EAE-6000-001 Game Design，每周有两篇阅读，并根据阅读完成一篇 Reflection。有时还会写一些 Snacks，举例说明游戏中的优秀/糟糕设计。

Week 1，Readings:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CFutBFGs5M
• The Structure and Classification of Games. 

Week 1，Reflections:

第一篇Reflection，打算先拿中文写个大概，再转英文。

两篇材料都提供了独特而富含启发性的对游戏的视角。在 Foulston, M. 的 演讲中，她以 V&A’s Videogame Exhibition 为例，阐述了策展人视角下的游戏。而 The Structure and Classification of Games 则是从 Huizinga 著名的游戏学著作 Homo Ludens 出发，指出了其对游戏的定义的不足，并试用分类的视角解决其问题。

让我们从演讲 Design, Play, Disrupt 开始。这篇演讲首先提到了游戏作为一种媒介和文化，其影响力日益升高，其本身的艺术属性也本应很适合展览。但是在传统的美术馆艺术语境下，我们又缺乏一些行之有效的方式，将游戏作为展览中的艺术品进行展出。Foulston 在演讲中提出的一种解决方案是，不把游戏当做 the sort of key object. 以 V&A’s Videogame Exhibition 展出的 The Journey 举例，策展人选取了游戏中若干个切片视频和前期的设计文档，用游戏的视听效果和开发历程，来体现游戏作为 Designed Object 的艺术理念和艺术属性。然而，个人来讲我并不喜欢这样的形式——它几乎完全舍弃了游戏这一媒介的交互性。另一方面，如果用The Structure and Classification of Games 提供的游戏分类的视角来分析展出的游戏，我们也会发现，不同类型的游戏显然有不同的展示方法。

那让我们把目光转回 The Structure and Classification of Games. 本文首先指出，Homo Ludens 对游戏的定义既泛泛，又狭隘。为了解决这个问题，作者从游戏的核心乐趣和游戏的形式的角度，对游戏进行了分类，并对每个类型中的游戏特点和例子进行了细致的分析。其将游戏的分类结果总结为下表。

纵向上，我认为其从游戏动机出发进行了分类。PAIDIA 指一种更自然、更自由的对 玩 的渴望。你可以轻松地在每个孩子身上看到这种本能。而 Ludus 则往往源于克服困难和挑战的冲动。而横向上，文章根据游戏形式的不同，将游戏分为 agôn 、alea 、mimicry 和 ilinx。他们分别指代着竞争性游戏、运气游戏、扮演游戏和 感官刺激游戏。（私人理解）

那么，如果按这种分类来审视展览中的游戏，我们能否提出一些别的展览方案呢。

先来说说 agôn。agôn 游戏的独特性往往源于游戏本身的规则——足球和篮球最大的不同当然就是规则。我相信 Foulston 展示风之旅人的手法——利用视听语言和设计历程来展示——用在这里简直再合适不过了。试想，有什么比看一场篮球比赛能让人更快地理解篮球的规则吗？同样是机制主导的 alea也是类似的——比起让观众自己上手去玩，观看就已经能体现游戏的核心内容了。

但是mimicry (笔者认为风之旅人也属于这一类游戏) 和 ilinx则截然不同了。按照 The Structure and Classification of Games 对于这两类作品的分析，虽然 Foulston 的方法可以将作品作为一个 Designed Object 展出，但是很难想象观众可以不游玩游戏就收获与普通玩家接近的体验。而倘若不能切身体验 mimicry 的沉浸感 和 ilinx 的 vertigo，任何对作品本身的解读都像是空中楼阁一般缺乏支撑。诚然，博物馆的展出需要考虑的因素很多——空间、场馆、主题，很难调和各种问题和矛盾。但，V&A’s Videogame Exhibition作为一个游戏展，考虑到游戏媒介与其他媒介的最大差异恰恰是交互性，或许更多地将交互展现给观众才是更好的选择。

Q1：用大量2~3分钟长的，小交互作品（类似What Remains of Edith Finch 中的部分关卡）是否能组成一个独特的 Game Exhibition？

Q2：在 2020的视角来看，The Structure and Classification of Games 中对游戏的分类是否需要扩充和扩展？例如，以观察其他人的故事为主线的游戏 Gone Home 或 Dear Esther，似乎并不属于 agôn 、alea 、mimicry 和 ilinx 中的任何一类。

Q3：类似 V&A’s Videogame Exhibition 的真正把游戏作为文化媒介而不是商品的游戏展在全球范围内发展如何，美术馆和观众对于这种类型的展览是否抱积极态度？

Week 1，Snacks:

俄罗斯方块的 7 Bag 机制既保证了玩家游玩体验的多样性，又保证了策略性。

7-Bag in tetrominoes-generating helps Tetris builds a fruitful and tactical experience.

