Game Elements Reading

Having read "Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church, published in July of 1999, I have opened my eyes a little more to the fast progression of games in the past two decades. It is amazing to see how the same design principles that we use today were only being termed around the time of games like Mario 64 (1996), which is used as an example in the article.

Some of the tools that Church talks about in the article are "Cooperation, Conflict and Confusion". Church talks about how the player of a game like Mario 64 or others, will experience intention or consequence. When performing tasks in the game there are only so many ways a task or action can be performed (which are created by the game designers) so it is up to the designers to create tasks that are challenging enough that the consequence is not completing the task to advance in the game, but that the player can work out the intentional action to perform the task and progress.

This is all about the balance between the players having control and the designer having control. Finding the perfect balance between the two can be tricky but when it works, and the player is totally engrossed in your game, that is the payoff. That is the most important thing that I believe I have taken from the article.

Super Mario logo - Source

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Favourite Game

My Favourite Game Battlefield 1 is currently my favourite game to play. I have been playing it since it's release in 2016 and although I take a break from it to put time into other games I always find I come back to it. Battlefield 1's campaign is short and fun, with a lot of insight into the history of WW1. The multiplayer feature is where I spend my time in the game though, playing in battles of 32 vs. 32 players on each team, spread across some of the largest battlefields of WW1. The game is beautifully made, with realistic graphics and animations and the playable maps in the game take direct influence from photos and stories of the real battlefields from the time. A screenshot from within Battlefield 1 - Source

19Sixteen Progress - Week 10

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Annotated Bibliography

Today we looked at researching peer reviewed papers related to, and that will help us with our projects. I followed the mind map from 'interactive storytelling' to 'theory' to 'visual storytelling'. 1. Figuero Espadas (2019), A review of scene and sequence concepts. , Communication & Society. 2019, Vol. 32 Issue 1, p267-277. 11p. 1. This research proposes a separation of the scene concept into two, for the better understanding of any audiovisual narrative: scene and narrative scene. A scene is a narrative unit with space-time continuity. The key to this unit is spatiotemporal continuity. The narrative scene is, according to McKee: “an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character´s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a story event” (2003, p. 56). The key is its unity of action. 2. A narrative scene is a particularly...

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