Ancient games

Ancient Games

Games have been around for a long time as it is natural for humans to seek playing activities. (See notes on natural funitivity to explore more as to why playing games has always been important to humans.)

Some of the oldest known games (such as chess) are still played while others are forgotten.

In this post I will give a brief description of one of the ancient games I have learnt of:

The Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur is an ancient racing game where two players need to move a number of tokens across and safely off the board before their opponent.

Several examples of this game were excavated from the Royal Cemetery of Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1926 -1930.

The layout of the gaming board consists of what Becker calls a “larger ‘body’” (4x3 squares) and a “smaller body” (2x3 squares), joined by a connecting “narrow ‘bridge’ of two squares” (2x1). 

- Becker in Finkel, ed. (2008) p. 11

Becker also notes the five rosette squares are a consistent feature of game boards from other times and other regions (p. 11).

The game had different variations, however all were based on the same concept.

One of the versions used the following board:

Each player has 5 pieces and starts at the top and bottom rows respectively. Players have to take turn to roll a number of 4 sided dice, and based on their roll score, they move their pieces onto the board, or move a piece which is already on the board ahead up to 4 spaces towards the next rosette tile (determined by the rolls). The first row that players move their pieces onto are safe from the opponent as no player interaction takes place there, however as soon as they go beyond the first rosette square, players must race their pieces along the shared middle row where they can knock each other's pieces off the board and thus have to start that piece's progress from scratch.

When a piece landed on a rosette square, the player gets a few benefits: They get an extra turn, their piece may not be knocked off while in that square and their piece prevents the opponent from landing on the rosette square.

In the end The Royal Game of Ur is a luck based game (due to the dice) with a bit of meaningful (and yet obvious) decisions to be taken by the players based on their rolls, however the game is easy to get into and it is amusing to play simply to watch the dramatic action caused by the competition from the middle row.

Bibliography Task

This is a guide for how to do a reference to a Book, Contributions to a Book, and a Journal Article using the Harvard Formula...

Book:

Author or Editor Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) The full title of the book. Publisher: city of publication


Contribution to a book:

Author Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) “The full title of the article in inverted commas”. In Editor
Surname, Initial., The full title of the work containing the chapter. City of publication: Publisher. Page span of the work cited.


Journal Article:

Author Surname, Initial. (Year of publication) “The full title of the article in inverted commas”. The full title of the journal [volume and part if given and/or] Month, or Season, or volume/part number.



This site could also help with generating your references: http://www.neilstoolbox.com/bibliography-creator/



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Using the above guide I will give an example of:

• Two book items (two full length books) 

Atkins, B. (2003) More Than A Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Adams, E. (2010) Fundamentals of game design. New Riders.

• Two contributions to books (two articles in books) 

Salen, K. (2002) “Telefragging Monster Movies.” In King, L., (ed.), Game On: The History and Culture of Video Games. London: Laurence King. 98-111.

Rettberg, S. (2008) “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft”. In Corneliussen, H. & Rettberg, J.W. eds, Digital culture, play, and identity: a World of Warcraft reader, MIT Press. 19-39.

• Two journal articles (two articles from academic journals) 

Keighron, P. (1993) “Video Diaries: What’s Up Doc?” Sight and Sound. October. 24-25.

Clark, L.S. (2003) “Challenges of social good in the world of Grand Theft Auto and Barbie: a case study of a community computer center for youth”. New Media & Society, 5(1). 95-116.

Game Balancing

Game Balance

-Challenge/difficulty level in single player.

-Asymmetric Games (Possible starting advantages in multiplayer game where players don't have an exact start).

-Following a specific strategy in a game where u can use multiple strategies to reach the goal.

-A game object when compared to another game object, in terms of cost vs benefit. (Such as cards in card games, units in strategy games, and items in rpgs)

...

Single player.

When trying to decide on a difficulty level for a single player game, aim for the middle of the curve, as you will get the most people (the widest possible audience).

Another way to deal with this is to add multiple difficulty levels, handicaps, or alternate rule sets.

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Asymmetric multiplayer.

In Asymmetric games, balancing the game has to be done through a lot of play testing. The more asymmetric a game is, the more testing it requires.

A player's resources are the ideal measurement to use for testing balance.

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Balance between different strategies.

Suboptimal strategy are unneccecary parts of the game and would be better off removed than left as "wrong decisions" in the game.

Playtesting, and keeping track of the popular player choices is a good method of balancing different strategies.

...

Balance between game objects.

Try to make all items neither too weak to never be used, nor too strong to always be used.

Give preferance to too weak over too strong if you must.

To balance game objects, get the cost and benefit to always roughly match.

The difficult part is to give a value to the costs and benefits in order to compare them with other game objects.

...

In the reading 3 methods are mentioned to balance game objects:

-Transitive

Give every cost and benefit a value so it can be compared as a value, then take all the costs of an object and add them together and compare them with the sum of the benefits.
When the cost and benefits have the same values, the object could be considered balanced.

-Intransitive

This is better known as a rock-paper-scissors relationship. Some objects are simply better than others but because they are their counter, however all the objects would have their own strengths and weakness.


-Fruity

This means the game objects are so different and unique from the others, that direct comparisons are impossible. This can only be balanced through playtesting.

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Balancing Techniques.

Maths, Your Instincts and Playtesting are the three techniques one should use to balance a game. They all have their own problems, so using them all probably leads to a better balance.

Changes should be done one at a time or you will get misinformation from results regarding to which change caused what.

