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Hey guys,
Sorry for the very late post, I have been preparing for my trip to Valve Software tomorrow and it's been quite a busy week.
I'll start by posting the homework for this week:
Journal prompt: Think about a game you have played where the manipulation of levels of information is essential during gameplay. How does the game give you information? How do visual rhetorics or other concepts we have discussed help the game give information to the player? How does the game hide information from players or cause players to hide information from one another? Think about a famous piece of architecture you have been in or learned about that also utilizes manipulations of information. How does the building hide information from occupants and how does it reveal that information? How is this manipulation used to guide people through the space? Are there visual cues or other tricks used to give visitors information relevant to their visit or convey symbolic information?
I understand that many of you have lately been playing Halo 3, Mass Effect, World of Warcraft, and others, but I would like to see some new games being discussed. For this assignment the discussion can be particularly meaningful with many non-digital games. I hope you understand that I'd like to encourage all of you to explore all different types of games, not just video games.
Here are concepts from the last lecture:
1. Symbol - Representations of objects in the real or imaginary worlds created for the game that behave and resemble what they would look like in reality.
2. Type - An architectural symbol of a certain building use. These are created by popular associations between certain building uses and forms that they are most often built with.
3. Rhetoric - The study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion.
4. Visual rhetoric - The use of symbols, illustrations, or images to convey ideas.
5. Despite many modernist opinions against ornament, ornament can be useful in architecture when used as symbols and a means of engaging in visual rhetoric. Functional ornament can inform and therefore be an important part of a building system.
6. 3 types of advertisingare used in games to inform the use of visual rhetoric:
- Demonstrative - Uses direct illustration and descriptions of how something is used or how it can be beneficial to the person reading the ad.
- Illustrative - Indirect, usually focusing on an image of the product in a certain setting to illustrate that product's popular "image."
- Associative - Even more indirect, often not even featuring the product, but showing intangible qualities associated with the product such as "fun", "adventure", or "experience."
7. Memory Palace - A pneumonic device used to remember and organize large amounts of information. The user imagines a large palace of many rooms, each with a different architectural style. Each piece of information is assigned a "room" of the "palace" and each room is envisioned with a distinct style so that each piece of information can be uniquely remembered.
8. 4 levels of information are manipulated during games:
- Information known to all players - The rules of a game, movements one can make, the board layout in a board game, a game environment in an online multiplayer game, etc.
- Information known to only one player - The cards in your hand in Poker, a player's position in an online multiplayer game.
- Information known to the game only - Unused cards in a Poker deck, enemy movements in a video game, whodunit in Clue.
- Randomly generated information - Dice rolls, games of chance
9. These 4 levels of information create 3 levels of certainty for a player:
- Certainty - A situation where the outcome is certain. Games that are certain are hardly games at all.
- Uncertainty - Players have no idea about an outcome of a game; entering a situation completely blind
- Risk - Players are uncertain but have an idea of the nature of uncertainty in advance. Example: The outcome of a game of Roulette is uncertain but the odds of a number coming up can be calculated.
10. An important part of game design is leading players where they don't feel comfortable or sure of an outcome, and rewarding them for taking chances. Hiding information can enhance the feeling of taking a risk, as well as the survival conditions discussed in the first two lectures.
11. Game theory - A branch of applied mathematics that looks at how players in a game process the information they receive and act accordingly to achieve the most desirable outcome for themselves.
12. Choices that players will make along the course of a game can be mapped by creating flow charts.
Hello all,
I wanted to address a general tendency that I'm noticing in some of your journal entries. A lot of you are doing the entry within the hour or two before class, and ending up with some incomplete results. Also please begin discussing some more important pieces of architecture besides those in your immediate surroundings. Discuss important buildings you have been to or are familiar with through your architectural education. This is what the class is ultimately about after all. I commented on a few of your papers from last class that this should change, so I hope to see better and more complete analyses from now on, or I may need to make the assignment a bit stricter.
Don't forget, next week is the mid-review for the class, located in the Crough Center. You need two 24x24 boards, one for your building and one for your game. I will have some of my own graduate student colleagues on the jury and they're very excited, so make sure you have a good presentation.
For the journal prompt, I have 2 different options. You will get the same amount of points for each, but I just thought I'd open one up for discussion. It's more complex so feel free to address it if you are feeling brave.
Journal prompt 1: Real Virtuality: Play a game of any kind with others. Describe the game and observe the actions, reactions, and personal interactions of yourself and the other players, then document your findings (this works better for non-video games). Discuss how the rules caused you and the other players to behave the way you did and try to describe the strategies and even "player personalities" that emerged. Then, find a space either in a building or urban environment where people gather. Observe their interactions and discuss how the space facilitates their behavior. Describe their actions and/or try to name their "player personalities" as well.
Journal prompt 2: Opinion: Phenomenology is a hotly debated philosophy that, when applied to architecture, relates to "spirit of place." It is the idea that when one visits a site, urban environment, or piece of architecture they must put aside all priory knowledge and experience the physical and sensory qualities of the space wholly in and of itself. As stated in the lecture, game designers debate whether or not a game can fully immerse a player in its world or if real world influences on the player shade their experience of gamespace. As game design and architecture collide, the question arises then whether or not game design proves to be a phenomenological supplement to architectural design; due to the immersive quality of games; or if they "simulation gap" and the "immersive fallacy" ring true. What do you think?
Now that that's out of the way, here's the info from this past week's lecture:
1. Simulation gap - The idea that the interpretation of a game's events depends on an individual user.
2. The immersive fallacy - An argument against the idea of total immersion in a game based on the idea that each individual is different and will bring their own outside experiences into the game world. The term is coined by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
3. Game design is a second order design problem, which means that the designer is creating a formal structure that indirectly influences the experiences of those interacting with it.
