timmgoh

[timmgoh]

Game to be analysed: Age of Empires II: The Conquerors

Abstraction

Because the game of Age of Empires is heavily based on reality and what has been in the past, a lot of its elements resemble reality so there is not a lot of abstraction in terms of representation, but there is a lot of simplification to focus on the main activities that the player must carry out to make progress in the game. For example, players will send units to gather resources and these resources will then be returned to central gathering points, be it the town centre or specific mining of lumbering camps for their respective resources. The resources then go into the players stockpile but the stockpile is not a visible entity on the gameplay map but in the players control interface. So when it comes to constructing a structure, for example, the units that are responsible for constructing the building need not go to the place where they had deposited the resources, bring them to the construction site and then construct the building. Farms, a structure that be built by players as a food producing building provide food, but specifics such as what type of farm, be it grain or animals are not included as relevant information as they both amount to the same thing: general food as a resource. Meat from animals does not count as more food than food gathered from berry bushes. However, different animals do provide different amounts of food, e.g. wild boars have more food to be gathered than sheep or deer.

This changes later in Age of Empires 3 where animals can be bred to provide food and they fatten as time goes on to provide more food and different animals can provide different types of food.

Architecture and Space

The gaming space in Age of Empires is a world viewed from above, like a commander viewing a small scale map of a battlefield. The point of view is fixed, the only action that can be done in terms of space is moving the camera around and controlling the units around the field. When it comes to the field however, the space and its elements play a big part. The field, which comprises mainly of resources and natural formations such as bodies or water or hills and valleys. The game enables interaction with the space in that the different land features do affect the players and their units. Forests act as a barrier for units travelling from point to point and they also prohibit sight beyond them. Bodies of water cannot be traversed without the aid of seaworthy transportation units and even these units have limit capacity, however their realism comes to a halt when you can fit a fixed number of units regardless of their size. (Insert photo of meme)

Unit Operations

The most basic unit operation of this game is the collection of resources from the most basic and only unit available at the beginning of the game. From then on every action hinges on the resources available to the player. The basic resources are food, lumber, stone and gold. Everything in the game requires the use of one or more of these resources to produce, be it more resource gathering units or military units and structures. Technologies that can be researched to upgrade units and structures also require the aforementioned resources.

Another unit operation in the game is that there are prerequisites to structures, units and technologies. A tech-tree is something that is common in games such as these. The tech-tree, as can be seen from the visual accompaniment, shows the path that needs to be taken to attain higher levels of technologies that in turn give the player an advantage over others if other players have not yet fulfilled those requirements yet.

Magic Circle

The magic circle in the case of Age of Empires is the setting in which it takes place and all the units and structures. The game is played on a battlefield that resembles a place that can be found anywhere, with trees and hills and animals and water. Though the game may progress across a span of time where structures will change and improve as the player advances his civilisation through the periods. The structures are a way of identifying which of the 4 time periods the player is currently at.

Narratology and Ludology

Campaign stories. Whilst it is not a major part of the primary gameplay aspect that most players end up playing, there are a few custom created missions that use the same gameplay mechanics of the main game but have extra triggers inbuilt that are represented as objectives that the player must achieve in order to advance. These triggers tend to follow historical famous battles as the many civilisations in the game are based on actual nations, both past and present.

Ludology is not as difficult to grasp because the game is based on a history and not taking on more abstract forms of representation and mechanics that may not be immediately understandable.

Ludic Scen

Taking the concept of the board game Risk and the whole territory and turn-based gameplay and implementing it into Age of Empires. Overall strategy would be carried out from the world map, and any territory that a player has units on is controlled by the player. It may be challenged by other players, be it computers and so to initiate a challenge or to defend against a challenge, one would go into an Age of Empires style battle, where the player would start out with units and a base, instead of having to build up an empire from scratch like in regular matches in Age of Empires. Early game however will still start out rather humble with limited resources and military might. As the player progresses and gains more military might, the enemies that the players will face will also have increased strength as they embark on a world conquering missions that rivals the players’. Alliances can be made depending on the number of computer or human players that choose to participate. When alliances are formed, allies are granted control over each others forces, should they be needed for reinforcements. Players can decide how large a force to share with their allies.

