by Annie | Jul 14, 2010 | Game Design
My dad once tried to teach me how to play the game Go when I was in kindergarten. Staying home to work on his PhD thesis, he was easily bored, and seeing as how I was the only other person in the house, I was by default the most worthy opponent. On the most basic level, Go is a game of surrounding your opponent’s pieces. In fact, the Chinese name for the game literally means “encirclement game.” Taking turns to place black or white stones on grid intersections, you work to surround your opponent’s pieces, thus capturing them and removing them from the board. Sounds pretty simple, right? Wrong. Soon after starting, you’ll realize that Go can quickly become very complex. You and your opponent are simultaneously trying to surround each other’s pieces, making for an increasingly messy situation. Strategy, skill, and planning ahead definitely come into play, or else you’ll soon find the board slowly being taken over by your opponent’s color. Similar to poker, there are expert Go players, and Go tournaments can award prizes of up to a quarter of a million dollars. Never played? The best way to learn is to play. Beware: rules are easy to grasp, but the game is difficult to master. Ready for a challenge?...
by Annie | Jul 13, 2010 | Game Design
I’ve recently rediscovered my insatiable love for Bejeweled 2. For those of you who have never played, the gameplay is quite simple. Given a grid of random jewels, you must switch adjacent jewels to create strings of 3 or more. Bonus events occur when you get 4 or 5 gems in a row. Pretty simple. Not rocket science. So why has the game been played and replayed hundreds of millions of times? What keeps people coming back to such a straightforward game? The answer lies in the psychology behind the game. While the gameplay may seem simple, the psychology behind it certainly isn’t. Here’s why: 1. Difficulty level Bejeweled may not require a PhD in pattern finding, but there is some level of skill required for the game. You have to practice in order to increase your skill in finding rows of jewels. With a learning curve in place, the player gets a sense of contributing to and earning the rewards, making them all that much more gratifying. 2. Randomness and unpredicability Sure you can control which jewels to move, but you have no power over the placement of the gems in the grid. The jewels appear in a random pattern, so gameplay is new and different each time you play. Because of this, you can’t predict the outcomes. This keeps you constantly guessing as your dopamine neurons are jumping up and down in elation, quite similar to the effect gambling has on your brain. 3. Cascading effects At certain points in the game, you might create a simple string of 3 jewels that sets off huge cascading effects,...
by Annie | Jul 11, 2010 | Game Design
Because so many VFS classes are taught by industry professionals, people still very active in the field, several classes take place in the evening. This week, I have 6:30-9:30pm classes Monday through Thursday. The upside of evening classes is that they’re not in the morning. The downside, however, is that I have to bring both lunch and dinner every day to avoid high restaurant meal bills. Thus, Joe and I just spent about 3 hours cooking dinners for the whole week – Joe as the sous chef and me as the executive chef. Pasta, rice, sausage, bacon, greens, asparagus, cauliflower, chicken, potatoes, and lots of onions and garlic. We’ve certainly done enough slicing, dicing, sauteing, and dishwashing to last us several days. Looks like it’s going to be a tasty...
by Annie | Jul 11, 2010 | Uncategorized
Coming into the VFS game design program, I knew that my class would be predominantly male, just like the game industry at large. I figured, maybe 5-10 girls out of a class of 30. Little did I know, the demographics would be even more skewed. There is only one other girl in my class. Needless to say, I was pretty intimidated at first. Most of these guys have logged hundreds if not thousands of hours playing games like World of Warcraft and Bioshock. They could probably play the games in their sleep, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them slept with controllers under their pillows. After the first day of classes, I was still a little wary. Sure, the guys seemed congenial, but could I really be friends with them? There were guys who joked about including boobs in every video game, guys who had already been involved in game development for years, and other guys who rarely said anything. As the week went on, I made an effort to get to know as many of the guys as possible. As it turns out, they’re all completely different. Some just graduated from high school, others are career changers, and they come from all corners of the globe. As the conversations piled up, gender started to fall away. Now, at the end of my first week, I know that I’m among an amazing group of people, both male and female. There are people here I could be great friends with, others that I might start a business with. Whatever the outcome, I’m confident that we’ll learn more than...
by Annie | Jul 9, 2010 | Uncategorized
Sooner or later, games are going to take over the world. You might as well just face it and accept it now. You can turn practically any activity into a game. Take, for example, the to-do list game. Pretty cool,...
