Game Elements

Last week I spoke about the definition of what a game is and discovered how broad the answer is. This week I looked at the different elements within a game, these include:

-Players 
-Objectives
-Rules
-Resources and Resource Management 
-Game State
-Information
-Sequencing 
-Player Interaction
-Theme (Narrative, Backstory, Setting)

-Games as Systems 

The first article to be read was "What are the Qualities of Games?" by Ian Schreiber and it was regarding Critical Analysis and what it is. Before this reading I thought of it as a negative evaluation of something, that it points out flaws within something but after reading the article I learned it is much more than that. By looking at the different steps of critical analysis when examining a work it progress it could help you improve on certain aspects of your project.

The second article to be read was "Game Design Research" by Annakaisa Kultima. In it they go into detail about Game Design and what differentiates Design Research and Game Design Research. I briefly read through the article and found it interesting how everybody interprets things in different ways. Nigel Cross described design research as "a goal of development, articulation and communication of design knowledge" while Keiichi Sato has 2 meanings.

Prototypes 

After the reading I watched a video which was an introduction to prototypes and how they work in game design. The title of the video was "Introduction To Game Design: Prototype your Game and it can be found here. In the words of Colleen “a prototype refers to the creation of a model to represent some aspect of a product in designs” in a game this describes what the player gets to do in the game, how the scene is designed, the duration of the game and many more aspects. Like a lot of other designers - Colleen and her colleague start at the basics and begin with just paper and markers/pencils. By doing this you can experiment with your game without committing to anything, if it goes wrong you can start again. They also recommend using physical objects to experiment your game idea. By following these steps your idea will evolve ultimately improving your final output.

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