Re-mediation and Games

When one medium is represented in another, it's called re-mediation. Re-mediation is said to be a defining characteristics of the new digital media.

When gaming first came about it was thought to overtake the film industry, but that never happened. However, the gaming industry has seen a huge surge of success in the last decade, so much so that they are reviewed in the same way as films. The medium is on par with films and therefore it's becoming a huge part of our modern lives. Because of this, it's to be expected that the different mediums would cross over into one-another.

It's not just films and games that are a part of mediation, photography and paintings are also a good example of remediation. 'Photorealistic' art is a cross between photography and art in which paintings or drawings are created in such a way that they appear to be flawlessly realistic, see an example below.

IMMEDIACY

• Media that aspire to a condition of transparency.
• The aim is to make the viewer ‘forget’ that they are watching a movie, for example, and be drawn in to the experience.
• Immersive virtual reality
• Photo realistic images

HYPERMEDIACY

• Artefacts that are aware of and wish to display their own constructed nature.
• They call attention to their own constructed nature all the time.
• Video Games HUDs

People may complain about or compliment games for 'copying' film techniques and trends, such as certain camera angles or narrative elements. The thing that people don't realise is that mediums take time to develop their own unique attributes. When film first came around, it was generally all filmed versions of theatrical shows; because of this films industry was thought to be a flop at the time. Just as with films, it will take a while for games to develop their own creation techniques.

Crawford's 6 Lessons on Storytelling

Lesson 1 - Stories are complex structures that must meet many hard-to-specify requirements
Most games don't look at the requirements needed to create a story. Because they dismiss a lot of these structural requirements, they concern themselves with things instead. Games will focus on things you obtain throughout the game, things to destroy, things to use to help you accomplish victory. Stories can't be called stories if they are about an object, they should be able people.


Lesson 2 - Stories are about the most fascinating things in the universe: people
People play the key role in stories, because people can use conflict to drive a story. Somebody who reads a story will expect progression through human emotions, they also need to be able to empathise with them to an extent. Objects and tools can be important to a story, they will help the character progress further, but it's the way that the characters are feeling and thinking that interests the audience.


Lesson 3 - Puzzles are not a necessary component of stories
Characters make decisions in stories, and these decisions affect the progression and outcome of said stories. Games have taken the idea of decision-making and added spectacle to it. Providing exotic imagery as a form of entertainment is a spectacle, something the audience hasn't seen before. They can take a decision-based story and instantly make it more exciting by adding better graphics and effects; however, Aristotle said that spectacle is the least important of the six elements of a story.


Lesson 4 - Spectacle does not make stories
Games are always trying to improve their appearance, or spectacle, but traditionally visuals are created by using our own amazing tools that are hard-wired into our brains: our imagination. Books are an excellent example of this, as although there is nothing but pages of text, it leaves us to imagine our own surroundings and characters to place the story into. In games you wouldn't be able to tell how a character is thinking by just looking at them, visual spectacle is limited.


Lesson 5 - Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling
Spatial reasoning is when we can work something out by using our knowledge of space. When used metaphorically it works well, and allows us to use statements such as "Your statement is wide of the mark". However, Crawford states that "when people use it too literally in storytelling, it becomes a problem.


Lesson 6 - Stories take place on stages, not maps
Stories will mess around with time, they will break it up, jumping backwards and forwards, as well as skipping parts altogether. They will skip how the character arrives at a place, or what they even did during their journey there. I personally think that this is a good thing, because it would get incredibly boring having to listen every detail given; stories are split up into particular sections for a reason: to keep the audience interested. Modern games use this quite well, cutting out parts you don't need, but most games involve you taking your character to every destination you need to go to. A good example of this would be JRPGs, as they force you to walk to every new area without skipping parts.

Gender and Games

It is fairly obvious for any average onlooker that the games industry is extremely segregated when it comes to gender dominance. Traditionally the games industry was seen as extremely 'nerdy' and therefore unappealing to a mainstream audience, let alone a female audience. Recently though, in the last decade, the market has been slowly opening up as more modern views on  gaming are created; there are now games for every person, males, females, children and adults. Although the market for games has expanded, can the same be said for the industry?