Everyone has played Tetris. But how the game generates the sequence of tetrominoes? Modern Tetris usually uses an algorithm named 7-bag。In 7 bag, Random Generator generates a sequence of all seven one-sided tetrominoes (I, J, L, O, S, T, Z) permuted randomly as if they were drawn from a bag. Then it deals all seven tetrominoes to the piece sequence before generating another bag. There are 7! (Links to an external site.), or 5,040, permutations of seven elements, and it is believed that Tetris assigns a nearly equal probability to each of these, making it much less likely that the player will get an obscenely long run without a desired tetromino. ( The 7-bag description is from Tetris Wiki) So why Tetris designers believe 7-bag is a good choice for tetrominoes generating?

With the development of the modern Tetris games, Tetris has become more and more competitive (such as Tetris99, Tetris Online) For the most players, what they are seeking is both uncertainty and predictability. 

For uncertainty, they want a unique experience for each game. With 7-bag, there are 5040 permutations for each sequence. Considering about you may have many sequences in each game, you can never have two Tetris games with the exactly same tetromino-sequences. For predictability, they do not enjoy the feeling of completely out of control. In Tetris, some tetrominoes may take a significant role in the specific strategy. For example, one common strategy (in fact not a good strategy) may like the image below. Without 7-bag, it may take a long time to wait for your I tetromino. That is undoubtedly a bad experience for the player who uses strategy.

In short, 7-bag in Tetris gives the player both uncertainty and predictability making the game random enough but still tactical.

俄罗斯方块的 Perfect Clear 的大量奖励让随机性对对局的影响上下限差异过大。

The huge reward of Perfect Clear in Tetris make randomness has too much effect on the competitive situation.

Everyone has played Tetris. In Tetris, A Perfect Clear (PC) means having no filled cells left after a line clear. Usually, a PC sends 10 lines of garbage to the opponent in multiplayer. However, because of the random generator of Tetris game, I think sending 10 lines of garbage is a bad snack for Tetris.

Let us start with how to perform a PC. The best situation is at the beginning of the game. The best players normally create a stack that makes a perfect clear more possible like below.

After finishing this stack, there are lots of different situations. And in some situations, you may not perform a PC. All the possible solutions are listed below.

As you can see, you cannot perform a PC at the beginning of each match. In the conclusion, you have only 74% chances to perform a PC if you always make the best choice. And if you choose the strategy described above, the success rate is 61.2%. What’s make things worse is that there is nothing to lose when you use this strategy.

In my opinion, designers should never give such a huge reward (10 lines garbage) to a play that depends on luck. It leads to that lucky players may gain large advantages over the unlucky players at the game beginning. Random is good for it gives people fruitful experiences. However, if randomness can greatly affect the competitive situation of the game, helping one side in the game get large advantages, it cannot be a good design.

A preferable solution to this problem is Tetris 99. It gives only 4 extra garbage lines to the opponent if you perform a PC. That is a much more reasonable use of random.

Week2, Reflection

本周我选择了GDC视频 History Shaping Design: Gender Roles As Shown in Centuries of Game Design 和 Dangerous games 的 Chapter 1 作为自己的阅读材料。个人而言，两份材料比起学术性质的研究和分析，更像历史性的材料。两篇材料都着重在对于历史真实事件的描写，而没有太多分析性的和批判性的文本。因此，本篇 Reflection也将着重描述自己关于这些史实内容的分析和自己的想法，而不是对原文的史实的重新总结。

GDC演讲 History Shaping Design 主要描绘了 Non Videogames 的发展历史上的性别元素。演讲涉及到了不仅 象棋、跳绳 Jump Roap 这些从更早时代出现的传统游戏，还有近代的玩具例如希曼、彩虹小马。演讲对这些玩具中的不同性别的玩家的参与度，受到的暗示、与当时的政治背景等内容作了翔实的介绍。

Dangerous games 的第一章则更加纯粹。第一章首先介绍了 DnD 游戏的前身，War games 的发展历程和主要形态。随后将视角转向 DnD的主创 Gygax，以他的视角讲述了从DnD诞生到他去世的游戏市场、公司概况等内容。

History Shaping Design 毫无疑问体现了政治对于文化发展的巨大影响。游戏作为文化产品的一种，自然也无法避免。材料中国际象棋中皇后功能性的变化，启蒙运动，还有战后的男女平权等事件都切实地证明了这一点。然而，让我们以2020年的视角来审视这个阅读材料的主题，随着VideoGame 在我们文化环境中扮演着愈发重要的角色，它当然也不能避免 NonVideoGame 曾经的命运。考虑 2020年美国社会中最重要的政治事件之一，弗洛伊德事件与轰轰烈烈的BLM运动。BLM时期，以及 BLM事件发生后，许多游戏，就像这个GDC视频中的 NonVideoGame一样做出了设计的改变。例如，魔兽世界将在9.0的暴风城中加入更多的有色人种。所以，无论我们设计的是video game 还是 nonvideogame 政治从未远离我们而去，Whatever has happened before will happen again. 或许作为游戏开发者，这个演讲对我们的启迪，政治方面比游戏设计方面更多吧。