[timmgoh]

Relationship between Games and Architecture

There is an eternal relationship between games and architecture. And that is not limited to architecture by the most commonly used sense of a building or a structure but architecture by way of a container, a world with its own unique detailed intricacies. Every game has its own architecture, whether it is an open realm game where a player is controlling a character to explore the wild outdoors or a player is controlling armies to fight against other armies. The architecture here refers to an entirety, a world and all that is within it to make up that world. Every game in essence has to have its own architecture and through it representations of certain elements that guide the player through gameplay.

I like to think of architecture in games to be either one of two types. One can be one that is focused solely on the external realm, these games usually focusing on larger scale controls and gameplay, such as age of empires and Sim City, and the one that indulge in both the external and the internal realms, such as World of Warcraft or Golden Sun or Final Fantasy. The choice of what these two types categories of spaces these games choose to involve the player in give us an idea of the type of games these are and the level of personal involvement with the playable elements.

[timmgoh]

Defence of The Ancients, or DOTA as it is widely known as, is a game where 10 people come to play against each other on teams of 5, each controlling a unique hero each. Each hero has its own unique set of abilities. Basic units are generated every minute to fight against the other teams units. The enemy’s units can be killed and in turn the player who kills the unit can get gold, the basic resource for buying items in the game. This game has a level of abstraction in that when your character dies, he or she merely response after a certain time. Only minor units can die in the game. Other things include trees being a little more than what they are in real life. Clusters of trees cannot be walked through and they can also be consumed by the players heroes to regain health.

The objective of this game is to destroy all the towers that stand between your heroes and the enemy ancient and then destroy the ancient. The enemy heroes will attempt to do the same.

Skills learned by the heroes are predetermined and only need to be learned through leveling up by experience through the killing of neutral units on the map or enemy units or heroes, not by memorising any incantations like previous movies and books have made us think.

These are just some of the levels of abstraction that DOTA has.

[timmgoh]

Gamergate and All that

The whole Gamergate issue is one of madness. The world has struggled with gender equality issues from the start of time and will continue to do so, and rightfully so, because there is indeed a difference between men and women. However, when the differences that separate the genders becomes so big an issue that it causes hostility and divides the genders and also those who do and do not support gender equality. Things really spiral out of control when the groups feeling the hostility because of their ‘rights’ being encroached on, in this case: guys and what they have perceived as their rightful territory. I can understand (though I do not agree) that they would feel hostility. But in actuality, I believe the hostility that they feel is actually just the misunderstood feeling of change. When gaming sphere has been so predominantly male (and keeping in mind that there has always been a minority of women present in this sphere), its easy to just falsely come under the impression that girls just don’t play games, simply because of ratio of female gamers there are to male gamers.

Personally, I can’t quite understand why the increasing presence of women in the gaming spheres, be it on the battlefields or in the design studios, has come off as such a threat to the male gaming population that it has come to the point where the males feel they have to stoop to the point of threatening the very lives of these people just to protect that outdated belief that the gaming world is a male-only world.

I don’t know why gaming has only recently begun having more and more women taking part in it (or maybe I simply did not know of many women who did game extensively and as much as guys back when I was younger), but in my view, this is great. This means that there are more people playing games and I think gaming has many benefits. In fact, one of the biggest benefits I can immediately think of right now is that when women start participating in something that many more guys indulge in so passionately, it becomes a bridge between the genders, and that separation between the genders is lessened when commonalities are formed.

But as such, there is a strong force out there that passionately believes that women should stay out of this realm and they are willing to really go to the extremes to threaten a few prominent female figures. Their extreme efforts are just overreactions and are absolutely unwarranted.