By looking at the United Kingdom National Gamers Survey 2009 we can get some factual representation of the industry. The Gamers Survey provides authoritative data on gamers across all main game platforms and covers key European markets and the US.

As you can see in the first chart above, the ratio between males and females playing games are actually fairly similar, there is a slight increase in males playing over females, but generally speaking they're on even footing. The same can't be said for average hours, as it's apparent that males generally spend a lot more time playing games than females. For the 13 - 19 years, males spend more than 3x the time playing video games than females.


All of the charts reflect the same basic idea, although there are a lot of female gamers, they don't tend to play games very often.

A report by the online games magazine, MCV (2008) suggests that the percentage of women within the games industry in core creation or developmental roles is around just 6.9%. More recent figures produced by Skillset (2009) found that women represent 4% of the game industry’s workforce, a decrease from 12% in 2006 (Skillset, 2006). Even the small percentage of female employees consist of jobs such as marketing and writing, and rarely occupy jobs which affect the game in big ways such as art or coding.


It's quite shocking to see this huge segregation in a medium which is thought to be getting a broader audience over time, so why is this happening? I believe that it's just a mindset that's been put in place over many years and that it won't change so suddenly. There may be more games targeted at girls, but it doesn't mean girls will find the idea of creating these games more appealing. Despite the figures, I still think over time the gender segregation will decrease, but for now it will have to remain a male-dominated industry.

Royal Game of Ur - 3D Model

I've made my own version of The Royal Game of Ur for my design document. So far I have yet to name it, so I'll just give it a cool codename: 'Project Royal-Steam'.


This was made on Second Life, and I also decided to take away my third iteration (which involved removing part of the board), as I felt it didn't add anything or change anything significantly.

CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

Week 14 Reading - Mike Stout - "Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda" (2012)

In this article Mike Stout talks about the level design on the classic NES game: The Legend of Zelda. Though it may be logical to think that this old game is lacking some of the design elements we see in today's modern games, it actually turns out that it contained some interesting and influential techniques to guide the player through each level.


The creator of the game, Shigeru Miyamoto, wanted to give his players a feeling of exploration as they journeyed through the land of Hyrule, and to achieve that there are some clever tricks found present in the game.

Mike looked through each level of the game and did a detailed analysis, looking closely at:

• Level Flow. How do the spaces in the level fit together? Where is the player supposed to go, and will she know how to get there?

• Intensity Ramping. Does the intensity of the experience ramp up in a satisfying way? Do monsters get more difficult as the level goes on? Does the player get a chance to learn how the enemies work and then display her mastery later on?

• Variety. Is there sufficient variety in the gameplay? Do enemy encounters frequently repeat themselves? Are the spaces varied in interesting ways?

• Training. If the design requires new skills from the player, does it teach and test those skills appropriately?

Level Flow

The dungeon layouts in the game are carefully planned so that the flow is very cleverly executed.

The critical path is the shortest path through a level without using secrets, short cuts or cheats. It is the path that the designer wants the player to take through the level without being too clever.

Critical paths don't often require players to complete 100% of a level, just that they do the mandatory objectives.

The critical path is almost always linear in the dungeons, there are few times where the player needs to re-traverse ground they've already been. This means the player rarely gets lost.

There are optional rooms that branch off from the critical path which aren't mandatory, but they reward the player with bonuses. These rooms make the level seem less linear.

At the start of the level there are rooms that force the player to re-traverse ground, it makes the level feel less linear, but because there are only two of them the player probably won't get lost.

The dungeons also have lots of short cuts, which can only be accessed with certain bonuses (such as bombs), so it makes the player feel clever.

This level generally keeps an excellent balance between giving the player the feeling of exploration and keeping them from getting lost.

Intensity Ramping

There are two important things to look for with intensity ramping:

1. The enemy encounters should usually ramp up in difficulty over the course of the level.
2. No encounter should be repeated twice. This gives a greater variety, and also keeps the player constantly answering new questions as she goes through your level.

It seems that on the dungeon the monsters slowly increase in difficulty over time, with more monsters appearing in the later levels OR the level elements affecting the gameplay in such a way that it becomes harder for the player to defeat the enemies.

For example, the player fights five Stalfos in Room 3, but two blockers in the room make it easier to avoid them; in Room 4, there are only three Stalfos but there is only one large blocker which obstructs your movement more than theirs'.

The design behind these encounters were intentional, subtle and very well executed.

Variety

None of the encounters in the dungeon were ever repeated. The combination of blocks and monsters are always different.

One criticism is that there is too much monster variety. In modern games you would have the same monsters, but more of them or combinations of previously fought monsters, whereas in this dungeon you and introduced to new monsters at almost every room.

The game does this combination mixing later in the game, but for some reason it doesn't do it here.

Training

In modern games, training seems like a required feature. When looking back at the NES-era of gaming, however, you would have to read the manual in order to get any form of training.

The original Legend of Zelda does actually contain some training - it's just very different to modern games.

In The Legend of Zelda, training is accomplished with "black rooms" where an NPC gives you hint.

The hints were practically useless most of the time, the above one telling the player to go to the end of the dungeon, which is obvious in itself. 

The most interesting thing about these black screens, however, is that in the Japanese version of the game they are actually useful, the hint in the first dungeon tells you that you need money to shoot arrows in the Japanese version, which is much more useful training.

Miyamoto and his team were trying to guide the player, and on the important things too, but due to the translation error we English-speaking players don't see the mastery behind the "black screens". Even then, they weren't overly successful, which is why they eventually scrapped them in later games.

What Did We Learn?

• It is possible to achieve the feel of non-linear level design by taking a linear path and adding short offshoots.

• Ramping encounters up along the critical path still allows you to have a good intensity ramp even if your level designs aren't all linear.

• Miyamoto and company intended to have training in the game, but it was excluded because of localization errors.

What Mike finds awesome is that they were making this stuff up back then, they had no prior knowledge of these techniques but instead relied on the masterful mind-power to achieve such amazing results.

My Thoughts

I always loved the original Legend of Zelda game, but until now I never appreciated how much thought when into the level design of it. It's true that it never felt like an overly linear game, even in the dungeons, where nearly all games fall to a linear set-up. It just shows that clever pacing and difficulty ramping have always held a place in successful games.

To implement these techniques into my own games, I imagine it would take a lot of play-testing and iteration to find a good balance between keeping the player on target and making them feel the feeling of exploration.

Week 13 Reading - Ed Bryne "Game Level Design" (2005) Chapter 2

In this chapter, Ed Bryne takes us through the process of designing a simple level of a game. There are many basic and critical elements which should be put into place for the level to be fairly simple and easy to figure out, whilst still keeping the player feel like they accomplished something challenging.


Level Design Building Blocks

The basic elements of a level, or the "building blocks" are these:

• Concept
• Environment to exist in
• Beginning
• Ending
• Goal
• Challenge to overcome between the player and the goal
• Reward
• Way of handling failure

Although these building blocks don't cover more complex elements which you would find in a modern-day shooter or RPG, they generally work with most modern games, you just need more of everything.

A good example of this method would be a Tetris-style puzzle game, as it's still a very popular template for modern games:

• Concept: Find a place for the blocks or lose the level.
• Environment: The active play area to the left of the game data.
• Beginning: The player starts with an empty screen and a score of 0
• Ending: The level is over when the player either creates the correct number of vertical lines (success), or the blocks pile up to the top of the screen (failure).
• Goal: Create a number of lines that meet the target requirement for success.
• Challenge: The speed of descent, type of blocks, and number of lines needed.
• Reward: The player moves to the next level, or receives a brief animated sequence.
• Failure: The game ends and must be started from the beginning.

Story

Storytelling may seem important, but it isn't a fundamental requirement. Story can enhance a level and give players information about what they're expected to do, but many games exist without a narrative element. Players are left to imagine their own story, for example in chess, which has elements of medieval war and politics, but can also be played with coloured stones. 

The gameplay drives the game, and is what drives the stages and levels within them. Ideally a game should allow players to create their own narrative as they play, even if it's just a list of personal achievements.