Dangerous games 的第一章则鼓励我们重新审视 DnD的前身。可能与大多数预想的恰恰相反，DnD的前身是一个完全没有RP要素，靠数值驱动的策略模拟游戏。而DnD只是在这种数值系统的基础上，加入了流行的文化概念（托尔金创造的魔幻世界）和更多更多基于角色扮演的玩法。那么从游戏设计师的角度，我们能不能依借助类似的思路，进行游戏的设计呢。事实上，每一次新的概念风潮或技术风潮，都涌现了一大批把旧的Gameplay融合到新的概念里的作品。无论是数字化下的桌游（席德梅尔的文明、炉石传说），还是近几年科幻风潮下的诸多科幻化的传统玩法（命运、圣歌），都论证了这个一观点。虽然如何选择真正契合的玩法、概念与技术能够完美地结合，并且产生新的反应非常困难，但这样的思路无疑还是非常具有启发性的。

将两篇材料与我上面的分析放到一起，作为一名喜欢数学的程序员，我深刻感受到了对于游戏设计师，了解历史是多么重要而有帮助的一件事。正所谓 Whatever has happened before will happen again. 好的设计师只有从人性当中寻求快乐的本源，才能真正设计出有趣和快乐的游戏。而人性和快乐的根源往往不会随着时间而改变。正如 DnD 的数值乐趣与更古老的 War Games 数值乐趣非常类似，正如当年国际象棋中的Queen受现实政治影响 和 如今魔兽世界人类肤色受 BLM影响。好的设计师应该多关注历史，理解历史是为了更好地理解未来。（这段是为了作业要求扯的）

Q1：Why DND was created at that time? Is there any cultural trend or ideological trend leading to this?

Q2: Why there are more gendered games? Is it just because credit is being given or boys and girls may have different hobbies in playing?

Q3: How is the development of modern war games? How are they affected by DnD? Are there any other direction of war games instead of DnD?

Week2, Personal Narrative

The Stanley Parable

About seven years ago, a naive boy logged in to his steam account, planning to have an exciting Dota2 game. However, as he wandered through the store page, he was attracted by a big “-50% off” tag on a game. Failing to beat his own curiosity, he decided to buy it. What he did not know then was that this decision would change the boy’s life. The boy was me, and the game was The Stanley Parable.

As a high-school student who didn’t experience many games, I was extremely shocked by The Stanley Parable. It gave me a new vision for games, where games are not only for entertainment but also a unique form of art. In The Stanley Parable, there is no traditional game target or game mechanics. The only thing player can do is just moving, and observe how the narrator reacts to your action.

After finishing the game, I started to enjoy exploring Steam and experience the most famous games on Steam, such as GTA, Batman Arkham City, and Trine. I spent lots of time on them and have a fun time. However, though the games are very nice, none of them gave me the feeling of astonishment as The Stanley Parable had done.

Mass Effect Series and The Last of Us.

In 2015, I entered the Communication University of China and majored in Game Development, which led me to have more time and passion to play games. Then I met The Last of Us and Mass Effect series, which both have a great influence on my game life. I started thinking about how story important is for a game, and what is good storytelling for a game.

Although there are many differences between the storytelling of these two games, the immersion both games bring me are similar. When I played Mass Effect, I just felt I was Commander Shepard. I was the hero of the whole universe and always trying my best to protect our world. But when playing The Last of Us, I was Joel and the only thing I cared about, was Ellie’s life.

Before playing these two games, I had never had such an empathic experience. Though these two use completely different ways to create an experience of emotion, the touch they brought me affected me a lot. In Mass Effect, I can make many different choices and decide on which way of becoming a hero and save the Galaxy. While in The Last of Us, though I can’t make many choices, the perfect combination of gameplay and cinematic narrative makes me feel I am just in the dangerous end-time world, and I must protect the girl along with me. 

What reminds of Edith Finch

The Stanley Parable taught me how interaction important is in games. The Last of Us and Mass Effect inspired me what empathy is in the games. It’s understandable that What reminds of Edith Finch, which has both advantages in some ways, is my favorite game so far. Influenced by The Stanley Parable. I keep trying a variety of Walking Simulators all the time. Dear Esther, Gone Home, everyone has gone to the rapture…They are all great and help me think about how Walking Simulator works, but none of them give me the shock as The Stanley Parable did. However, the situation has changed since I played What reminds of Edith Finch.

Undoubtedly, What reminds of Edith Finch is a great try of discovering possibilities of games. (by the way, so does Unfinished Swan) At the time most games were still trying to find a common game system and game mechanic to tell a story, What Reminds of Edith Finch gives us an innovative thought, where interaction is a kind of language. It is a language different from text language, audio-visual language, camera language. It is a unique language that can only apply in games.