Unfortunately, this whole fiasco will surely disappoint gamers if their only goal is to chase females away from the gaming scene because realistically it is an impossibility.

It is encouraging to see however, that there are efforts to try and protect the safety of those who are against gamergaters. Founded by Zoe Quinn herself, Crash Override was launched to help others who fall victim to such harassment.

This issue’s solution is obvious but extremely difficult to achieve. It is plain to see that such extreme behaviour is entirely one that is almost impossible to logically justify. Why should the mere presence of females in the scene threaten males so much to generate such a response?

All in all, I find that this is something that has been blown way out of proportion and should never have escalated to this point to begin with. But now that the larger issue has surfaced, people have to deal with it and find a way to come back to enjoying games as they were meant to be enjoyed and not take the gaming world as seriously as the real world where actions have real and serious consequences, some of them irreparable.

This also has brought to light the disparity in non-violent but yet still crucial differences between men and women in the gaming industry, such as standards and norms and pay grades. Arguably, because the gaming industry was predominantly run and managed by males, certain norms such as sexual representations and stereotypes for games have been established and remained as such for a long period of time. However, with a growing female presence in the industry and on the consumer side, there will have to be some change taking place in order to cater to that demographic. It would be foolish to ignore what could potentially be a huge population that the industry is missing out on, in terms of input, marketshare and progress as an industry. And gamergate itself is one of the most significant indication that the gaming world has yet to warm up to the idea of women making up a considerable percentage of the gaming population.

The ludoligistic and the narrativistic possess an interesting relationship that is becoming more and more obvious in games and is in fact one of the reasons some people are so interested in games. Their relationship is that they have their own way of making certain events happen within certain restrictions. Ludus in that it has its own structure and limitations, resulting in a limited set of outcomes, as it were. Narrativistic process works in a similar way, possibly working within even tighter parameters and really narrowing things down to a few routes that a player can take, for example, in a game where the players decisions at certain junctures in a games storyline will affect how the player will progress, but there are only so many paths that are available to be chosen. Narrativistics can even be seen as a subset of ludoligistics. I think the gamergate fiasco has taken a more paidic route, with the initial spark of the whole issue being focused on one game and one personality in particular and then having it spread like wildfire into different regions of the gaming world. Its just chaos.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/19/gamergate-harassment-network-crash-override-zoe-quinn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism_in_video_gaming

http://www.businessinsider.sg/gamergate-death-threats-2014-10/#.VNq4jFOUdkI

[timmgoh]

Week 4 of History of Games. Playing some games and saving the world while at it

Play Darfur is Dying ; Mc Donald's Game ; Phone Story ; September 12 . Understand Re-Mission ;America's Army ; Fold.it . Select one of these games and write one or two paragraphs focusing on the game's effectivity (or lack thereof) in conveying a compelling message by the means of engaging gameplay.

Darfur is Dying:

After playing this game, I found that it does give a sense of awareness of what is happening to the particular people group and even what is happening to the individuals within that culture. The gameplay does give an idea of what kind of situation and life that the people have to endure in order to survive. The game play is not exactly engaging in that it envelops you in the whole world (or in the case of this game the region and the circumstances of the characters that the player plays as) but it does bring the key elements that I’d imagine are what are essential to portray the situations.

When you fail the mission to reach the well and die or get captured, the game does tell you what your character would endure should that situation actually happen in real life and while that is something that is quite impression-leaving it is only effective if the player really realises that these things actually happen to real people. If not, it would just be passed off as something that the characters, being contained in the game, endure and may be passed off as just being part of a game storyline. Read The Playful and the Serious. Reflect, in a couple paragraphs, on Serious Games as elements of education and social change. Refer to the Rodriguez's reading of Huizinga. Education:

In education, play from a young age teaches children certain characteristics that they will require to function in society, governed by established norms and conventions. These norms and conventions become more difficult to adopt if not constantly cultivated and exercised and practiced while young in the magic circle where it is safe and its consequences of mistakes are not as dire as they will be later on when real life requires characteristics developed from participating in playful activities that cultivate these characteristics. These characteristics may be self-restraint or motor or moral skills. All of which are fully applicable later on in adult life.Serious games also play the function of packaging the learning content into something that would otherwise seem a chore or a bore to learn in a serious environment. As such, games become the vehicle to impart skills and attributes to children in an indirect but arguably more effective manner as through the process of participating in games, one would actively apply those skills and characteristics that the games aim to develop in children.

