Week 02 - A Playful Endeavor

This week we were introduced to the basic design process of making games. In our lesson we were given words - objectives - to think about for our endeavors in game design. The 6 elements of play design: actions, rules, goals, objects, play space, and players became our focus.

On Thursday, September 2nd, our professor split the class into teams of roughly three to brainstorm ideas for and create a folk game. Minimal equipment and maximum fun became the goal for the idea we would be hoping to present, aiming for an effect similar to the number game we as a class played to give us a few clues for what we should be pursuing.

What our group quickly found within our brainstorming was that sometimes, “to get from point A to point B, you frequently find yourself having to go through point C” (Koven). Together we crafted the idea of ‘Number King” - a game where the players have to use numbers against each other to eventually defeat the ‘number king’. Simple rules and simple goals, but rather than finding out the process first, we found that going to the end-goal at the beginning was most helpful. As how were we supposed to find a way to the end if not even we knew what the ending is.

Our group’s chattering jumbled over each other, as an earlier scrapped idea was brought into the light as we tried to figure out Number King. The working title, “Princess” had a clear goal- to rescue your princess from the other team. While it was put on the back burner for a future project idea, it was brought to the head again as we came to an impasse- the idea that “procedure is[/can be] negotiated” as Doug Wilcon said. Three highly competitive minds trying to create a game not meant to be such got to our heads as we tried to make a game where rules were important but malleable so that all players could have fun.

Actions, goals, objects, play space, and players were all figured out easily but the problem of rules was the ugly one to rear its head. Our initially thought rules were simple as the game state changed “based on player engagement” and any needed changes could be easily made to be more accommodating (O’Reilly 1). However, as we delved further into the creation, new challenges with the rules approached and the simple folk game became more convoluted - ruining the point of what it was meant to be - simple. Eventually, we threw out the original rules as we knew them and decided to start anew with Number King, keeping only the main premise and name,

Like Eric McMillian, we needed to think of “what would I, as a child, like to do” (Brown). To play like children is what games, especially folk games, are meant for us to do and our goal needed to be readjusted as we relearned this past week what it means to play and to design for it. Rules are important, but making them complicated ruins the vision of the simple folk game we desired and as a group we began to think once more on what it really is like to play.