What reminds of Edith Finch consists of several short phases, each of which is accompanied by a unique interaction. Not like the simulating and immersive interactions in The Last of Us and The Heavy Rain, interactions in What reminds of Edith Finch are not aimed to create immersion for the player. They start from the emotion and experience of the story itself, targeting using the interaction itself to tell a story. A good example is the most famous level in What reminds of Edith Finch, where the player must act separately to experience the illusion and the reality of a psychopath.

I, and games

Thanks to my special mode of thinking, The games affected me most are not from any specific gameplay or game experience. They are from the long-lasting thinking after I finished them. I look forward I could discover the possibilities of games and interactive art in the future.

艾迪芬奇的记忆

如果说史丹利的寓言带我领略了游戏中交互的意义，最后生还者和质量效应让我理解了游戏中的共情。那某种意义上同时拥有这两者优点的，艾迪芬奇的记忆成为我至今最喜欢的游戏也并不奇怪了。受史丹利的寓言的影响，我一直孜孜不倦地尝试着各式各样的步行模拟作品，亲爱的艾斯特，归家，万众狂欢。就像我在高中时游戏体验那样，这些作品都很棒，也给我带来了非常多的思考和快乐，但是没有一款像史丹利一样给我那么巨大的冲击。然而，当我玩到艾迪芬奇的记忆的时候，一切都不同了。

艾迪芬奇毫无疑问是对于游戏可能性的一次伟大尝试（BTW，其工作室的前作未完成的天鹅也是），当我们的大部分作品还在试图用一套通用的游戏系统和游戏规则串联故事的时候，艾迪芬奇为我们带来了截然不同的思路——把交互真正地当做一种语言，一种不同于文本、视听、镜头的语言，一种只有游戏才能拥有的语言。并用这种语言，讲述一个独特的故事，传递一种独特的情感。

艾迪芬奇的记忆由若干个小故事组成，每个小故事都伴随一种独特的交互。与最后生还者、暴雨中的拟真式交互，艾迪芬奇中的交互往往并不旨在通过拟真增加沉浸感，而是从故事本身的情感和体验出发，将故事真正融入到交互里。以最为出名的切鱼场景距离，玩家需要左手和右手分别执行着不同的操作，来模拟一个精神病患者的现实世界和妄想世界。

我，和我喜爱的游戏

或许是性格使然，对我影响最大的并不是某一两段特定的游戏体验，特定的玩法。而是在通关游戏后，这些游戏带给我的长久的对游戏的思考。我期待着自己有一天也能像他们一样去探索游戏和交互的未来，做出真正独特的游戏作品吧。

Week3, Refelction

This week I chose three materials. They are Investigating Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on the Steam Platform,  Analyzing the Steam Marketplace Using Publicly Derived Sales Estimates, and On the Role of Score, Genre and Text in Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on Metacritic. Generally, the three materials are all about game markets or players’ review, which is a unique view for most game developers.

Investigating Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on the Steam Platform and On the Role of Score, Genre and Text in Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on Metacritic are written by similar teams, they introduce some statistic analyzing method and take a deep dive into the players’ review on the Steam and Metacritic. Both articles are in a similar structure, which introduces the statistic and mathematical method they used in the research in the first half. Then they show the data and result in their study. At last, they analyze the data and give a discussion about the result.

As for the GDC Talk Analyzing the Steam Marketplace Using Publicly Derived Sales Estimates, it introduces a new way for us to get the data of the games market. The speaker, Kyle Orland, uses the Steam public API and crawler to collect data from the available Steam user, which gives us tons of data to help us have a basic understanding of the Steam user. However, as Kyle said, there are many limits, and it has been five years since he showed the data on GDC. Uncounted games have been published on Steam, and Epic Games Store has suddenly risen the past five years. It’s hard to say the data is still useful in 2020, while the analysis method could be used in the now time.

Considering the missing of the statistic and mathematic knowledge, we should focus on the two game-review-analyzing articles’ conclusion. What impressed me a lot is that so many players are sentimental with game review rather than reasonable. According to the On the Role of Score, Genre and Text in Helpfulness of Video Game Reviews on Metacritic, when players browse the comment on Metacritic, the review that has more possibility to be regarded as helpful are usually easy to read and sentimental. The importance of easy to read is obvious. But the sentimental parts are astonishing. Another article focusing on the Steam review points out the problem also exists on Steam review, while not so severe. The Feature Distribution Differences Table in the article could prove that. In this table, you could find only a few features that are significantly connected with the helpfulness score, while the Sentiment is a powerful one. Summarizing, most players are more emotional than reasonable when clicking helpful or not helpful.

It is not unfamiliar for me to the content mentioned in this GDC Talk. As a Steam fan, I even donated to the Steamspy.com, a Steam data website inspired by this GDC Talk. However, in 2018, Valve made an update to Steam’s privacy settings, which badly affected the Steamspy.com and the method Kyle used[1]. Therefore, the technique he used is outdated. So is the data. In 2015, there is no PUBG and Epic Games Store, which have a significant influence on the Steam market. So the data in 2020 is completely different from the 2015’s. So, in my opinion, though the video is useful to analyze the user’s data, the method to collect data and the data itself is outdated.

