Endterm Game Ontwerp
Hoorcollege 5 – Advances in Game Technology
Smell:
• Can’t stop/cancel the scent.
• Scent stays in the room, user moves through them.
LCD:
• Flatter & lighter.
• Initially slow response time.
1980’s & 1990’s:
• Rise of multi-game console.
• Need for a multipurpose controller, instead of it only being compatible for one game.
• Joystick: 2D displays, 2D controls.
• 1990’s and 2000’s: increased complexity.
2000’s & 2010’s: Motion controllers:
• Software is better.
o Hard to interpret raw motion data.
o Kinect gives developers human poses, not pixels.
• Hardware is cheaper.
o Back to purpose built controllers.
Controllers:
• Evolution over?: stable design and no obvious improvements.
• Hardly used features.
o Capacitive touch.
o Motion sensing.
o Force sensing.
o Force feedback: vibrations and adaptive triggers.
,Hoorcollege 6 – Player types & Game Patterns
Do not use blanket terms like ‘enjoyment’ or ‘fun’ because:
• Different players find different kinds of games enjoyable.
• Different players may enjoy the same game for different reasons.
• Whether or not a game is enjoyable is relative.
User persona: a representation of the goals and behaviour of a hypothesized group is users.
Game patterns:
• Competing, e.g. against the game or against other players.
• Cooperative play (co-op), players work together to help each other and share resources to
achieve mutually desirable goals.
• Self-expression, some games are played simply to provide players a chance to express
themselves and exercise their creativity.
• Often, games incorporate a combination of these three elements; often with the goal of
engaging distinct types of players, or enabling more than one type of play behaviour.
Player skill level:
• Games are played by people of different skill level, but need to be enjoyable for all.
• For a novice: guide the player into the game gently, allow her to get used to the game
mechanics (and reward her for learning the mechanics), and build up difficulty and gameplay
element/mechanics to interact with.
• For an expert: they already have all the skills they need to competently engage at a high level
of game play.
o A player can remain at this level for an extended period of time, if a well-designed
game continues to provide fresh activities, content, or challenges to keep the expert
player coming back to experience more of the game.
• If an expert has completed all content, they could still be motivated via e.g., social status.
Player types:
• Game research distinguishes between two overarching forms of player segmentation.
o Designer theories. Theories created by game designers based on their observations
and intuitions about the different types of player motivations.
o Empirical models. Directly derived from data, e.g., by asking players to self-report
about how they feel about various situations and game activities, and seeing
whether some of these answers are correlated and clustered together into groups.
Bartle’s player types:
• Influential classification of players are Bartle’s Player Types, by Richard Bartle, creator of the
first multi-user dungeon (MUD) online games in the later 70’s.
• Idea: every person typically exhibits traits from all four types when playing a game, but many
people tend to lean more heavily toward one of the types.
• Performed a (not-particularly structured) analysis of game pleasures in MUD games, and
came up with these four distinct types of players:
o Achievers:
▪ Focused on pursuing and achieving goals inside the game, often competitive
and status oriented, derived enjoyment from challenge and game-related
goals that they are given (or set out for themselves).
▪ Ten to engage in activities only if it contributes to a particular goal.
, • Exploration for gathering new rewards.
• Socialization for instrumental purposes (e.g., self-improvement).
• Aggressive behaviour if opponent interfere with goals.
o Explorers:
▪ Try to find out as much as they can about the game environment; want to
understand the breath of the game; enjoying discovering new
things/places/secrets of the game.
• Gaining points is often instrumental to allow further exploration.
• Behaviour might be explorative (sometimes aggressive, sometimes
more social), just to see its effect.
• Socialization as a source of information and learning; social capital of
these players is based on knowing the ins and outs of the game.
o Socializers:
▪ Interested in relationships with other players and in organizing player; enjoy
connecting with other through the game environment.
• Exploring and achievement-based behaviour is for extending social
activities.
• Killing they rarely do, but perhaps instrumental for protecting other
players or in-game characters.
o Killers:
▪ Interested in defeating (killing) opponents; goal is not to win the game, but
to kill as many other players as possible’cause disruption, or enact control on
the environment or other players.
• Social capital based on being (physically) powerful inside the game,
perhaps even feared.
o Bartle visualizes players to exist in a space of possible player types:
▪ X-axis: interacting with Players <> interacting with the Game World.
▪ Y-axis: interacting with <> acting on.
ACE2 model:
• More focus on enjoyment derived from aesthetics.
o X-axis: enjoyment derived from mechanics (gameplay) <> aesthetics (presentation;
aesthetics elements of the game that do not belong to gameplay).
o Y-axis: acting <> interacting with the game world.
LeBlanc’s taxonomy of game pleasures:
• A list of eight pleasures that LeBlanc considers the primary game pleasures.
• Sensation: pleasures of sensation involve using your senses. It is primarily the aesthetics of
you game that will deliver these pleasures.
• Fantasy: the pleasure of the imaginary world and the pleasure of imaging yourself as
something that you are not.
• Narrative: LeBlanc does not necessarily mean the telling of a prescribed, linear story. He
means, instead a dramatic unfolding of a sequence of events, however it happens.
• Challenge: in some sense, challenge can be considered one of the core pleasures of
gameplay, since every game, at its heart, has a problem to be solved.
o For some players, this pleasure is enough, but others need more.
• Fellowship:
o Here, LeBlanc is referring to everything enjoyable about friendship, cooperation, and
community. Without a doubt, for some players this is the main attraction of playing
games.
