Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Itele3 (Gad) - Module 1
Itele3 (Gad) - Module 1
● Street fighting is against the law, so there is not even a semblance of any
rule in the activity.
● If one of the combatants can grab and use a weapon, he might be able to
gain the upper hand.
● They are not allowed to punch each other, even though they clearly have
the means to do so, and it would almost certainly be an advantage to do
so.
AGREED UPON, ARTIFICIAL RULES
● The game Chess and Rules
● When two players sit down to play chess, the goal is for one player to
capture all of his opponents chess pieces.
● Although there is nothing physically stopping the player from simply
reaching over to the other side of the board and grabbing his opponent’s
chess pieces, he is not allowed, by the rules, to do so.
● Only when the players have followed the artificial rules of the game and
one of them has created the circumstances to remove all chess pieces can
that player be declared the winner.
AGREED UPON, ARTIFICIAL RULES
● If the rules of a game were not agreed upon, the game would quickly
break down and fail to function.
● If there is an established set of rules for a game and a player chooses
to play that game, we can implicitly assume that the player has agreed
to all the rules-regardless of whether that player knows or understands
them.
● While all of the attributes that make a game a game are important, the
most important one is that a game has agreed upon, artificial rules.
Without these rules, there is no game.
PLAYERS HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE OUTCOME
● This attribute is actually slightly controversial. A small number of
people believe that a game can be a game even if players have no
impact on the game.
● If a player does not have an impact on the game, he/she is not a player
at all, and the activity is not a game.
PLAYERS HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE OUTCOME
● In the game Candy Land, players
take turns drawing a card and then
moving an avatar along a linear track
toward a goal. Is this a game?
● According to the criteria we are
putting forth—that a player must
have an impact on the game—it is
not.
PLAYERS HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE OUTCOME
● Imagine that one person were to play Candy Land as all four avatars.
Could this player have enough influence to make a preferred avatar
win? No
● It would proceed identically regardless of the desire, skill, or intent of
the player.
PLAYERS HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE OUTCOME
● In contrast, with chess, if a single
player plays the turns for both sides,
it is easy for that player to decide
which side will win and which will
lose.
● In fact, most people find it difficult
to play chess against themselves
because it is too easy to favor one
side winning without even trying.
PEOPLE CAN OPT OUT
● If a person is walking with a
basketball and someone calls out,
“That’s traveling. You must be
dribbling the ball while you walk,”
● The person might respond, “I’m not
playing basketball. I’m just
walking, so it’s okay.”
● This is perfectly fine. People are
never obliged to play a game.
GAME SESSIONS ARE FINITE
● A game must have some form of
ending so that participants are
sometimes “playing the game”—but
not always.
● A massive multiplayer online game
(MMO), may go on indefinitely, but
players do stop playing from time to
time.
INTRINSIC REWARDS
● One more aspect that distinguishes
games is intrinsic rewards—that is,
rewards that have value only in the
game.
● For example, when you play chess,
it is valuable to capture an
opponent’s pieces. However, that
captured checker holds no value
outside the game.
INTRINSIC REWARDS
● At the end of the game, all checkers are returned to the set to be
redistributed at the beginning of the next game.
● Let’s consider a slightly more complex example: poker, In this game,
the players play for money that has an extrinsic value, but there are
significant portions of the game that hold only intrinsic value.
● For example, in the context of poker, having cards of the same suit and
in order is considered highly valuable.
● Outside the context of poker, randomly drawing five cards of the same
suit in order is still very rare, but it has no value.
FINDING THE TARGET
AUDIENCE OF A GAME
FINDING THE TARGET AUDIENCE OF A GAME
● It is important to consider who you
are making a game for: Who will be
the game player?
● what is a game player? It could be
argued that literally everyone in the
world is either a current or former
game player; most people enjoy and
sometimes play some sort of game.
FINDING THE TARGET AUDIENCE OF A GAME
● To define your target audience, you can think about various attributes,
attributes of game players run the gamut from demographic
characteristics to attitudes and behaviors.
● Don’t try to define the audience you want to play your game; you want
everyone to play it. Instead, define the audience for which you are
making the game.
● For example, some players won’t play games that have sessions that
last longer than a few minutes. Other players won’t play games whose
sessions last less than an hour.
AGE
● Age can most effectively be split
into two major groups: adults and
developing children.
● As children develop cognitive
skills, they do so (very roughly) by
age.
● Games made for developing
children have specific requirements
and face legal restrictions.
AGE
● There are entire fields devoted to
child development and making
learning activities or games for
children at different stages of
development.
● If you are planning on making a
game for children, you need to do
some research into the field of child
development.
AGE
● Adults, on the other hand, can be
grouped into one large pool for the
sake of game development.
● You can assume that all adults that
you make games for can read, use a
controller or keyboard, understand
basic mathematics, and work out
puzzles on their own.
● This makes the categorization of
adults by specific age nearly
meaningless.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Many people hate learning new rules.
● Hand someone a thick rule book and ask her/him to read it. Many
people would think this sounds awful, right? These people often
decide it is not worth the effort to play any new games.
● Think of people who play chess on a daily basis but no other games.
They are certainly gamers, but they’re not the same kind of gamer
who picks up a new game weekly just to give it a try.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● On the other end of the spectrum are players who enjoy learning the
rules of a game; they might even enjoy learning the rules as much as
or more than playing the game itself.
● These people might belong to a local board gaming club, where they
play a new board game every week, rarely replaying a game.