Social change:

The idea of serious games playing its role in society by revealing essential features about philosophy, science and other serious academic subjects. Serious games enable us to understand, through the studying of certain aspects of life the playfulness that is contained within. And the playfulness of such things can bring to light the fundamental social features. These can enable us to understand different aspects of life and teach us more about life, which may also be under the education section but a constant study of such can also enable us to see how societal norms may have changed over time.The idea of play has also changed society in other ways, such as in art. A playfulness in the approach when it came to creating art allowed artists to break away from norms that art had and in that sense, art requires that kind of mentality to keep on progressing and changing and evolving and art also plays a part in influencing the societies that it comes into contact with or vice versa (as art can influence people and people can influence art). Spontaneity and not rigid adherence to a particular routine or rule (which may even contradict some of the characteristics of some play) allowed participants to feel the fluidity of works and one could argue that life is much like those performances, full of unpredictability and uncertainty to differing extents.

See Jane Mc Gonigal's TED speech. Write a short answer to: Can we "save the world" by playing games online?

I think that her concepts and ideas about the implications and the meaning that games can have for gamers are radical and very interesting. I find that it may be a very real possibility that humans will be able to not necessarily save the world instantly but slowly solve the worlds problems by adopting the mentality and mindset that gamers have when playing games and collectively trying to achieve objectives.

Of course, the real world also poses its own set of challenges that may restrict the actual mobilisation of people into action because of circumstances and the level of uncertainty involved. Most people would not be able to be able to participate actively in a mission without having no obligations and responsibilities to tend to that normal life requires.

Real life and the responsibilities that people have to tend to (bills, taxes, food, basic human necessities, etc.) often become too big a burden to just drop any reliable income one may have to pursue world changing problems. The funding of the bare survival of people who would be required for such ‘missions’ would be a huge hurdle that needs to be addressed before further considerations can be considered. As always, figuring out how to pay for something is always the first issue with pursuing anything.

[timmgoh]

History of Games Week 3 / Unit Operations / Porting a non-digital game into the digital space

Unit operations in Monopoly (non-digital)

The objective of the game is to try and make other players bankrupt. Money is a primary resource in the game, having more of it will give you advantages such as buying property, increasing chances of earning money from other players and decreasing the chances that they have to buy property to take money from you.

There are chance and community chest cards that also provide opportunities to players to earn more money, but they also have cards that will set players back.

Buying property and building houses are operations that can be executed, and the more houses that are placed on property, the more money other players have to pay the owner when they land on said property.

A pair of die are the driving force behind all the actions and they determine where the player lands and what options are available to the player for the duration of their particular turn.

Going to jail is another basic function of the game, where players who end up there are disadvantaged because of their inability to progress through the game, making rounds to earn money or buy more property and increase their chances of earning money.

Unit operations in DOTA (Defence of the Ancients) (digital)

The objective of the game is for one of the two teams to destroy their opponents home command centre (the ancient). With 5 players to a team, the players have a range of hero characters from which to choose, each with its own distinct set of abilities and when combined with some other characters, can form strategic combinations that will be able to more easily secure kills of enemy characters, allowing the team to have an easier time advancing on the opponents base.

Each time has computer generated foot soldiers that automatically fight against opponent forces. The foot soldiers of enemy teams can be killed for extra gold, which will be used to buy items to strengthen the hero characters. Friendly foot soldiers can be killed to prevent enemies from killing them and gaining advantage gold, giving them a slight disadvantage that can be compounded if enemies can be successfully prevented from killing many of your own teams foot soldiers.

