Formal Abstract Design Tools, by Doug Church

A couple of weeks ago we got together in a group again to discuss our second piece of reading. This article was written by Doug Church and it was all about formal abstract design tools, or rather “FADT” as he labels it in the article, of course this is an acronym for Formal Abstract Design Tools, but that bit is obvious enough.

For a lot of the start of the article, Doug Church talked a lot about game designers establishing a shared language amongst designers and that the FADT would help designers design games, review them, talk about them and talk about what is good and what is not and that sort of thing. Which brings me back to an article that I read recently for University, I can’t quite remember which one it was however the writer stated that games design is becoming a field of study, such as is history and science, and as such it needs its own critical vocabulary for its designers to have the ability to discuss it.

Anyway, FADT is literally a sort of framework for creating this vocabulary.

Later on in the article Doug Church goes on to speak about the actual vocabulary that could be listed under FADT, there are three pieces of vocabulary noted in total and they are; Intention, perceivable consequence and story.

First off is intention; Doug Church said that intention is what encourages players to do the things they do intentionally, and in my notes on intention I have very clear link back to Costikyans article that I previously read the week before.

Intention made me thing of Structure as explained by Costikyan. If intention encourages players to do the things they do then surely then the structure of the game also includes what the intention also is, because players would be following the structure and doing the things that they are intended to do.

But it’s not the same thing, if it was then there would be no point in me reading a few paragraphs about it, there would be no point in covering ground I’ve already covered. Intention is different from structure, you could say that instead of intention being structure, it’s the offspring of structure and the structure instead makes it so that the players actions are intended to result in something, which leads into the next FADT as covered by Doug Church, perceivable consequence.

Closely after intention comes perceivable consequence, this is as it sounds; a consequence perceived by the player and these consequences dictate the players action within the game. A player, after playing the game for a little while, will be fully aware of the consequences of his actions and how they will change his state, and now he can perceive the consequences of his actions, and use this new knowledge to get through the game. Perceivable consequence is the piece of vocab used to describe this action in the words of Doug Church.

The last piece of vocabulary that Doug Church explains is the Story; the story is explained to be a narrative thread that is either designer driven or player driven.

Designer driven story is a sort of narrative that was intended for the game to have, it’s the story of the game, of what happened to the characters, of how the characters interact with each other and things as such. Most commonly designer driven story is found in RPG titles, a player can play a game differently however the story will never change and will be the same for every cycle of game play that you undertake, however some RPG’s nowadays offer alternate endings, but that doesn’t exactly make the point of the designer driven story any less valid, it’d still be the same alternate ending no matter what you do to try and change the game.

Player driven story, however is the story that is created by the player throughout the game, not the designer story, however the story of the player and how that player got to the state that he is currently at. The story of the player may be present in a game of chess, for example; the white player pushes a pawn two squares forward. This is an example of a player driven story. In essence it is a narrative that the player creates during his time playing the game, rather than having an actual story pre-determined by the designer.

That’s about it, but rest assured that most of this stuff made sense to me in my notes, but into text it really has transitioned pretty badly. Some of it may have lost meaning and all that, but it’s still relevant to my studies because I think the actual goal of reading these articles is to read them and then to understand the critical vocabulary in one way or another. I’m sure that my understandings listed above aren’t completely wrong.

Sorry about this being posted a bit late, along with the other stuff that is soon to follow. Expect a week of blog updates, lecturers.

Game Iteration

In the first working week of University we were asked to create a board game on the spot, and last Monday we were asked to iterate the design of the game to make the game better, improve the rules and all that, and so I did, however I felt that my game was so basic and unoriginal that there were very few changes that needed to be made, however after some feedback from my peers and Phil I decided what sort of changes I should make to my game.

My game is a very simple “Follow do the track” game with cards that you read after landing on a certain square; this is a very simple game to which many changes don’t have to be made, however, my feedback dictated that I need more cards which would give the player a chance to interact with other players to keep the game interesting, and so I did that. 

For the most part, the reaction I got from my peers to my game was good, however that’s not because it was a good game but because I included some crude humour in the game.

And that was half of my Tuesday in a nutshell; the second half of my Monday was the pitch for the game for our group project, I decided to pair up with Andre for the pitch and to say the least, the pitch went well for both of us. Though there was some severe lack of preparation on my part, I feel that Andre did a fantastic job briefing me before the actual pitch, enough so that I would have enough information for me to run my mouth off about the game we were pitching.

The game we decided to pitch was a little skill based spelling game for KS1 children called “Missing Arrows”, in this game you would take control of one of two characters, a boy or a girl and you would shoot down balloons with letters attached to them, the player would have to shoot the right word to fill in the blank of the word that is displayed someone on the screen.

This is a drawing I did for the pitch of roughly what the game interface would look like.

The story at the point of the pitch was something along the lines of “You’re an ace archer who has to shoot down food attacked to balloons for your hungry village.” And it was literally something we came up with on the spot.

This is roughly what the characters will look like in the game.

Apparently this game was well received and was chosen to undergo further development in a team of five, when I heard about this news I was really surprised and pleased at the same time. I didn’t expect our game to be chosen, and I was getting ready to do one of the other games that were pitched on the day.

But that doesn’t matter now, last Thursday we got together in our five-man group and begun the game iteration process of Missing Arrows.

We got somewhere with the original concept in the first half of the day during our break, however during the second half of the day when Rob prompted us to think about changing the game to make it less quiz-like, we did so and in the end the outcome was widely preferred by the group than the original concept.

We iterated the game outside of it’s original concept, while maintaining the core of itself.

We decided that it would be better to rather than have the children fill in a blank, shoot down letters to form a word, we’d provide three spaces for the children to fill in with letters in the correct order to spell a three letter word, on the first level at least, we also iterated the story to make more interesting to children.

These changes were something we were all happy with, of course, however there are some issues we are still discussing as a group and we hope to eventually eliminate.

I guess the point of this post is just me thinking about the game iteration cycle. When I was talking about the board game, it was following the cycle that Rob explained to us, this cycle included play testing; which makes sense, because to make improvements to a game you have to know what is wrong with it first by playing it.

However when we got together as a group and started making changes to Missing Arrows, which naturally was all still just in our heads, I got a thinking’ if we really needed to play test a game to figure out what’s wrong with it? Something that I and Andre though was a good idea was made better by the presence and opinions of others before anyone played it. Maybe imagining a game and then thinking about how it could be changed is a feasible substitute to play testing. But I feel that if you play test it or not, you can’t go without the opinions and advice of others during a cycle of iteration.

I'm very much looking forward to making a great educational game with my team, and also look forward to seeing what the other groups come up with.

Paidea Vs Ludus

Paidea and Ludus; when speaking about these two words in relation to games it basically means linear(Ludus) and non-linear(Paidea). Both these words may refer to those specific kinds of games, though “Linear” and “Non-linear” are not an official genre of game, these words can still be used to describe a game to have a certain amount of paidea in it, or on the other hand it can be said that a game has elements of ludus in it.

Below you’ll find some examples of games to which Ludus and Paidea can apply.

Ludus;

Some may argue that Ludus is a good thing in games that involve the player more, which Final Fantasy 13 doesn’t do, and in fact makes the player concentrate more on the game and the story of the game to make the story more enjoyable and make advancement of the game faster, and by limiting the amount of exploring the player can do; it achieves the very thing that it may have set out to do. However in Final Fantasy 13, the player is limited so much and then so uninvolved with the game, it makes it difficult to enjoy. Is what its main criticism is.

In Final Fantasy 13 the Ludus presents itself as straight line dungeons with enemies that present themselves before you, and half of the time you have no choice but to fight them, and when you reach your destination you watch a scene and then carry on to get to your next goal, defeat a boss and so on. It is only later in the game where some Paidea elements introduce themselves and the game becomes more sandbox-like and allows the player to go out and fulfil his own objectives, or complete side missions like hunting monsters or something of that sort. A lot more freedom is given to the player, however that is near the very end of the game. This game is dominated by Ludus styled game-play, in short.

Ludus is a type of game style which reinforces the structure of the game by providing a lack in choice in action for the player in order to help them concentrate on progressing through the game.

Paidea;

Paidea on the other hand is the presence of freedom in a game, you could say. Something that has the essence of Paidea is most likely a sandbox game, a lot like Grand Theft Auto, or Sim City. Something that doesn’t limit the players’ creativity and allows him to fulfil objectives at his own pace, and allow the player to do whatever he wants while fulfilling these objectives.

I think that the first Grand Theft Auto is the best incarnation of pure Paidea game play, Grand theft Auto doesn’t restrict players at any one point, even during missions you can go off on your own and do whatever your mind wants you to do, however at the cost of your missions’ success of course.

Of course the fact that you have missions during the course of the game introduces Ludus, you are still not restricted to going through the missions the way the game wants you, for example; your missions would be to hunt someone down, you can do that in whatever way you want to do it and the game doesn’t care as long as you get it done within a time limit or some other small and irrelevant restriction.

Unlike Final Fantasy 13, Grand Theft Auto offers gratuitous freedom in course of action, because of its stronger dominant element of Paidea. But because of this the player might get side tracked too often and then ignore the story quests; however a focused gamer will always strive towards the goal set by the game, usually...

Well, aside from Grand Theft Auto there are plenty of other online games that provide a gratuitious amount of Paidea, all MUD's and MMORPG's usually provide the user with a lot of freedom.

These two games are just examples of where both Paidea and Ludus are most potent, however there are games that use both Paidea and Ludus to make the game better, easier to play and follow or over all more enjoyable

Paidea is a type of game play style which provides freedom for the player to express himself and assert his individuality by showing how differently the player plays the game when compared to other players.

Hybrid;

Disgaea; Hour of Darkness, this is one of my all time favourite games of ever. It is also possibly one of the finest examples of Paidea and Ludus working together to make the game better, or worse.

Disgaea is a turn based-isometric strategy game in which your goal is to complete stages by defeating all enemies on your map using a maximum of ten characters, unique or creatable. The first element that appears is Ludus, to unlock new stages for you to do you have to advance the story, that way you can re-visit the stages you went before, however new enemies will appear on those levels, this introduces a sort of sandboxy Paidea style which allows the player to dilly in the other maps which the player has unlocked.

Of course, there are maps for which you may not be a high enough level to complete, which forces the player to create his or her own goals, such as levelling up an item in the item world, levelling up a character in the previously visited maps, and so on, this reveals a heavy Paidea style which is ever present in Disgaea.

By the end game of Disgaea, the Ludus is no longer present and the game turns into a Paidea sandbox state where you can unlock different kinds of maps without advancing the stories, unlock hidden bosses and hidden character classes which makes the game about a thousand times more enjoyable, however sometimes the lack of Ludus at end game makes it hard for the player to decide on what to do, because there are a lot of things he can do.

In the end, Paidea and Ludus can make a game completely different, it can make or break a game or it could make a sequel completely different. The presence of Paidea and Ludus cannot be over looked in video games, even if you don’t know what the words actually mean.

For my lesson today, after we had a small discussion about the critical vocabulary that Costikyan talked about in his article that we were assigned to read the previous week, and after we have all established a good meaning for each piece of vocab, we looked at a key stage one educational game from the BBC Bitesize website.

But before I explain the game, I’ll list the vocabulary and the definitions that me and my group have prepared from the session before.

Interaction;
Interaction is the choice you make in a game that can alter its outcome.

Goals;
Goals create a purposeful/progressive interaction.

Struggle;
Struggle brings the feeling of achievement.

Structure;
Structure dictates our behaviour in a game.

Endogenous Meaning;
In context of the game things are meaningful, however outside of the game they’re meaningless.

Putting a key stage one game against these definitions; I will talk about it.

This game was 2D and 3D shapes, it’s a math game for KS1 students that are going into their math exams sometime in the future and are looking to get some revision done in a really fast and fun way.

Interaction;

The interaction with this game was very limited, you were limited to choosing to play the game, as a start, and then you were given the option to choose a difficulty, out of normal, hard and very hard. When you’re actually in the game you are given a choice out of 3 shapes, a scientist requests one shape of the three and gives a vague clue as to what shape you’re supposed to give him, for example; “A shape with four sides”, if you select the correct shape then your character will do a happy looking animation, however if you get the wrong shape then the scientist will be electrocuted and the shapes will reset.

The interaction is not only brought back by it’s limitedness, however it’s also brought down by the lack of feedback that it produces for the player, a KS1 child will be playing this game and getting questions wrong and not know why he was getting them wrong.