Putting the Elements Together

Concept


As the example, it is a game for a portable phone called Clownhunt; it involves the player controlling Crispy, a  clown escaping from an insane ringmaster.

The player can move Crispy left and right and make him jump, he can fall from any height, has unlimited energy for jumps and has no inventory or weapons. The game is simple.

Environment

Clownhunt is set in a circus, all elements should be thematic. "Cartoony" graphics fit well and offer contrast to the games context, running from murderous ringmaster.

The environment consists of static background, starting point, visible exit and whatever elements to help him in the foreground. There isn't a HUD to interfere because the game doesn't have lives, energy or other "metrics".

It's also important to keep the player immersed in your game by keeping everything to the right theme, but it's also important because the player needs to understand what they can and can't do. If you were to drop a pair of wings in for the player to put on, he will obviously believe he's able to fly.

Beginning

Begins with the player on left of screen ,he needs to move to the right to reach exit. Entrance can be at the top, the middle or at the bottom of the screen, depending on the level. This level starts at a plain wooden door next to elephant cages.

Ending

The exit needs to be far away to make it more challenging, the exit is therefore placed in the opposite corner of the entrance, and clearly labelled 'exit', to make it obvious for the player.

Goal

The goal in every level of Clownhunt is the same - reach the exit. Other elements can be added, but for starters it doesn't matter. It's important for the player to be able to finish the level.

The game has a narrative-driven goal, as although Crispy is supposedly running from the Ringmaster to motivate the player to continue, the Ringmaster will never actually appear in-game. This means there is no need to precede each stage with a description of the objective, and also no need for additional metrics.

Challenge


This creates the fun in this level, we need a challenge to stop the player simply reaching the exit, but it needs to be thematic - that it doesn't seem out-of-place or goofy for the genre of game. This is called dissonance, it has to be avoided.

A seesaw would be good as it fits with the game style, and it is useful for a number of reasons:

• The player needs to gain height to reach the exit.
• It is immediately recognizable by most players.
• It's easy to see how it works from looking, so no explanation is needed.

Determining the Challenge Mechanics

We now have to add mechanics that allow the player to interact with it, we can usually break down challenges such as this into different sorts of mechanics.

For example, the mechanics behind doors are simple in most games - activate a door and it will move on one axis (usually hinges), as in real life. The best gameplay mechanics need no explanation, allowing players to interact with them from their own observations. This makes players feel clever and allows the designer to stay out of the picture.

The seesaw mechanics should work as the player expects, a weight on one side makes that side go down, and the other rise. There are three possible ways to do this, as illustrated:

To avoid adding any new gameplay mechanics into the game, the only way it will work is if we put the weight ON the seesaw. Crispy can only move left, right, and jump.

By putting the weight on the seesaw, it means players need to work out how to use it to throw the weight up, then use resulting impact to propel Crispy to the exit. This mechanic needs little explanation, as players know how gravity works.

The player feels obliged to then jump on the high part to make the opposite weight fly up, smash down and send him flying. In real life this wouldn't work, it might break the seesaw or the weight may not land where it started, but this is an example of "game logic". Game logic means events may be more predictable than they are in real life.

Knowledge about the game, gained within the game itself is called intrinsic knowledge, whereas knowledge applied in the game but gained from another source, usually real life, is called extrinsic knowledge. With the seesaw, the player uses his extrinsic knowledge of how it works in real life to tackle the virtual problem.

It's good to include a simple set of in-game rules for objects to follow and react to the player's actions. It's useful for the programmer to implement these when they code said object. 

An example of a rule for the seasaw would be:

Multiply the distance the weight goes up by the number of feet the player character falls before landing on the other end of the seesaw

We then add a pile of objects in front of the seesaw for the player to get high enough before jumping onto it, as he currently can't jump high enough without them, and we don't want to alter the functions of the game.

Reward

The main reward for completing the level is access to the next one, and a secondary reward would be a short victory animation of Crispy giving a thumbs-up. For many players, the act of completion and progression is the driving force for playing a game.