All the reading materials I finished are about data. And the content could be divided into Collecting data and Analyzing data. Each material is inspirational about how to collect data for we designers. However not all the conclusions they have reached are convincing. Data never lies, while we may misunderstand data sometimes. Tencent, one of the biggest game companies in the world, has a data-driven game design pipeline. Even so, they could make mistakes sometimes. In my opinion, learning to analyze data is definitely important, but data is not all-powerful, especially in game design. Understand data, and take advantage of data, not driven by data. I believe this is a more reasonable attitude to the data.

Q1: Could we use a similar method with the two articles use to analyze Ludum Dare games?

Q2: Now that Steam change their privacy settings, how the giant commercial company like EA, Ubisoft, etc. conduct their market research and data collecting?

Q3: How is the game description (on the Steam Store page) connecting with the reviews of the games? Could we use the statistic method to do an analysis?

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[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-12-steamspy-creator-warns-pc-market-is-once-again-open-to-abuse

Week4, One Page Document

Week4, Good Snacks

Making all information available and clear in the logical puzzle games.

Puzzle games focus on logical and conceptual challenges. For those who rely on logic, such as The Portal, Sokoban, The witness, the fun usually comes from the process of the understanding puzzle, analyzing puzzles, and solving puzzles. You can hardly come up with an experience better than the moment when a player finally solves the puzzle after long-time thinking.

So, for the players of a puzzle game, they love clear rules and easy access information. They do not enjoy the time guessing rules or walking around to see the whole puzzle. In other words, designers should make the information easy access enough to help them begin thinking as early as possible.

A good example is the Focus Level feature in the game Filament(2020). The puzzles and levels of this game sometimes are large, and the player needs to walk around to see the whole. As a result, the developers give the players Focus Level, which allows players to see the whole level in a top-down view. It makes players much easier to access all the information and help them focus on THINKING rather than LOOKING.

还有一个比较有感触的例子，是怪物远征可以在设置中打开网格线，没有网格线着实让我难受了好一阵子。开了网格线整个人都清爽多了。

Lack of motivation may prevent players from finishing Puzzle games.

The process of thinking and finally figuring out is the best part of puzzle games. However, some puzzle games may have simple and thin content out of this, which may lead the player to lack motivation to start the game again.

According to the gamer motivation model by Quantic Foundry (https://quanticfoundry.com/2019/04/11/gdc2019/), The gamers’ motivation could by divide like below. However, in many puzzle games, the only motivation you can see is just Challenge. What’s worse, though the Challenge motivation encourages you not to stop playing, but has no help to make you start playing the game again.

You can see this issue in lots of puzzle games, even though the best ones. Stephen’s Sausage Roll (2016), one of the best Sokoban-Style puzzle games, is famous for its perfect mechanic and puzzle-design. However, during the game, you can not see where the game ends; you can see no story; you have no acting experience and. The only thing you can see is the vast world filled with puzzles, infinite puzzles. Even the feedback when you finish a level is quite simple. As a result, the only motivation you have is Challenge, while it is helpful for you to finish one level, not the whole game.

The solution is simple and hard. The simple point is, designers only need to add more motivations to their games. In the world of The Witness, the player could trigger some beam targeting to the top of a mountain, which can always encourage the player to keep playing. And in Portal 2, the curiosity about how the story will end takes a similar role. The hardpoint is how you could make these motivations integrate your game properly. The cost also can not be ignored – writing and telling a story like Portal 2 are almost impossible for most developers.

In a word, lack of motivation may prevent players from finishing puzzle games like Stephen’s Sausage Roll (2016), while designers should think carefully about how to solve it.

Week6, Refelction

This week the reading materials I chose are two GDC videos,  A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later, and Did You Have Fun? Analytics in Call of Duty. They are from literally different views, though they are both talking about the fun of the games.

A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later is presented by Koster, the author of the famous book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. He talked about how his opinion has changed and developed since ten years ago. The talk has so many contents, and it is hard to summarize them all just in a short reflection, but it majorly focuses on thinking fun systematically. In the beginning, he tried to find a game template to indicate how games create fun. Then with some game art movement, he started to think about the relationship between game experience, art, and gameplay. In a word, the talk is a short version of his book, and his book is based on his in-depth thinking about games and fun.

Did You Have Fun? Analytics in Call of Duty is by Rogerson, one from the COD-WW2 data team. He shares the experience of how they use the survey-data to observe what makes games more fun. It is based on a statistical method named Correlation Analysis. More specifically, they did surveys about how they feel about the last game sometimes when players just finished their game, and according to the result, they judge if the game is more fun.

Let’s make a comparison. The first talk is from a systematic perspective, summarized from a personal talk and the artists’ experience, while the second defines the fun as the feeling of most players. In some ways, we can see the different ideas toward the game behind the indie-developers and commercial corporations like Activision Blizzard.