There are only two outcomes of your actions, you can choose a shape and get it right, or you can get it wrong. It lacks variety in outcomes, however because it’s a KS1 game, anything remarkable might not necessarily be needed.

Goals;

The goal of the game is to go through five questions while choosing the right answers along the way and in the end you will get to see an ending animation where the scientist finally builds his robot and your character and the scientist rejoice in your success.

I suppose the other goal of this game is to learn about shapes, but since you’re not really told why you’re right or wrong, because of a lack of feedback, it’s pretty hard to reach even that goal of the game.

Struggle;

The struggle in this game lies in it’s difficulty, it’s not a hard game however some KS1 students may find it hard to answer the questions correctly.

There are thee difficulties, Normal, Hard and Very hard, and in each difficulty the questions are about different types of subjects related to 2D and 3D shapes, hard asks some things about 3D shapes and very hard asks about symmetry in shapes.

Though the difficulty varies between each mode, the chance of you failing at the game are still none; you still get to choose from only three shapes and no matter how many times you fail to get the questions right then, you will still stay in the game and advance through the game. So technically, the difficulty doesn’t really increase; you don’t even get teleported back to the first question if you lose from the 5th.

Structure;

The structure of the game is very simple and limited, there is a very limited amount of things you could do in the actual game, you can either click a shape and then get it right or wrong, which is pretty boring, and believe it or not the amusing animations will get boring eventually.

However, there are a couple of buttons at the top of the screen that you can press to change the volume, get tips or leave the game.

Endogenous Meaning;

There is no endogenous meaning in the game, unless you include the shapes that you have to select to give to the scientist and then there is the robot that you build at the end which is in fact your primary goal, however other than that there is nothing in this game that means anything to reality or anything extremely significant to the game.

I suppose you get knowledge out of the game, however that’s hardly enough.

Overall evaluation;

This game lacks a decent goal as well as a decent and versatile structure which would allow the player to do as many things as they want to do. There is barely any struggle for the player to achieve his goal, the only thing holding him or her back is his own intellect and as much as I love a whole two different outcomes of the players’ interactivity, I’m just not pleased with it over all.

However, since it’s a KS1 learning game for children aged 4-7 maybe, then it’s acceptable. But it doesn’t excuse the fact that the game itself is a massive bore, adults should enjoy children’s learning games too!

Jack of all trades; master of none

Yeah, I wrote this little rant at about 2AM and it's literally what it is; a rant. But I think it could be a good read and if you want to look at Symbols of Magic then there is a link at the bottom of the post, but be warned because there is some swearing and low brow humor.
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So here I am, sitting alone late at night and I’m trying not to fall asleep, instead I’m trying to think up where to go with my super awesome sprite comic which is updated rather irregularly now. My sprite comic called “Symbols of Magic” was supposed to be updated on an every-other-day basis, however that’s changed now and I usually submit pages to where my comic is hosted in some sort of bulk. The problem isn’t the fact that I can’t get the pages done, however it’s the fact that I can’t get them done because I can’t be bothered anymore, no, not to do the comic anymore but rather to stick with my schedule that I usually re-new every month.

“Symbols of Magic” is an adventure of self discovery with hints of science and religion. The reader follows the adventure of a mysterious “200” year old girl called Maroon as she roams her continent in search of knowledge and later runs into an old Symbolican called Zuchyin who is willing to help her discover who she really is and then face her past.

That’s a small synopsis for my sprite comic, it’s not a complicated story and I’d rather keep it that way, but while I think about how I’d like to keep Symbols as uncomplicated as possible, my mind always drifts off onto other things that I would have much preferred to be less complicated as well. An example of a story that got too complicated would be the Kingdom Hearts series of games; after the first game things just got too complicated, there was nothing wrong with a nice, feel good adventure of a boy with a magic key fighting off baddies and making friends. That’s all a good story in a game needs really, nothing fantastic and complicated. Of course, my mind drifts off to one of the games that I like because I’m a gamer, that’s where my mind drifts off to a lot of the time. But I’m also striving to become a game designer which obviously means that I can’t let my mind drift off to only games for too long.

