Analyzing and Understanding Games

3 Paper Presentations:
Note: I will revisit this page and fix some of the issues related later.

Sat next to Ian Bogost during presentation, but didn't get a chance to talk. His presentation is coming up.

Beyond Choices: Design of Ethical Game Play (Top Paper Award)
By: Miguel Sicart

the perspect of the presentation: he's a phenomenologist.

Playing

• Playing is more than interacting with a system to reach a goal
• Playing is understanding values, creating values, and living by those values
• Play is (also) an ethical action: as players,we interact with the gameworld usingethical thinking.

Ethical game play

• Beyond choices, ethical game play is determined by how we relate to the game world
• It is not only our strategic/mathematical/spatial self who interacts with the game
• Ethical game play is the ludic experience in which regulation, mediation, and/or goals require moral reflection beyond system calculations

Speaker: Players are not monkeys. We know who we are and we don't forget who we are while we are playing the game. We are reflective beings in play.

Ethical Gamepay Design Typology

• Open ethical design
  
  • open system design
    
    • Players' choices affect rules, systems, mechanics,...

(WOW, he is flying through these slides. Funny aside: his avatar for "player" is Marty Feldman.)

This is a very interesting topic. Too much information in too little time. This seems to be a must read paper.

Tools for subtractive design is to take ethical thinking, and juxtapose it against the gameplay. Need to look at this more.

He uses Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Fables, bioshock, Call of Duty 4 as examples.

A Framework for the Analysis and Design of Meaningful Games
By: Russell Williams

PDF of full paper after link

http://www.coms.hkbu.edu.hk/williams/concepts/meaningfulpresentation.swf

9 points

1. We need to use some sort of schematic to create the game. Describe the PSE (Process - System - Environment) to be played.
   
2. Audience (The Players-demographics, psychographics, cognitive and motor skills, persona and scenario). HE talks about a book called "About Face" which helps identify who the person is.
3. Intention (information, connection, attention, research, persuasion, entertainment, expression.
   
4. Media
   
   1. Discrete
      
      1. individual media objects which aare image based
   2. textual
      
      1. written language in all of its various types and forms
   3. convergent
      
      1. combination of image and text
   4. sequential
      
      1. moving images and sound that add the dimension of time
   5. digitized
      
      1. computer-based media that add the dimension of intelligence
   6. Networked
   7. interconnected media that add the dimension of distance
   8. Human
      
      1. face 2 face com that adds the dimension of interpersonality
5. Mechanic
   
   1. movement
   2. options
   3. opportunities
   4. limitations,
   5. scoring
   6. emergence
6. Aesthetics
   
   1. Look
      1. representation
      2. lighting
      3. rendering
   2. Feel
      1. transcendent / immersive quality
      2. interactive controls
      3. sound environment
         
   3. Interface
      1. simple
      2. usable
      3. consistent
      4. responsive
      5. transparent
7. Poetic
   
   1. Creator Controlled - designed experience
   2. Synthesis - established beginning for emergent development
   3. Player Controlled - experience generated
   4. Socially Negotiated - emergent community & Collective experience
8. Subjective Experience
   (8 kinds of fun-LebBlanc)
   
   1. Sensation: sense pleasure
   2. Fantasy: make-believe
   3. Narrative: drama
   4. Challenge: obstacle course
   5. Fellowship: social framework
   6. Discovery: new territory
   7. Expression: Self-discovery
   8. Submission: killing time
9. The Dynamic
   
   1. Platform
   2. Online
   3. Board Game
   4. Card Game

The Rhetoric of Serious Game Genres: Issues for Analysis and Design
By: Lee Sherlock

How do we talk about Serious Game genres?

Brian Bergeron: "games with an agenda; news games; political games; realistic games; and core competency games" All of these are a variation of educational games (2006, p 26)

What is the problem?

• These genresdefinitions obscure the co-construction of meaning through play and the "procedural rhetorc".
• Intionality of the game designers; purpose; essentializing of a particular domain or activity
• "most labels define a specific output ignoring the larger possibility space for serious games.

Genres are not static states, but a dynamic system that carries out as social action.

Three levels of scope:

• Macroscopic: Genre fucnitons as activity
• Mesoscopic: genre functions as action
• Microscopic: genre functions as operation.

For example: The McDonald's Video Game

Example: Darfur is Dying

The game mechanic is Darfur is dying explicity connects the various levels of scope.