The difference between them reminds me of a recent Chinese game by miHoYo, Genshin Impact. It would be the best example indicating the fun from a different view. Generally, Genshin is a third-person open-world action-adventure game. It perpetuated a huge deputation when first announced. The opponents badly criticize that Genshin is a poor imitation of The Legend of Zelda:BOTW. However, the fan argued that though there are so many similar elements between Genshin and Zelda:BOTW, the gameplay and core experience are literally different. What’s more, Genshin is a free gacha game. People not having Switch can also enjoy this game on all platforms. The deputation has lasted a long time until the game launched in September. However, the war did not end. The opponent keeps their taunting and criticizing after having a short try, while the fans could finally start enjoying the fun of the game after a long time waiting.

After this week’s reading, I figured out one of the possible reasons why these happened. There are many different kinds of fun, and different players may enjoy a different kind of fun. Maybe Koster has such a great conclusion about fun, but it is also too hard to implement to every player in the world. As for me, I do not mind if Genshin has a similar art style with BOTW as long as Genshin has a totally unique Action Adventure Game experience. In other words, I enjoy the fun from the gameplay. However, for the players who love the experience being immersed in the world and exploring the world, Genshin is definitely a failed work trying to copy The Legend of Zelda: BOTW. In a word, we get fun from different aspects, so we may have a different opinion.

So, as designers, rather than talking about what is fun, maybe a better and easier choice for us is to think about how to make a kind of fun more fun, because there are literally so many different players and so many different kinds of fun.

Q1: In Koster’s theory, why gambling is so fun? (Maybe this is not such a hard question. I will figure it out after finishing reading his book. Yes, I bought his book right after watching his talk.)

Q2: How could we analyze Genshin with Koster’s theory?

Q3: Could we use Rogerson’s method judging the fun of a puzzle game? How could we design the survey to get the convincing data? Placing a question each time players solve a puzzle seems to be a bad idea.

Reflection 5

Reflection 5

This week I chose two videos as my reading material, one is Edible Tabletop Games: Using Constraints to Innovate by Sandercock, and another one is Thinking with Your Body: Fast Iteration for Mixed Reality Design by Shapira.

The first one, focusing on using constraints during making games, shares the speaker’s experience making the incredible and impressive work Edible Games. She believes using constraints can help designers step out of their comfort zone and think with the different methods. A fantastic example she takes is To Design A Game with Real World Permadeath. (Of course, just a thought experiment, no one lose their life actually) Besides the concept, she also shares some How-To about using constraints to do innovative work.

The second one, however, from a completely different perspective. The speaker is a virtual reality designer, and he concentrates on sharing the experience in creating a great VR experience. His talk is composed of many non-related tips, while each one is beneficial.

In my opinion, these two talk shows the two different ways of game design. The second one introduces a from top to bottom pattern while the first prefer from bottom to top. More specifically, Sandercock encourages designers to start from the constraints to think about the gameplay, the details of the rule. On the other hand, Shapira shares his understanding of how VR works and what makes the VR experience different. This is a high-level consideration, which is also helpful for creating innovative games.

Both methods could be seen frequently. An excellent example of constraints making designers more creative is the Game jam. According to Wikipedia, A game jam is a contest where participants try to make a video game from scratch. The contest duration usually ranges from 24 to 72 hours. Typically, a game jam may be centered on some other constraints like themes, tools, platforms, and time. Some of the best games are developed from a Game jam entry, which is a great evidence constraints could be helpful to come up with new ideas.

As for the top-down methods that could make great games, you can see many examples in the new-born areas. Like Half-Life: ALYX, which is coming up with the idea about the 3A-title experience with VR, you can see the developers created so much unique experience, and the ideas just came from “What should be a 3A title with VR experience”.

I believe the two methods are both useful, but using them at the same time would be terrible, according to my experience. It would be like writing two lines, where one of them is bottom-to-top, and the other is top-to-bottom, and finally, you found the two lines you have drawn were impossible to meet.

Q1: Is there any good idea to design a game with the top-bottom method and bottom-top method at the same time?

Q2: Could we use the method like Sandercock did in the Edible Games to make some games using some behaviors or interactions other than eating, like cooking, sleeping, and doing sports.

Q3: In 2020, with the rapid development of our VR tech and headset, which of the obversions by Shapira are still useful, and which are not valuable for now, and why?

Week 9 Snacks

Allowing players to customize their UI in MMORPG make different players play in their favorite ways.

World of Warcraft, one of the famous MMORPG games in the world, has a powerful addons system, allowing players to have a custom UI layout. What’s more, players could write some simple Lua scripts to show something not in the display originally, like damage meter.

As you see, the different players may have a completely different interface in World of Warcraft. These customizations not only change how the game looks but also influence how players play this game. For example, WeakAuras is a powerful and flexible framework that allows displaying highly customizable graphics on World of Warcraft’s user interface to indicate buffs, debuffs, and other relevant information. Thanks to more and more complicated game mechanics and operation, addons like WeakAura play an essential role in World of Warcraft.