That’s why I’ve invested a lot of my time to different hobbies, my sprite comic being one of them, there is also my drawing and writing projects that I spontaneously initiate on a whim. But because it’s only a whim they don’t last for too long, and to be honest; my comic so far is the longest running drawing project that I have stuck to and it’s sort of pathetic in the sense of how lazy I am with it now, since I like to keep it simple each page is a compilation of copy and pasted sprites that I made. Obviously I made the sprites, after all it’s a drawing project and not a “Re-colour of Sonic sprites that I posted on Deviant Art” sort of thing.

But is there really an uncomplicated way to make the sprites for my comic? Of course not, I do it the easiest way there is and the best way I can think of. Mind you the sprites aren’t amazing looking, but they get the job done. If there was a shortcut for making the sprites that wouldn’t jeopardise their quality then of course I’d take it because that’s the kind of person I am. If there is a shortcut that would make things simpler, then by all means I’ll take it.

It is exactly because of this sort of mentality I didn’t get into the Warhammer franchise, and see it as more of a collecting and painting hobby. Buy little orcs or space marines and then colour them in, it’s like back in the early days of primary school where you were told you were being creative when you were scribbling sweet nothings on the walls of the school. But the thing is, I really wanted to get into Warhammer and if I tried to learn it then I would, but it’s too complicated for my brain to care about so I didn’t, which is a shame and all because when I went to the game shop in Ipswich and the kind employee showed me and my friend how to play it, I really liked it.

But complexity didn’t stop me from learning to do difficult things that I really wanted to do, for example; in my last year of high school I decided to learn how to play an electric guitar and as far as I remember it, it was amazingly mind boggling to me because I’ve never done something like it before. I just thought that I’d look cool swinging my EG 012 YAMAHA, that I bought for £100 at a local LIDL, around the room. In spite of my lack of knowledge of guitar playing I still learned it without any prior lessons or help, and I’ve become painfully mediocre at it.

But there were just some elements of playing a guitar that I really didn’t care much about like learning the chords and whatever, I’m sure that would be useful but since childhood is short I just went ahead and did it. I learned the basics of playing a guitar and just went on to learn some famous guitar riffs alongside those that aren’t so famous.

But since I’m not really fond of being a copy-cat I always try to make my own while I pretend to be a professional musician. It usually ends up in failure but at least I feel good about myself, it’s as if I’m making something rather than taking what someone else already done and just making it slightly worse when I do it. I still do jam alone in my room with my guitar every now and then, but lately I’ve not had much time to do so.

Which brings me to my writing projects, I have a lot of them, I’m not a fantastic writer, but I do love writing, and I feel bad about initiating a story which I feel really great about at one point but then I leave it as soon as I stop writing. It’s just the issue of time, I never have enough of it to finish my writing.
Since I have obligations to my other hobbies and people, I never have time to finish a piece of good writing, and when I finally decide to get back to it I just don’t care anymore. Obviously that’s a bad trait, but I can’t expect myself to stick to something I decided to do on a whim. Looking at my other hobbies, I was seriously thinking about them. When I learned to draw, I seriously wanted to out-do my friends, when I learned to play guitar I seriously wanted to impress some girls and when I started writing I seriously wanted to be entertained.

Well apart from the big three of my hobbies I’ve tried doing many other things, for example; making videos in windows movie maker, but I gave that up because windows movie maker is horribly limited, I used to try out photography when I was younger, I had a Polaroid camera and I just ran around taking pictures, I used to try taking real life videos with my video camera. I’m not saying that I’ve stopped doing all of these things, but instead I’ve become less able to do them. I still take photos, but with my phone and I still make videos, with my phone and lately I made a fantastic slideshow filled with amazing effects and Metallica’s Enter Sandman for my father’s birthday and he seemed to really like it.

Of course, by now you’ll be wondering why I’d want to be a game designer, well it’s not because I like games, but it’s because I like creating things and making designs, it’s why I start so many spontaneous projects, it’s why I made a sprite comic on the internet, it’s why I have so many different hobbies, it’s exactly why I prefer colouring in orc figurines for Warhammer instead of actually playing it.

In my personal statement I sent into the university I wrote something along the lines of “Computer Games are a unique mixture of art, music and film; and I want to be a part of what makes that.” And I really mean that. This doesn’t come from a person who is a gamer and wants to make a blockbuster first person shooter or whatever; this comes from a designer who has experienced many things, has many abilities and wants to utilise them to create something as unique as a computer game.


Links;
Symbols of Magic