was suggested that we discuss the simulation of the game, the depth of the story, how it ends, and make a comparison to its most recent version.
EXERCISES
Exercise 1 | Personal Game HistoryDescribe your personal relationship with games in your life. Express it in any way of your choice (diagrams, infographic, video documentation...). Talk about the turning point of your life. The ones that relate to your situation at the time. Highlights, key phrases, or an account trying to explain ur relation.
- Your first games (both physical & digital)
- Why do you like that game?
- The features that you like about it.
- What was your experience like?
- How does it connect to you?
- How do you see ur situation at that time?
- Your Journey. How did you get there? What made you play this game?
Before creating the content for personal game history, I worked on drafts and sketch potential topics to discuss. I had to filter some information out because it's not possible to discuss everything in the history of ours. That said, I ran through a few topics and ideas in the following sketch:
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| Planning on the topic of discussion on Personal Game History. |
Here's my personal game history is written as a report document.
I presented my personal game history to the class from the following slides:
Exercise 2 | Analogous and Digital board games
Exercise 3 | Story-driven games
WEEKLY GAMEPLAY ANALYSIS
Week 2 | FlorenceFlorence is an interactive visual-novel based game that enables a new experience in reading novels. Playing as Florence Yeoh, a 25 years old lady who has a life of an endless routine of work, sleep, and spending too much time on social media. Things changed as she met the love of her life and the relationship develops over each chapter. Enough spoilers.
The game features extremely calming orchestrated music and friendly hand-drawn art style which makes the game less serious from many other types of genres. The bright use of colors evokes strong youthful emotion in the game. Its heartfelt story presents the theme of hope and self-love, a meaningful message from its authors to the rest of the world.
Week 3 | Cytus
Cytus was once my go-to game to hop on to every time I needed to forget about the world for a while. This rhythm game has great collections of instrumental music that gives you the vibe of the music genre and art style of Japan, which was greatly popularised since the productions of animes. I personally love music and great arts so Cytus has always been a great solution to the younger version of myself.
The gameplay involves a very little set of rules such as tap, hold, and drag. The player has to interact with circles as a state by its symbol while matching a rhythmic pattern represented by a line that moves up and down the screen as the player plays. The game is as simple as that. No tricks or tips, but just as a normal instrument, practicing is the main key in becoming a master at anything.
Week 4 | Viscera Cleanup Details
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