• Discovery:
Hoorcollege 5 – Advances in Game Technology
Smell:
• Can’t stop/cancel the scent.
• Scent stays in the room, user moves through them.
LCD:
• Flatter & lighter.
• Initially slow response time.
1980’s & 1990’s:
• Rise of multi-game console.
• Need for a multipurpose controller, instead of it only being compatible for one game.
• Joystick: 2D displays, 2D controls.
• 1990’s and 2000’s: increased complexity.
2000’s & 2010’s: Motion controllers:
• Software is better.
o Hard to interpret raw motion data.
o Kinect gives developers human poses, not pixels.
• Hardware is cheaper.
o Back to purpose built controllers.
Controllers:
• Evolution over?: stable design and no obvious improvements.
• Hardly used features.
o Capacitive touch.
o Motion sensing.
o Force sensing.
o Force feedback: vibrations and adaptive triggers.
,Hoorcollege 6 – Player types & Game Patterns
Do not use blanket terms like ‘enjoyment’ or ‘fun’ because:
• Different players find different kinds of games enjoyable.
• Different players may enjoy the same game for different reasons.
• Whether or not a game is enjoyable is relative.
User persona: a representation of the goals and behaviour of a hypothesized group is users.
Game patterns:
• Competing, e.g. against the game or against other players.
• Cooperative play (co-op), players work together to help each other and share resources to
achieve mutually desirable goals.
• Self-expression, some games are played simply to provide players a chance to express
themselves and exercise their creativity.
• Often, games incorporate a combination of these three elements; often with the goal of
engaging distinct types of players, or enabling more than one type of play behaviour.
Player skill level:
• Games are played by people of different skill level, but need to be enjoyable for all.
• For a novice: guide the player into the game gently, allow her to get used to the game
mechanics (and reward her for learning the mechanics), and build up difficulty and gameplay
element/mechanics to interact with.
• For an expert: they already have all the skills they need to competently engage at a high level
of game play.
o A player can remain at this level for an extended period of time, if a well-designed
game continues to provide fresh activities, content, or challenges to keep the expert
player coming back to experience more of the game.
• If an expert has completed all content, they could still be motivated via e.g., social status.
Player types:
• Game research distinguishes between two overarching forms of player segmentation.
o Designer theories. Theories created by game designers based on their observations
and intuitions about the different types of player motivations.
o Empirical models. Directly derived from data, e.g., by asking players to self-report
about how they feel about various situations and game activities, and seeing
whether some of these answers are correlated and clustered together into groups.
Bartle’s player types:
• Influential classification of players are Bartle’s Player Types, by Richard Bartle, creator of the
first multi-user dungeon (MUD) online games in the later 70’s.
• Idea: every person typically exhibits traits from all four types when playing a game, but many
people tend to lean more heavily toward one of the types.
• Performed a (not-particularly structured) analysis of game pleasures in MUD games, and
came up with these four distinct types of players:
o Achievers:
▪ Focused on pursuing and achieving goals inside the game, often competitive
and status oriented, derived enjoyment from challenge and game-related
goals that they are given (or set out for themselves).
▪ Ten to engage in activities only if it contributes to a particular goal.
, • Exploration for gathering new rewards.
• Socialization for instrumental purposes (e.g., self-improvement).
• Aggressive behaviour if opponent interfere with goals.
o Explorers:
▪ Try to find out as much as they can about the game environment; want to
understand the breath of the game; enjoying discovering new
things/places/secrets of the game.
• Gaining points is often instrumental to allow further exploration.
• Behaviour might be explorative (sometimes aggressive, sometimes
more social), just to see its effect.
• Socialization as a source of information and learning; social capital of
these players is based on knowing the ins and outs of the game.
o Socializers:
▪ Interested in relationships with other players and in organizing player; enjoy
connecting with other through the game environment.
• Exploring and achievement-based behaviour is for extending social
activities.
• Killing they rarely do, but perhaps instrumental for protecting other
players or in-game characters.
o Killers:
▪ Interested in defeating (killing) opponents; goal is not to win the game, but
to kill as many other players as possible’cause disruption, or enact control on
the environment or other players.
• Social capital based on being (physically) powerful inside the game,
perhaps even feared.
o Bartle visualizes players to exist in a space of possible player types:
▪ X-axis: interacting with Players <> interacting with the Game World.
▪ Y-axis: interacting with <> acting on.
ACE2 model:
• More focus on enjoyment derived from aesthetics.
o X-axis: enjoyment derived from mechanics (gameplay) <> aesthetics (presentation;
aesthetics elements of the game that do not belong to gameplay).
o Y-axis: acting <> interacting with the game world.
LeBlanc’s taxonomy of game pleasures:
• A list of eight pleasures that LeBlanc considers the primary game pleasures.
• Sensation: pleasures of sensation involve using your senses. It is primarily the aesthetics of
you game that will deliver these pleasures.
• Fantasy: the pleasure of the imaginary world and the pleasure of imaging yourself as
something that you are not.
• Narrative: LeBlanc does not necessarily mean the telling of a prescribed, linear story. He
means, instead a dramatic unfolding of a sequence of events, however it happens.
• Challenge: in some sense, challenge can be considered one of the core pleasures of
gameplay, since every game, at its heart, has a problem to be solved.
o For some players, this pleasure is enough, but others need more.
• Fellowship:
o Here, LeBlanc is referring to everything enjoyable about friendship, cooperation, and
community. Without a doubt, for some players this is the main attraction of playing
games.
• Discovery:
