Let's now look at the inner workings or the system of the game. That is, let's decompose gameplay. Let's start by looking at how games are different from other consumable media. On one side we have the designer who creates the media, on the other we have the consumer who consumes it. The media could be books, movies, television, or games. But how are games different from these other media forms? In a book, the author writes the book and the reader reads it. Every reader is reading the same book and getting the same story. They may interpret the story differently, and the story may impact them differently, but the story is fixed by the author. The same is true for a movie or television show. But with games the consumer or the player in this case, is an active part of the experience. The game itself is not fixed like other forms of media, rather it is dynamic and changes based on the player's interactions. Each player who plays the game will have a different experience. In fact the same player who plays the game multiple times may have a very different experience each time they play with it based on how they interact with it. Here is an expanded model of consumption for games proposed by Marc LeBlanc. He created what he called the MDA framework, where he breaks the game down into three components. The mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. This framework has become one of the standard frameworks used by the game industry when discussing games. And it is the basis of the expanded design play experience framework that we've been using in this course. Each of these components in more depth with the aesthetics. In art, aesthetics are the principles concerned with the nature and the appreciation of beauty. It is defined by color form and shape. In games, Mark LeBlanc defined aesthetics as the principles concerned with the nature and the appreciation of fun. In both cases, aesthetics is emotional and subjective. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder or perhaps, in the case of games, fun is in the mind of the player. But since aesthetics is an overloaded term used heavily to describe the visual experience of an art form including games. I often substitute aesthetics for the word effect when talking about the MDA framework. Affect is a term from psychology, meaning emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action. I think this term is more clear when we are discussing gameplay, and we'll reserve the word aesthetics for the artists. So this is our slight variation on the MDA framework. Many games are fun, Settlers of Catan is fun, Halo is fun, and Mario Kart is fun. But are they fun in the same way? As game designers we need to understand fun beyond a surface motion. That is, we really need to decompose and understand fun to define the affect of goals of our game. Many people have tried to decompose fun into more granularity. Pierre-Alexander Garneau defined the forms of fun that you see here. For example, beauty is that which pleases the senses and may include graphics, music, sound effects, or touch. Competition is an activity where the goal is to show one's superiority either over other players or against oneself improving previous scores. Thrill of danger is fun where the stakes are high failure could lead to the player being killed for example. Thrill of danger is what gets your blood pumping in that adrenaline rush. Overall Garneau proposed 14 forms of fun. I included two additional forms of fun here that I did not think were completely captured by his 14, including altruism and learning. Hence the 14 plus 2 forms of fun. I've included a handout that defines each of these forms of fun for your reference. I often find it useful to look over the list when I'm thinking about the effective goals for a game that I'm designing. That is, what forms of fun do I want my game to evoke in my players? As designers, we can choose certain effective goals for our game. But we need more than a one word definition of our goal. Mark LeBlanc proposed using affective models, that is having a rigorous definition of an effective goal. The model state the criteria for success and failure of the goal. It can be used as a design compass to know if you're reaching the goal in your design. For example, here's an effective model for the goal of competition. The model states a game is competitive if players are emotionally invested in defeating each other. We have success if the players are adversaries that is there on competing sides, and the players want to win. Of course, if you've ever played a game and one of the players does not really care about the game and the other does, competition breaks down. So both players have to want to win the game. And we have failure if a player feels they cannot win, or if a player cannot measure their progress. So once again, if you're playing against an older sibling, and they're just so much better than you, they're always going to win. The element of competition breaks down the competitive element is no longer fun. Further, you need to know how you're doing. You need to know your progress. If we have a racing game, and you don't know what place you're in and you don't know where the other players are, competition breaks down for example. If an affect is emotional and subjective, we do not have direct control over them. So how do we meet our effective goals? We do so through the mechanics. Game mechanics are of course, also known as the rules of play. As we've learned in our definitions today, all games have rules. Play without rules is just play, it's not a game. Overall, the game mechanics determine what choices a player will be able to make in the game world. We talked about these in our lecture on the game world, and what ramification those choices will have on the rest of the game. The game mechanics include defining the boundaries of the game world, in a non digital game, you can think of this as the game board. The mechanics also include defining the game elements, the tokens, the pieces, and the game economy or the resources in the game. And of course, all the other rules of play, that is the choices, the challenges and the player goals. One technique to think about when designing the mechanics of the game, is to think of the mechanics as the actions you're allowing the player to take, or not take. In other words, what are the constraints on the actions of the player? For example, the player can run and jump on platforms, and climb ladders, but they can't climb walls, and they die when they fall into lava. Some designers like to think of the mechanics as verbs of the game, that is what can the player do? For example, the player can explore, build, craft, and fight in Minecraft, among the other things. Of course, actions and verbs are just synonyms of each other. In the video that follows Mark Brown discusses the secrets of Mario's jump and other versatile verbs as part of his game makers toolkit series. Please give it a watch for an in depth analysis of game mechanics or verbs. [MUSIC]