Failure

What happens when the player fails is another important aspect. With this game this is handled inherently, there isn't a timer or over-arching challenge that ends the game before the player finishes. 

In this level there is no way for the player to fail, and the more players can blame the designer for failure, the easier it is to simply stop playing. Because of this, it's good to let the player have a way of climbing back up and trying again, instead of kicking them out and forcing them to retry.

My Thoughts

This chapter made it very clear that a lot of different genres share the same basic elements that make up the game, and that by learning these building blocks, it's possible to make a basic design for almost any kind of game. I thought the order in which he set up the level was quite interesting, as it involved planning out the start, finish and general level layout before thinking about the challenges. Personally, I think it would be good to think of a set of challenges to overcome and generally base a level around said challenges, to make them seem more coherent with the theme of the game and fit perfectly.

The information and techniques discussed will certainly be helpful in the future.

La Decima Vittima

"The 10th Victim" is a 1965 Italian/French science fiction film directed by Elio Petri. It is based on Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story "Seventh Victim". It's set in the near future where there are large wars going on, and the only way they know to hold them up is to give people with violent tendencies a chance to kill in the 'Big Hunt'. The Hunt is a form of entertainment in this fictional world, where people looking for fame and fortune participate in ten rounds each, five as a hunter and 5 as a victim. The survivor of ten rounds becomes very wealthy and retires.

The protagonist, Marcello, an assassin in a loveless marriage with his wife, finds himself the target of a female assassin called Caroline. The film looks at the relationship between these two and how Marcello is reluctant to kill her as he is not sure whether she is his hunter, and they eventually become romantically involved. To maximize financial gain, Caroline wants to get a perfect kill in front of the cameras as she has negotiated a major sponsor from the 'Ming Tea Company'.

I personally loved the concept and setting of the film, but I think the narrative could have used some work and I would like to see a more modern version of it. I think the film helped to encourage 'live-action games', which are games that take place in real life and on a bigger scale. The most prominent example of these and one that we looked closely at is 'The Assassin Game', which I feel was directly influenced by the film; in this game people are randomly assigned another participant to 'assassinate' (pretend to kill). The game is fairly popular worldwide in different Universities and videos of it can be found online.

Royal Game of Ur Essay

The Royal Game of Ur – Evolution through Iteration

By Dominic Noble

This essay talks about an ancient board game, ‘The Royal Game of Ur’. I will focus on the game’s history, as well as the mechanics of the game to form a base understanding of how it works. I will also discuss some possible iteration to the game which I have implemented either for better or for worse.

 The Royal Game of Ur (also known as the Game of Twenty Squares) is one of the earliest board games discovered in recent history. The boards were discovered in the 1920s by Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur during an excavation into the Royal Tombs of Ur, and date back to between 2600-2400 BC (Becker, 2008: p.1).  Though the wood decayed a lot, red limestone and lapis lazuli survived in their original positions so that the shape could still be restored. (BBC, n.d) This board wasn’t the only one discovered in this period, but it’s still the oldest version of it. The game is said to be, at one point in time, used as a tool to predict the future. (‘Dundy O’, 2011)

(royal_game_of_ur, n.d.)

Later a clay tablet was found, which dates back to 177BC, holding the rules of the game; this tablet is the oldest set of rules in the world. I was made using earth and water, inscribed whilst wet then sun-baked to preserve the markings (Kayne, 2003). Irving Finkel is the curator in charge of translating ancient inscriptions on tablets from Mesopatamia at the British Museum. He was the man who translated the Royal Game of Ur rules from an ancient clay tablet in the 80s, and these rules were fairly vague (British Museum, n.d). Since forming a foundation of the rules there have been many different interpretations of them from different historians such as H.J.R. Murray and RC Bell.

The game has been through a though different versions over the years, but I feel that it's important to grasp an understanding on the original rules and mechanics before making any iterations. Though one single set of rules can’t be guaranteed from the translation, I feel that out of all of the alternate rules, Bell's gameplay ideas are the most logical, so I will be using them for my iterations. These rules can be found in Appendix A [on page 8].