● The draw of the game for this group is learning new rules with the
group, and the games themselves are secondary.
● As you create a game, you need to decide what tolerance level for
learning new rules your target audience will need to have.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● People basically fall into five groups when it comes to tolerance for
learning rules:
● Refusing: Players in this group
all but refuse to learn new rules.
If you are making a game for this
group, it is almost certainly a
game based on a real-world
game, or it is a sequel to an
existing game, or at least it fits
tightly into a very specific genre.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Resistant:Players in this group do not like learning new rules, but they
will do so occasionally so that they can play a specific game. Players in
this group tend to stick to a small variety of games, or possibly a narrow
genre, and tend not to explore new titles beyond what they already know.
Designing games for people in this group is easy if you are doing
something that would be familiar to them and takes very little ramp-up.
However, members of this group are nearly impossible to reach if you are
doing something unique or well outside their comfort range.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Resistant(con’t): Think of the
“match three” genre of games,
like Bejeweled. Many players
play only this genre because it is
easy to learn and play and is
available on a convenient device,
such as a smartphone. If you
wanted to make a new twist on a
match three game, this group
might be open to giving your
game a chance.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Neutral: Players in this group are fine with learning new rules if it is
for the specific purpose of playing a new game. Many casual video
game players and board game players fall into this category. This group
is unlikely to read or understand all the rules; instead, they learn as they
go, and they may be interested in only the rules that are needed to play
the game.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Neutral(con’t): Players in this
group are the kinds of players
who follow several specific
franchises and buy each new
installment of those games. They
are also likely to buy similar
competitors within the same
game genre, but they are unlikely
to wander outside their preferred
genre to try something
completely new.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Accepting: Players in this group
like learning new games and new
rules. They often learn more rules
than the bare minimum needed to
play. They sometimes seek out
rules exploits and use them to
their advantage.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Accepting(con’t): This group is also likely to have a favorite genre and
stick
to it mostly but also explore other genres. The accepting category is a
significant market and makes up a good share of professional game
developers’ target market. This is the group that is most targeted and
valued by the gaming industry, and accepting players are often flooded
with a variety of games made for them.
TOLERANCE FOR LEARNING RULES
● Enthusiasts: Players in this group love to learn new rules. They often
jump from game to game, and many of them drop a game as soon as
they figure out the rules completely. While it is easy to get a rules
enthusiast to play your new game, it is just as hard to hold on to that
player. This group is also willing to accept many more rules and much
higher barriers to entry than are the other groups. While there are no
exact numbers on the size of each group, sales of games with many
complex rules provide significant anecdotal evidence that this is the
smallest of the five groups.
INTEREST IN CHALLENGE
● There are many varieties of
challenge, but we can simplify
this attribute to tolerance for
failure.
● Most games have mechanics that
allow the player to both succeed
and fail.
● We can quantifiably measure the
frequency of success versus
failure and use it as a metric that
defines challenge.
INTEREST IN CHALLENGE
● To some players, failure is almost
—or even completely—
unacceptable. They want constant
rewards and play games simply to
feel good or pass time—and not
for challenge.
● It is possible to quantify this
aspect by listing an accepted
failure level as a simple ratio of
the number of failures to the
number of successes.
INTEREST IN CHALLENGE
● Consider these two dramatically different ratios:
● 15/1: This notation indicates an expected 15 failures for every 1 success.
This is a very challenging game; it is so challenging that it will likely
drive away many players, but it may attract a small devoted following.
● 1/100: This notation indicates an expected 1 failure for every 100
successes. This would be a game that is not intended to frustrate players.
Story-driven RPGs and simple puzzle games may have this type of
accepted failure level. The challenge of the game is not really the point
of such a game, and so challenge is heavily downplayed.
DESIRED TIME INVESTMENT
● Desired time investment can be broken into two subcategories: session
time and total time.
● Some games, such as checkers, don’t have a total time, only a session
time.
● But many games have both.
DESIRED TIME INVESTMENT
● Session time
● is how long it takes to play a
standalone session of a game or, in
longer video games, to have what the
player would consider a satisfying
session.
● Volleyball is a well-divided game. It
consists of points that make up a set,
and sets which make up a match.
DESIRED TIME INVESTMENT
● Total time
● is the amount of time it takes to
“complete” a game—which can be
very different for different games.
● Some games are never completed.
Think of MMOs, match three games,
and older arcade games.
DESIRED TIME INVESTMENT
● For each of these time investment subcategories, you need to define
what you expect out of a game and what the audience wants.
● Some players want a quick 5-minute session with no end game; casual
mobile puzzle games suit this audience.
● Other players want 2-hour-long sessions with a 20-hour completion
time; many action and adventure video games appeal to this group.
DESIRED TIME INVESTMENT
● The following are some examples of how you might quantify desired
time investment for various games:
● Checkers: 10-minute session, no total time
● Mario Kart: 15-minute session, 50-hour total time to unlock every reward
PACE PREFERENCE
● The pace of a game is difficult to quantify but is important to players.
● You should consider multiple factors related to pace.
● For example, a game of speed chess is fast paced, but it is fast in a
different way than a “shoot ’em up” top-down shooter is.
● When you want to quantify the pace preference of players, you should
specify what specific type of pace you mean.
PACE PREFERENCE
● When describing pace preference, it is important to be as accurate and
specific as possible.
● The following are some examples of how you might quantify pace
preference for various games:
● Chess: Slow, turn-based, thoughtful pace