Heroes have different types of abilities, some that purely do damage, whilst some other abilities may not do damage but prevent enemies from moving or attacking. These abilities can be levelled up through experience the hero gains from killing enemy heroes or foot soldiers. With each increase in ability levels.

To win the game, players have to fight their way through three tiers of towers and also into the opponents base. Within the base, there are structures that when destroyed, give friendly foot soldiers bonus attack damage, making them stronger, putting the enemy at a further disadvantage. Porting a non-digital game into the digital environment

I will be intending to port the game of Alquerque from a physical board to a digital platform.

The game will retain its original board design for 2 players (A 4x4 square board) where the pieces will sit on the intersections of the squares, making it a 5x5 dot (dots are where the pieces of each player will be sitting on).

With an odd number of players, the number shall correspond to the number of sides to the board, eg. 3 players will play on a triangular board, 5 players on a pentagonal board, and so on.

With an even number of players greater than 2, the board shall remain square, but with an increasingly larger board and each player shall possess an equal number of pieces, leaving a single unoccupied space allowing for a first move to be made. And all players pieces will start clustered together in their respective areas of the board.

There will be one empty dot on the entire board for which the first player will get to make the first move.

In a two player match, a coin toss to decide which players get which colour. If a coin is unavailable, a player can take one piece of each colour, with one in each hand, the other player is to pick a piece and that shall determine each players starting colour.

White pieces to make the first move.

In games with more than 2 players, dice shall be used to determine who goes first, with the larger numbers rolled going first. 

Pieces can move along the lines of the board, meaning they may move forward (straight or diagonally) or sideways. Players may not move their pieces backwards. Pieces may only be moved along the lines. Where there are no lines connecting the dots, no move between those dots is allowed.

The aim of the game is to capture the opponents, they may only be captured when they are on points that are adjacent to a piece. It is only in the time of capture that players pieces can move backwards. All other times, players may only move their pieces forwards or sideways.

Multiple pieces can be captured in one turn if the path taken follows the rules of capture.

Other rules of the game:

Pieces cannot return back to a point that it has been on before (something to take note of when attempting to capture enemy pieces). If the end point of arrival is a point that that piece has been on before, the player cannot capture the opponents piece.

Pieces that make it to the end of the opponents back line may not move unless it is making a capture.

A player loses when all his pieces have been captured.

If a player cannot move any of his pieces, eg. his remaining pieces have made it all to the end of the opponents back line and he cannot move because there are no opponents that will allow his pieces to move backwards, the opponent wins.

Each piece is worth two points. Should the above case happen but the opponent has a total piece value worth 4 or more points less than the player with no moves left, the player with no moves left may still win the game despite not being able to move any pieces. Eg. player A has 5 pieces but no moves, player B has 2 pieces, player B still loses the game despite still being able to make moves.

This game will require a lot of strategy, trying to capture enemy pieces while maintaining strategic positioning on the board and also keeping options open for future piece movement. 

There is theoretically no limit to the number of players that can participate in the game.

[timmgoh]

Definition of Play/Homo Ludens

The boundaries of the magic circle may become blurred when a person who takes up a different role form their own 'regular' role in everyday life but takes particular qualities and mannerisms or even roles from the character and embody them and begins to incorporate them into their everyday life. An example of which would be a Singaporean male who has to go through his National Service, and during the period of his service he takes up the role of a soldier and some of those qualities may be imbued into his character that even after his service period, he may take certain traits or mindsets such as discipline or respecting authority (especially if the aforementioned male had issues with respect for authority in the past). 

An example of when the magic circle would be broken is when there is a sudden disregard or disrespect for the rules and regulations of the gamic space, disrupting the natural and intended flow of activities within the space. The breaking of such rules causes a break in the harmonic interaction that the activities are meant to have and thus as a result causes the entire space to fall apart.