Whilst play-testing the original version of the game, I used a tactic in which I worked on moving one of my pieces at a time, hoping that by doing them individually, they stood more chance of reaching the end than if I pushed them all forwards in a group. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, as every time I left my 'safe area', my opponent destroyed my piece instantly; this was because they had moved all of their pieces out at once into their safe area, meaning if they rolled anything between 1 and 4, they could take my lone piece. On the second play-through we both attempted their original tactic and ended up spending 30 minutes with next to no movement on the board, eventually we gave up.

I then tried the later version of the board which was popular during the early part of the second century BC; this version had a different layout, the six squares at the end, on the 2x3 body, were straightened out and added to the combat area, meaning players spent more time in combat. The pieces were also limited to 5 for each player instead of 7 (Finkel, 2008: p.27). Whilst playing it, I found myself getting frustrated by the longer combat area; although it meant more fighting went on, it also felt as if my pieces were never safe and that there was nothing I could do about it.

For my iterations I decided to start with the first variant of the game as I preferred it, but I still felt it was lacking something, and I decided that through iteration I would attempt to improve it. I made a total of 7 iterations to the board game, but there are three problems that I felt are the most important when it comes to improving this game.

The first problem for me is that the game doesn't bring many emotional reactions out of players as it is, or in other words, it's dull. For a game to be made more interesting for both players, it should bring out anger, happiness, satisfaction, or a vast range of emotions. Using the MDA framework makes it a lot easier to achieve these results. We start by deciding what emotion we want the player to feel (aesthetics), we then determine how the board interacts with the player to achieve this response (dynamics), and finally what components we, as game designers, need to add to create them (mechanics). (Hunicke, 2004: p.2)

I felt that it was lacking tension; there weren’t any big build-up events that the player feels anxious about. This is the aesthetic I want the player to experience, so I first had to think about the dynamics and how they create tension. There are a few ways, but I felt the best way for this game would be to create an element of risk; the players are always at risk of having their pieces taken away, but I wanted to add a precise moment of risk which would lead to an ultimatum of emotion. Finally, what mechanics would create risk? Near the start of the board, where a player enters the 'combat zone' in the middle of the board, the first square has been changed into a 'trespassing square', where if the player lands on it, must branch off from the usual route and travel through the enemy's spawn area. I also added one at the other end of the board, where the players branch off to leave; they must then loop around into the middle again (see diagram below). This means that they have to take a longer route through dangerous grounds, as the enemy stands a much higher chance of being able to take their piece.

After testing this iteration I found it worked very well, as whenever I landed on the trespassing square, I felt very anxious and worried for the safety of my piece. I also discovered that it granted me a great opportunity to attack my opponents (previously) safe pieces in their spawn area. In the end I received some unexpected, positive feedback from the game; although going through the enemy territory risked my piece and caused tension on my part, it rewarded me by letting me take my enemies own pieces, causing tension on their part.

The second problem is the lack of player control over the game’s outcome. Though the player rolls the dice to move their individual pieces, this still feels like a very chance-orientated game. To make it more fun, I feel that it's essential to create a good balance between luck and skill; this certainly isn't an easy feat, but if done correctly, it can make a game a lot more attractive to players. By giving players more and more decisions it makes the game more immersive, but right now the players have a very limited set of options (they can choose which piece to move). I need to be careful though, as adding too much skill may eliminate the element of chance, and this would really make the target audience a lot more narrow (meaning children wouldn't be able to win as easily) as well as make the game too predictable (Braithwaite & Schreiber, 2008: p.70).

From looking at the regular variant of the Royal Game of Ur, it's clear to see that the current skill comes from choosing when and where to move each piece, as well as tactics such as 'camping' on the rosette squares then waiting for the opponent to pass over them. To add a greater level of skill to the game, I felt it would be best to enhance the already-existing skill elements of the game; by doing this I would still improve the skill of the original game, whilst leaving the current style and appearance of it alone; after all, it's survived all of these years for a reason. My iteration was to add the ability to move backwards whilst on a rosette square. For instance, if the player's piece is on a rosette square and an enemy piece is two squares behind, they can then roll a two and take it. After that move, however, they must then start going forwards again.