4. Architecture can share this definition of design when architects take the experiences of the building occupant into account.
5. Emergence - The experience and actions that emerge from interaction with a formal system of rules such as the system of rules within a game, a mathematical algorithm, or even the structures of a building.
6. Possibility space - Spaces, created by sets of rules, that allow for different and varied experiences to occur.
7. Miniature garden aesthetic - A design aesthetic of Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto that describes a possibility space that simulates traveling through multiple natural and man-made environments, similar to a Japanese garden.
8. Overview - A method of exposing the player to the entirety of a possibility space through a fly-over or numeric tracking of progress through space. This can be helpful for showing the player the game's game state.
9. Tour - An initial encounter with a space that allows opportunities to see spaces or objects that are initially unaccessible, but will be encountered later.
10. Procedural literacy - The concept of engaging a game or other interactive program, critically analyzing the "rules" and procedures by which it operates, and learning how to interact with it.
11. Iterative design - A method of design in such a way that allows for imaginative or emergent behaviors to happen.
12. The argument over emergent or non-emergent spaces is embodied within the conflicts between urbanists such as Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.
13. Degenerate strategies - An emergent strategy that exposes the falsehood of the game world. Also known as "cheating."
14. Some games, such as Konami's Metal Gear Solid embrace the ability to utilize the outside world to enhance in-game experiences, such as in the Psycho Mantis fight.
15. Game designers also create secrets or surprises for players to discover within the game world by establishing strict spatial rules and breaking them, such as the spaces that break the 1-screen-tall format of Super Mario Bros.
Hey guys,
I spoke with Rafael Vargas earlier this week and he committed to doing his lecture in late November, so we can look forward to hearing from him at the end of the semester.
With that being the case, we will press on in our studies this week and begin discussing the actual process of creating games.
First of all, here's the homework:
Journal Prompt: Spatial Discussion: Play a "sandbox" game and a linear game (come to me if you need examples.) Give a brief summary and/or description of each and describe the spaces within each game. Detail the experience of playing through either type of game and discuss the opportunities and spatial descriptors available to the player in each.
EXTRA CREDIT (in addition to the other prompt): Flip-flop: Describe a game that you have played or read about and give a detailed description of its core mechanic and basic rules. Then, with that description, write a different story for the game utilizing the exact opposite atmosphere (ex: bloody sci-fi epic becomes a Barbie-esque fantasy world) than it had before, but maintaining the exact same core mechanic and gameplay style/rules.
1. Core Mechanic - The most basic element of a game. It is the thing that a gamer does over and over again. Many game designers refer to designing games from a core mechanic as "designing by verb", since designers often begin from a single action.
2. Core mechanics can become analogous of analyzing the actual uses of architectural spaces then building the spaces of the building to be forms or "rules" that are expressive of that "core mechanic."
3. Rules - A set of guidelines that control the behavior of players within a game and restrict the actions and movements that the players may take. There are 3 types of rules
- Operational - The written "rules of play" of a game. these are the guidelines that control player behavior and describe explicit player actions.
- Constituative - The mathematical logic that exists "under the hood" of games. They contain the logic of the game but do not describe how the players should interact with this logic.
- Implicit - The "unwritten rules" of a game. Includes etiquette and behavior that goes unstated when a game is played.
4. A game's rules are not the strategies that players create. Strategies are series of moves created by the player from the possible movements they can make within the game's rule system. They are developed for the purpose of gaining an advantage.
5. A games rules are also not the artwork, atmosphere, or any other narrative element that is part of the game's identity. Case in point: Super 3D Noah's Ark is a religious-themed game created by adding new artwork to the Wolfenstein 3D source code.
6. Digital games utilize programming code to assign behaviors to objects such as building parts and furniture that make them act like their real-world counterparts and limit player movement. This means that the rules of digital games are, for our purposes, structures and space.
7. Architecture is expressed in different ways through various types of games.
8. Classical gamespaces can inform the way we look at the gamespaces we create and serve as precedents for how we lay out spatial sequences.
- Labyrinth - An elaborate structure that consists of a single winding path leading to a final stopping point, usually found in the center of the labyrinth. Consisting of only a single path, it is not difficult to navigate.
- Maze - A tour puzzle featuring a complex branching passage that the occupant must navigate to find an exit or end condition. Often purposely confusing to navigate since they offer choices which can result in the occupant finding dead ends.
- Rhizome - A structure in which every point is interconnected with every other point. The internet is described as such a space, since it is a place where any information is accessible at any given time. Has no real-world counterpart.
9. Sandbox - Games in which the action takes place in a large open world that a player is free to explore at their leasure. The player can take on different tasks and missions based on characters they interact with and odd jobs they can procure in a non-linear fashion.
10. Linear game - A game that presents players with a prescribed set of actions or gamespaces in a sequence that they must work through.
11. Sandbox games, often portrayed as urban spaces, utilize many of Kevin Lynch's principles to help a player create a cognitive map of a place and orient themselves.
12. Different qualities of spaces can help stage different events:
- Cramped space - Space where an occupant feels claustrophobic and unable to act. This often makes a person feel like they cannot defend themselves. In games this is used for intense shoot-outs or places where the player is to feel cornered (the Morph Ball in Metroid)
- Intimate space - A space that allows an occupant access to every part of their surroundings. This sort of space is the ideal "refuge" space. This type of space makes occupants feel that they are in control of their surroundings. This is used often in games to create the players "home base" or the first level.
- Prospect space - A wide open space where occupants feel exposed and in the view of danger. This is used in games to create cinematic boss battles or large-scale conflicts.
13. In games, winning often means mastering the rules of the game. Winning in digital gamespaces and architectural spaces often translates into mastering the space, as demonstrated by various sequences from the movie, Tron.
