CFC Gaming Session - Lecture 01 Game Experience

Game Experience – Day 1!! 3rd November 2010!
Emma Westecott ! !! 1!
Wednesday, November 3,
2010
Emma Westecott 1
The Game Experience
Emma Westecott
Assistant Professor: Game Design, OCAD-U
ewestecott@faculty.ocad.ca
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 Emma Westecott 2Wednesday, November 3, 2010 Emma Westecott 2
What is a game?
Excerpts from Salen & Zimmerman (2004)
•  A formal game has a twofold structure based on ends and means; Ends:
It is a contest to achieve an objective. Means; It has an agreed set of
equipment and of procedural “rules” (Parlett, D)
•  Reduced to its formal essence, a game is an activity among two or more
independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some
limiting context. (Clark C. Abt)
•  [Play is] a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as
being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely
and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no
profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of
time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly
manner.” (Huizinga, J)
•  Playing a game is the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary
obstacles. (Suits, B)
•  A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome. (Salen &
Zimmerman)

What is game studies?
Object of Study: GAMES
Aim:
to gain an overall picture of games in culture
through an intersection of perspectives:
1.  study of games
2.  study of players
3.  study of the contexts of the previous two.
Mutually interacting and complementary views,
all informed by historical processes.
•  Game Studies is a new academic field of study,
focusing particularly on digital games.
•  Game Studies often involves a range of approaches:
–  Humanities methods
–  Social science methods
–  Design research methods
–  Game playing as method

The focus of study

Game worlds
•  Games offer worlds to play in, some are
abstract e.g. tetris, pacman, etc. others are
fictional e.g. mario, zelda, etc.
•  Game design is often about the design of
space. Whether the wide open spaces of
Assassin’s Creed or the grooved tracks of
Frequency (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=tWjPHBmZPmQ&feature=related)

Broderbund (1993) Myst. Cyan
Worlds.
id Software (1993) Doom. id
Software.

Contested Spaces
•  “stripped to their simplest elements, the earliest
digital games consisted of little more than
contested spaces.”
Jenkins, H. “The Art of Contested Spaces”
Game worlds
•  “When we refer to such influential early works
as Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. as
"scroll games," we situate them alongside a
much older tradition of spatial storytelling:
many Japanese scroll paintings map, for
example, the passing of the seasons onto an
unfolding space.”
Jenkins, H. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html

Game worlds
Level design
•  Why do games centre on level design?

Level design
•  Why do games centre on level design?
–  To give a sense of progress
–  Due to technical constraint and performance issues
(norm has developed)
–  Development convenience
Level design
Braid

Level design
•  There is always an entry and exit point
•  You always aim to leave the level
•  The first thing the player does is figure out
where to go
•  There are obstacles, enemies and barriers
•  The meta-goal (to escape) is achieved through
mini goals
Level design
•  All game design is about keys and locks
•  We expect game space to tell us what to do,
the space speaks to you about action..

Theme parks
•  In some ways game designers draw more from
studying techniques for environmental story
telling that brands such as Disney employ in
designing amusement park attractions.
•  “bread crumbing” (Hansel & Gretel)
Narrative in Game worlds
•  The theme park *evokes* the fictional world
rather than re-construct the whole narrative
•  More than just a container for player action, the
space of a game is a space of representation
that helps a player build meaning.
Jenkins, H. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html

Narrative in Game worlds
•  Another possibility is the use of micro-
narratives (short narrative units)
e.g. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin (1925)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euG1y0KtP_Q
Divergence between game and
narrative worlds
•  Ryan differentiates between the structure of
space in games as opposed to narrative fiction:
–  Games create an alternative space, separated by
what Huizinga calls a magic circle
–  Narrative fiction transports its users into an
alternative possible world separated by the
conventions of make-believe
Ryan, M.L. (2009). From Playfields to Fictional Worlds: A Second
Life for Ariosto in “New Literary History” Vol 40, No 1.

Cross platform storyworlds
•  Our transmedia future considers the range of
ways to deliver narrative i.e. book, move,
game, television, mobile; narratives now move
across media to build a diffuse web of
intertextual references
... Thus the game world becomes
the story world and reaches out of
the game across media

CFC Gaming Session - Lecture 01 Game Experience

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CFC Gaming Session - Lecture 01 Game Experience