After testing this iteration I found that it also worked very well. There were multiple occasions when, after landing on a rosette square, I was able to take my opponents piece from behind me. Unfortunately it also worked vice-versa, and I found myself frustrating at my opponent using the same tactic. Whilst playing, I actively decided to keep one of my pieces on the first rosette square throughout the whole game just in case of such an opportunity; this shows that I successfully enhanced skill in the game.

My third problem is the speed and tempo of play. The 'tempo' of a game is the intensity of play, it's the time taken between each significant decision made by the player. A high tempo means the player is taking a long time on each decision, whereas a lower tempo represents more frantic decision-making (Venturelli, 2009). Because there are so few options in this game the tempo is far too low, yet somehow it takes a very long time to complete a single game; why is this? It's because there is too much opportunity for a players pieces to 'die' and forcing them to start again, this means that as soon as a player gets anywhere in the game, they stand a high chance of losing all of their progress.

I tried a lot of iterations when it came to this point, some of them worked, some of them didn't. I attempted to shorten the combat area of the board in the middle even more to give less room to move, but this ended up limiting the rosette squares and meaning there was less time spent in the combat area. In the end I came across an idea that worked.

I decided to shorten each player's spawn area to two squares instead of four, meaning they have less time in the safe zone (See diagram below). This worked well whilst testing it and although it shortened the play time a little, it didn't quite shorten it enough. This iteration certainly improves the gameplay, but it doesn't make a huge difference, so it's not very effective. However, I also found that it added a greater element of risk, as it meant the players were forced to move out of the safe zone sooner than before, building up anxious feelings in the players even more-so.

In conclusion, I found that although the Royal Game of Ur has gone through centuries of studying and iterations, with vast amounts of people playing it in different cultures, there was still room for improvement to the gameplay. I feel that my alterations have left it as a better game, modernising it using knowledge from the last few decades, and enhancing elements which were already existing. One thing I didn't want to do was to change the game so much that it's unrecognisable from the original masterpiece, and I feel that I have achieved this goal.

APPENDIX A

The Royal Game of Ur is played with two players, each player starting with 7 pieces. The overall aim is for each player to move all of their pieces from the start of the board to the end of it,  using 4 tetrahedral dice with marks on two tips (this makes them into binary dice) to decide movement. Players take it in turns to roll, moving a single piece at a time (they can get a number between 0 and 4). They enter via their dedicated 'spawn point', there is one on either side of the board for each player, then follow it into the middle and down to the other end of the board, where they branch off to their side of the board to exit (see diagram below). When a player lands on top of an enemy’s piece, the enemy has to take that 'taken' piece off the board to start again with it. There are 5 special pieces on the board, they're called rosette squares. By landing on one of them, the player gets another roll, and the piece that's resting on said square becomes immune to death until moved along (Bell, 1979).

Bibliography

. BBC, n.d. World History: Royal Game of Ur, [online] Available at: <http://bbc.in/uCYHWp> [Accessed 6^th December 2011].

. BBC, royal_game_of_ur n.d. [image online] Available at: < http://bbc.in/uCYHWp > [Accessed 12^th December 2011].

. Becker, A. 2008. “The Royal Game of Ur” in Finkel, ed. pp. 11-15.

. Bell, R. C., 1979 Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations. Revised edition. pp. 23-25. 

. Braithwaite, B. & Schreiber, I., 2008. Challenges For Games Designers Charles River Media (chap 5 & 6).

. The British Museum, n.d. Irving Finkel [Online] Available at: [Accessed 7^th <http://bit.ly/v0vZGf> [Accessed 6^th December 2011].

. Dundy, O., 2011. Ur…I Demand That You Bury Me With My Game! Pt. 2, [online] Available at: <http://bit.ly/sKjtwC> [Accessed 6^th December 2011].

. Finkel, I. L., 2008. “On the Rules for The Royal Game of Ur” in Finkel, ed. pp. 16-32.

. Hunicke, R., 2004. MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research pp.1-4.

. Kayne, R., 2003. “WiseGeek: What are the Clay Tablets of Mesopotania?” [Online] Available at: http://bit.ly/vf7Dkf [Accessed 6^th December 2011].