What are the advantages of these customizations in MMORPG? First, different players may have quite different play styles in World of Warcraft. Some players love PVP, while maybe some never touch PVP. Some may enjoy keeping an eye on auction to earn as much money as possible, while some could only be fans of the dungeons. It is almost impossible for the developers to design an interface that could fit every player’s requirements.

Second, with the increasingly complicated game mechanic, only changing the UI layout is not enough. Different classes and different dungeons require players to focus on different elements. In other words, operating correctly is hard enough. The players should not have difficulties in obtaining information. Addons could help players quickly get all the information they need, but they still need to think about moving correctly.

Though World of Warcraft is an excellent example of using the addons-system, its success is also a part of the WOW community. Though Lua is an easy to understand programming language, it is also impossible for every player to write code by themselves. However, WOW has such a vast community that you can easily find addon configs by other players meeting your requirement.

MMORPG should not use equipment rewards to force PVE players to play PVP content

Modern MMORPGs often have both PVE and PVP gameplay. Although many players enjoy challenging themselves in PVE but also like to compete with other players in PVP content. But in contrast, more players will only choose one of the two as their main gameplay.

However, in World of Warcraft 8.1, if you want to get the Best in Slot(BiS) PVE equipment for you, depending on your class and specialization, you may have to play a lot of PVP content. Specifically, in World of Warcraft 8.1, Azerite Armor is an important part of the player’s equipment. In addition to providing basic numerical attributes, Azerite Armor will also bring players several additional passive traits. These traits greatly impact players, so whether having a BiS Azerite Armor has a huge impact on the game experience. However, for some specializations, BIS PVE Azerite Armor can only be obtained through PVP.

This design of World of Warcraft 8.1 brings two problems. First, a PVE player may need to learn a very long time to get started with PVP. Such a cost is unacceptable for most PVE players. Second, a PVE player may not enjoy the PVP experience at all. However, they could be forced to perform PVP gameplay, such as rating battlefields and arenas, to obtain specific equipment.

The solution to this problem could be straightforward. In earlier versions, there were equipment attributes called “PVP Strength” or “Resilience.” Under the influence of this attribute, although the equipment obtained by PVP is very powerful in the PVP environment, it cannot perform very well in the PVE environment. The equipment obtained by PVE cannot stand in the PVP environment. Although this design completely separates and decouples the two parts of the gameplay, it has a bad experience for a few double-fix players, but it is undoubtedly a good thing for most players.

In the latest version 9.0, the developers tried another way to reduce the separation between PVE and PVP-the equipment acquired by PVP must have very high versatility stats. But high versatility equipment is not the optimal solution for most PVE players. However, high versatility stats are often the preference of PVP environments. This design is seemingly soft harmony, but how its performances still need time for testing.

In short, in the contemporary World of Warcraft, the complexity of gameplay and players’ diversity has made the beneficiation of PVP and PVE a complicated problem to design. However, there is no doubt that forcing PVE players to perform PVP is a failed design. The content of 8.1 illustrates this point.

参考资料：https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/shadowlands-pvp-updates-incoming/645941/8

MMORPG不应该用装备奖励逼迫PVE玩家游玩PVP内容

当代 MMORPG 往往同时拥有 PVE玩法和PVP玩法。虽然有不少玩家既享受在PVE中挑战自我，又喜欢在PVP内容中与其他玩家争锋。但相比之下，更多玩家还是只会选择二者之一作为自己的主玩法。

然而，在魔兽世界8.1中，假如你希望获得最适合自己的PVE装备，那么取决于你的职业和专精，你可能不得不去游玩大量的PVP内容，来获取对自己最好的装备。具体而言，在魔兽世界8.1中，“特质装”是玩家装备的重要组成部分。特质装除了提供基础的数值属性，还会给玩家带来若干个额外被动效果。这些被动效果对于玩家的影响非常之大，以至于有没有一件合适的特质装会对游戏体验带来巨大的影响。然而，对于一些专精，BIS PVE 特质装只有通过PVP才能获得。

魔兽世界8.1的这个设计带来了两个问题——第一，一个PVE玩家可能需要学习非常长的时间，才能简单入门PVP。这样的成本对于绝大多数PVE玩家是不可接受的。第二，一个PVE玩家可能根本不享受PVP的体验。然而，他却被开发者逼着进行诸如评级战场、竞技场之类的PVP玩法，只为了获得某一件特定的PVP装备。

解决办法也很简单。在更早的版本里，有着叫做“PVP强度”或者“韧性”的装备属性。在这种属性的影响下，PVP获得的装备虽然在PVP环境里很厉害，但是无法在PVE环境中表现非常好。PVE获得的装备则无法在PVP环境中立足。这样的设计虽然让两部分玩法彻底割裂和脱钩，对于少数双修玩家有着不好的体验，但是对于绝大多数玩家无疑是好事。

在最新的版本9.0中，开发者试图用另一种方式来减少PVE 和 PVP之间的割裂——PVP获得的装备一定拥有非常高的全能属性。但是这项属性对于大部分PVE玩家不是最优解。然而很高的全能属性往往是PVP环境的偏爱。这是一种看似柔和的调和设计，但是具体的效果可能还需要等待版本上线进行测试。

总而言之，在当代魔兽世界中，玩法的庞杂性、玩家的多样性，让PVP和PVE的收益获取变成了非常难以设计的问题。然而毫无疑问，逼迫PVE玩家去进行PVP毫无疑问是失败的设计，8.1的内容说明了这一点。

Reflection 6

This week we have the topic Narrative. The reading materials I have chosen are How to Write Games for the Internet without Embarrassing Yourself, and This is Amazing! Writing the Supportive Space Coach in Destiny.

