Game Elements

Source: Unsplash

Caption: two computers, a block of paper with some writing and two hands over the paper

While watching the video Introduction to Game Design: Prototype Your Game I learned some important things about creating a game:

1. What is the primary thing the player gets to do in the game?
2. What is the space the player is playing in looks like?
3. How long should the game be?
4. What it feels like (happy, dangerous, ...)?
5. Try different ways to play the game.

I believe these five points are extremely important on the creation of a game since you are creating it not for you but for others to play and react (just like a website creation).

I also learned that a prototype helps to get the ideas more developed, what does work and whats doesn't work.

"The term prototype refers to the creation of a model to represent some aspects of the product design"

 

It was very curious to know that for some people 'game design' can mean "emotion engineering", "largely communication" or even "everything that goes into a game is more or less game design". I always thought of it being more of a complex or larger definition, something like the prototype definition. For me, 'game design' mean "the proccess of developing and thinking on different aspects of a game".

Also, it was indentified that the keyword 'game design'  was the most used among more than 20.000 keywords that were present in more than 8.000 articles in the period of 2000-2014. Fascinating!

When I read the article What are the Qualities of Games? it talked about three steps to critically analyze a game, them being:

1. Describe the game's formal elements, stating what is there.
2. How do the different elements interact?
3.  Try to understand why the designer decided to use those particular elements and not others (the player structure, the set of resources, ...).

During the proccess of a critical analysis we should be asking yourselves:

1. How players affect each other (if it is a multi-player game)?
2. What is the game's (intended) audience? Is the game appropriated for them?
3. Is the game considered fair by the players?
4. What are the challenges faced by the players?
5. Are there different paths to victory, can the player start in varied positions?
6. What is the 'core' of the game (the one thing one can do over and over again that represents the 'fun' part of the game)?

Readings:

Game Design Research

What are the Qualities of Games?

Watch:

Introduction to Game Design: Prototype Your Game

Lívia Alencar