. Murray, H. J. R. 1952 A History of Board Games Other Than Chess. pp. 19-23. 

. Venturelli, M., 2009. Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design – A PopCap Case Study pp. 2-4.

All other images in this essay, namely diagrams, were made by me.

Week 10 Reading - What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story

The quality bar is rising for stories in games.

To approach story in game, it’s vital to look at what has worked in other story forms, and what is unique story in games.

‘Games aren’t movies’ and ‘Movies aren’t plays’.

Moving pictures didn’t take off straight away, it took refinement to grow to the size of the film industry it is today.

They had to learn two things:

1. They are a form of story, not just a new toy.
2. Their particular form of story differs from all previous forms of story, and has other things in common with all forms of story.

Generally speaking, they hadn't discovered what this particular story form was good at. The same goes for games as well.

Common misperceptions:

• Story is dialog.
• Story doesn't matter.

But story is CONFLICT

The idea that story doesn’t matter is mainly with the industry old-timers, which is okay for a small audience of addicted gamers.

Modern games appeal to a much wider audience, some of whom have never tried a game before, so we need games to rise to the level of universal cultural experiences, just like movies have.

A starting place:

If we are to develop games into the fairly advanced story form that movies have become, we need to start by learning everything movies had to learn.

CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT!

This has huge implications for how we plan our productions cycles, and how story is best presented in the game.

Conflict is part of the structure, which means it needs to be planned from the beginning of the development process.

How classical stories move:

It’s important for game developers to know about classical story structure because it’s simple, and it works.

This structure has been tested by story tellers of all kinds for thousands of years:

• First, there's a protagonist, a hero.
• His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
• A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
• The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails. The world pushes back too hard.
• The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
• Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
• The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
• After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
• The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.

In a three-act classical story this is what happens, and with more acts than this, you have to add more obstacles. Three is a minimum, and a good goal for a game.

In a comic structure the last gap is overcome, and in a tragic structure one final gap opens up, and stays there. Games are comic by nature, so it’s usually possible to get to the end.

Character and why it matters to games

What a character wears, eats, and drives are all important, but they are characterization: the superficial stuff.

Character means the choices made, and any good story has pressures on hero to bring out these choices.

Rest of cast of character should be designed around protagonist, as they conflict with her to define character.

The game world should be designed to oppose the player at every turn.

Importance of reversals

Once the story arc is decided upon, some game developers work backward to determine individual plot points, much like puzzle designers sometimes start with the solution and work backwards from that point.

My Comments:

I agree with this article in that story is quite often important for games, but I also agree that we certainly haven't refined it enough for this new medium.

 Looking at modern games which are renowned for having a 'great, immersion story', we find ones such as 'Uncharted', which is a very well-made, high-budget game which received awards at VGA (Video Game Awards). Even with this game, however, the designers are merely treating it like a film; you will see a large cut-scene where the protagonist tries to uncover part of the plot line, and then you get thrown into gameplay at a completely different instance. There is not a clear link between the story and the gameplay.

Going to the other end of the spectrum, however, we find unique games such as the 'Half Life' series. In these games, there are absolutely no cutscenes, instead you control as PART of the cut-scenes. You could be walking around randomly and there will be an NPC acting right in front of you, but you still have control over it. My problem with this, however, is that you could be focusing less on the story of the game and more on the surroundings. One of the main characters could be explaining something very important to you, but you're too busy shooting barrels in the corner to notice. What's the point in writing a gripping story if the player won't listen to it?

Finally, a game which I think has a good balance between the two, is 'Heavy Rain'. I feel that this game is actually on the right path to understanding storytelling in games. Heavy Rain is a very story-based game, but it isn't all cutscenes. You will find, after just seconds of playing, that every decision the character makes, is made by you. Though you are eventually drawn towards the end of the game by different objectives, it runs on a branching storyline, where you control all of the micro-actions. These actions could be things such as brushing your teeth, taking a shower, or killing a man. It has an extremely touching and immersive storyline as well, which I think anybody could appreciate.