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due before class, Monday April 4
(0) How are you doing on your project plan, including division of labor? Is everybody on your team, including you, making substantial contributions that you can document? Will you have time to realize your goals? Post your plan for the rest of the semester on GORP under "design".
(1) Fun analysis:
(1a) Which of the following features (from the notes, with a couple of additions) are you relying on to make your gamelet fun (or engaging)? For each feature that you are using, explain concretely and specifically how it is supported in your design. If there are other features you are relying on, not included in this list, describe and explain them.
Competition. For some people, competing against someone face to face, or against a highest score list, or against a personal best, promotes engagement.
Goals with tuned difficulty level. If a gamelet's goal is too easy to attain the game will be boring; if too difficult, it will be frustrating. Since people get better with practice, especially in an educational gamelet, there has to be some way to escalate the difficulty to compensate. Many games do this with explicit levels; some do it with automatic difficulty changes based on player performance.
Partial reinforcement. Though it violates common sense, it is very clear from a great deal of data that rewarding someone for their behavior occasionally creates much more dedication to a task than rewarding them consistently. This is related to difficulty level: if you win every time the game is too easy; if you never win you can get discouraged, but if you win occasionally you may stay with game for a long time.
Progress toward the goal. Engagement seems to be increased if you can identify clear progress towards the goal, even if you don't ultimately win. Like the goal itself, progress should be neither too easy nor too hard. In baseball, getting on base is progress, and scoring a run is more progress, but neither one in itself constitutes winning. In a solitaire game, exposing a buried card constitutes progress. One analysis of the progress effect is that since it takes work to make progress, you don't want to waste the effort you have invested by quitting the game before the end, if you have made some progress. Another analysis is that you are rewarded for making progress, so you feel good about the game even if you don't win.
Emergent events. (This may not be best term for this... we may be able to come up with a better one.) In many games, every now and then something interesting happens more or less automatically that marks progress. In the gamelet Snood, every now and then a hit causes a bunch of snoods to be released, not just the one you hit, if you have hit the right things to set this up. In many solitaire games you may be able to play off a bunch at cards on one play, also if you have set things up right. Having these things happen may act as intermediate rewards during play, and help to sustain your interest. (Again, the partial reinforcement idea says these things will be more effective if they don't happen too often.)
Balance of chance and skill. While most games require some level of skill, there is abundant evidence that not much skill, or even user control, is necessary to make a game engaging, if other elements are present. I've spent a lot of time playing two forms of solitaire that have very, very little user control (and hence skill) but are quite strong on emergent events. In games like this, chance is essential to keep the game varied and hence interesting. Chance also plays a role in "lightening up" a game. If a game depends solely on your own skill, there can be stress associated with failure. The stress is diluted or eliminated if it is obvious that success or failure is influenced by chance as well as skill.
Collecting. Games like Pokemon are driven by the players' wish to collect sets of things. Maria Klawe and colleagues found that they could motivate a bunch of sometimes boring educational activities by providing cards that students could only collect by playing.
Narrative. The Zoombini games embed a bunch of logic puzzles in a narrative frame in which the Zoombinis need to escape from their island, and the puzzles are set as challenges they have to figure out to cross rivers, etc. There's some reason to think that the narrative frame helps to sustain interest.
Character attachment. The Zoombinis are built from combinations of separate attributes (what kind of hair, what kind of shoes, what kind of glasses, and the like.) They are really just tokens in various logic puzzles that hinge on discovering what combination of attributes pass some test. But, unexpectedly for the designers, play testing showed that some players chose favorite Zoombinis and paid special attention to the fate of their favorite character. This kind of attachment could contribute to motivation and interest.
Social engagement. Some games are fun because of the interactions players have with one another while playing. Social forces may also act to encourage continued play rather than quitting.
Destruction. Some players enjoy effects in which things are destroyed in a game.
Completion. Is there some aspect of the game that you don't want to leave unfinished? Collection can do this, but how about exploring all paths in a space? This can keep players going.
(1b) What changes to your design could make your gamelet more fun and engaging? Do some brainstorming on this, and if you don't come up with any enhancements, don't let it be for lack of trying.
(2) Revise your design, based on your fun analysis AND any other considerations that have come up over the week
write a description of the significant revisions
be prepared to present your revised design next class, using storyboard and or prototype
(3) Post your answers to 1 and 2 on the GORP site under "analysis" and "design" respectively.
(4) If you have more time: There are some fairly recent postings on the Web on "Theory of Fun". Do these contribute anything valuable to our enterprise? Get started with your sponsor on logistics for play testing; it'll be on your before you know it. Also get started on implementation. Explore the use of AgentSheets' "import agents" feature as a way of supporting division of labor in implementation. Read some stuff on the Web about Todd Oppenheimer and James Paul Gee. Download Robot Odyssey and a suitable Apple ][ emulator, and study this game. Many people consider it the high point of educational game design, though it is quite old. (The original game, and a real Apple ][, are available in the Lab if you want the authentic experience.)