How to Write Games for the Internet without Embarrassing Yourself is presented by the creator of the popular visual novel Dream Daddy. She talks about how and why memes are so crucial in our nowadays networking-spreading. More specifically, the art movement philosophy behind the memes-rising could be complicated, but how we use memes to spread our game could be noticeable. She gives us 4 How-To, and, definitely, I will show them with memes. After sharing these high levels of opinion about the Internet spreading, she last speaks about what they specifically did for their game to make their game more likely to spread in the community.

For the This is Amazing! Writing the Supportive Space Coach in Destiny, the speaker is Hayden, M from Bungie. He shares what and how Destiny series use Crucible announcers as story characters. After a simple introduction of what they have done in the game, he shares four pillars:

1. Character instead of Announcer.
2. Know who your character is.
3. Write to your actor.
4. Appeal to your players.

Let us come these two perspectives together. Why could the announcers not shown in the linear plot be so influential? Why the memes spread so fast in current players? Just as Leighton Gray talks in her speech, our media has changed a lot. And how we receive the information has changed a lot. Hiroki Azuma wrote in his famous book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals is, the huge narrative has been dispelled in our times. People could only focus on the tags.

What tags are on the Dreamy Daddy? If you have not seen this before, the first tag in your mind of this game could be Date with daddy. And for Shaxx, the announcer of Destiny, the tag could be Support Dad.

In other word, we are more and more get used to receiving short and fragment information. We give up our tradition of enjoying the information from mass media and just turn to something like Twitter, where we could have at most 280 words. Though we still love the linear plots and spending more time after we dive into something. But before diving, the only thing that could attract us is brief information.

So, as game developers, if we want to understand nowadays market, we must realize how times changed and how our information spread changed. I believe this is how these two readings inspire us.

Question:

1, Besides the meme-spreading and narrative by fragment, which is mentioned in readings, what else methods we could use nowadays?

2, What different roles Twitch, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and YouTube play in the game spreading?

3, Would it be hard to write new stories for announcers? Like what will happen to the announcer in the arena if he is killed in the future story?

Bad Snack 4

The players could be upset about the unfair environment caused by unreasonable information gap in competitive games.

Rainbow Six Siege is one of the most famous and competitive FPS games in the world. It has succeeded thanks to its excellent physical simulation. However, the physical simulation could also be a disaster if different client-sides have different simulation results.

An example is the corpse physical simulation in the R6S. In R6S, the corpse-simulating is operated by per-client-side, so in some cases, there could be completely different results in different players’ views. Sometimes, this is fine because the corpses’ location does not always significantly influence the game. But it will make the player extremely upset when they do.

As you can see in the below image, from this player’s view, he can not see the enemy behind the corpse at all. But the enemy, who has no corpse blocking his sight in the view, could easily kill this player.

Generally speaking, the reason why players could be upset is that the two parties get random different information in such a competitive game. Especially when one side gets win in this way. In other words, for the players in competitive matches, the fair is essential. The designers should put fairness on the top when making the design.

Good Snack 4

Low TTK in Rainbow Six Siege makes strategy in the game plays an important role.

If you type “R6S one shot” in google, the first relevant is “r6s remove one shot headshot”. One Shot Headshot means if you make a headshot in Rainbow Six Siege, you can kill the enemy in one shot. It is one of the most discussed topics in Rainbow Six Siege. I would say this is a good design for the players who enjoy playing games with their brains.

Different from other FPS games, R6S is a close-range-orientation game. And it gives players lots of tools to gather plenty of information for the battle. For example, you can use the drones the cameras to predict the position of the enemies. However, how to allow the players to take advantage of information to kill or win becomes the question. Ubisoft chooses to have a low TTK (Time To Kill), and one shot headshot in the R6S to make the information advantage plays an important role.

More specifically, the player who has more information and good at developing the strategy could always attack from an unexpected direction. In this situation, if the game has a longer TTK, the player who starts the sneak attack could also be killed if the enemy has a rapid reaction and is good at shooting.

The strategy obviously increases the depth and fun of the game. So generally speaking, the designers could consider making talented quick-reacting players not have such a massive advantage by increasing the strategies’ importance. Therefore, the game could appeal to more players and be more in-depth, and has more fun.