Excel is great for keeping track of every detail of game objects, and allows for easy access to compare their values.
Excel can also be used to keep track of tasks and status while designing a complicated game.
Excel can be used to create formulas that let you see scaling values as game objects are manipulated in game. (such as DPS of a weapon, in combination with crit chance in an rpg)

When changing values, doubling and halving is very useful when you are unsure of just how much of a change is required. Doing such a drastic change lets you understand better how much of a change was needed once you playtest.

Write down rules as you're creating the game whenever something feels right.

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Balancing First Turns in Turn Based Games.

There are a few techniques that may be used to make up for the first turn advantage that only the first player receives.
-Rotate who the first player is. (if the game allows several turns)
-Give extra resources to second player.
-Reduce effectiveness of early game or first turn.

What is a puzzle, and how do you make a good one?

What is a puzzle and how do you make a good puzzle?

Puzzles are a form of play which require a right answer to complete.

puzzles need to be fun for the player TO solve, not only fun WHEN solved.

puzzles can be combined with these genres: action, construction, story and competition.

Puzzles will often use words, images or logic, or even a combination of some of them.

It is important for puzzles to be easy to learn.

Keep the puzzle simple.

Let yourself be inspired by existing ideas.

Give hints to prevent frustration.

Add sounds graphics animations and story to make the puzzle more amusing.

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A puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy. This means that once you find an effective way of solving the puzzle, it will always work in the following attempts.

Puzzles are miniture games with one goal: finding the dominant strategy.

Puzzles are no longer being made explicit, instead they are being integrated into games.

10 Principles of Good Puzzle Design

1) Make the goal easily understood - people need to know what they're doing or they won't enjoy it.

2) Make it easy to get started - people should easily be able to manipulate the puzzle.

3) Give a sense of progress - players need to know when they're on the right track, let them see

4) Give it a sense of solvability - The players must be sure that the puzzle does in fact have a right answer.

5) Increase difficulty gradually - Puzzles are often solved by taking a series of actions. It is these actions that need to gradually become more difficult. Controlling the sequence in which the player can solve the puzzle lets you implement this gradual difficulty.

6) Parallelism lets the player rest - Multiple related puzzles as part of a big puzzle will let players try another part of the puzzle if they get stuck at some point.

7) Pyramid structure extends interest - smaller puzzles help in solving the larger puzzles within the whole puzzle.

8) Hints extend interest - Solving the puzzle with a hint is better than not solving it at all, because you gave up.

9) Give the answer - When the player is given the answer, it is satisfying after having given the puzzle some serious thought, even if you couldn't solve it yourself.

10) Perxeptual shifts are a double-edged sword - If the puzzle requires a big leap to gain any progress whatsoever, it could be very satisfying if you succeed or in some cases boring, because the players simply spent their time staring and then gave up.

Narrative and Puzzles in Games

Important Story Elements:

Protagonists

Conflict

Resolution of the Conflict

Moral

People are important to story, not objects. Objects may be important but only because they mean something to the people in the story. A good example of this is the ring of lord of the rings.

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Every story has conflict, sometimes direct, and sometimes indirect.

Direct conflict is between obvious "enemies" such as teachers and students, or two factions at war.

Indirect conflict is more subtle, such as humans and technology.

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Puzzles in Story

Puzzles are not a necessary part of the story, however they do work best when they move the story's narrative forward.

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Spacial Thinking

It is not important to get into too much detail when showing distance. The distances separating the important/interesting parts of the story can be simply cut out of the scene, to only show the interesting parts.

Level Design: A Simple Level

Game Level Design

When making a level you need the following:

Concept: general idea of how the game plays out

Environment to exist in: the "world" that contains the player

Beginning and Ending: how the game starts and ends (doh)

Goal: what player needs to achieve

A challenge to overcome to reach the goal: anything that makes the player put in any effort while playing(this is needed for player to have fun)

A reward: player gets something for reaching the goal, like a new level.

Way of handling failure: the action taken when player loses.

...

The best gameplay mechanics require no explaination (like the way a door works, everyone knows it will open when used.)

It is important not to set players back and punish them hard for failing a challenge, You should simply let them try again.
Designers must not give players the opportunity to blame them for failure, because it would lead to players stopping to play.

Don't Be a Vidiot...

To start off, I should explain the what this word "Vidiot" means;

A "vidiot," is a person whose sole understanding of games derives from video games.

One must look further than just pc and console games from recent years to get good ideas for games, otherwise the ideas will lack originality and will be constrained by today's repeated ideas.

Non-Electronic games have explored more ideas than video games, and are good sources for ideas.

When it comes to miniatures gaming, there are 2 aspects to note from it:

-The business model: A lot more money is made than when a game is sold as a whole, once people are into the game as a hobby.

-The activity external from the game: Players collect the pieces as models, and spend a lot of time painting them.

Dungeons and dragons started off as a poorly designed game where the player takes the role of one person. The fact that a game master was required makes up for the poor design of rules. (Game made a hit regardless of poor design)

-The collectors card industry began with the publication of Richard Garfield's MAGIC: THE GATHERING in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast (which is an exceptions game)

An exceptions game has a very simple, limited rules set; but some game components have additional rules printed on them that alter, modify, or break the basic rules. As a result, they can be quite complicated when viewed in toto, but are quite simple to learn in the first instance.

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Different categories:

Boardgaming
Miniatures gaming
Wargaming 
Science fiction and fantasy boardgaming
Roleplaying games
Collective card games
Live Action Roleplaying Games
Branching story games