ETEC 544: Intellectual Production #8: Game Design 101
Exercise 1 .3: Your Life as a Game: List five areas of your life that could be games. Then briefly describe a possible underlying game structure for each.
Post Work Shuffle: This is a game where the player has to wash the dishes, load and unloads the dishwasher, cook dinner, clean up, and then get their young children ready for bed, all in the two-hour window between their last meeting at 5 pm and when the first young child is supposed to go to bed at around 7 pm. Some of the variables in this game would include being sure to not break dishes, to cook a good meal that everyone in the family enjoys, and making sure on some days your child has a bath.
Zooming Through The Workday: This is a game where the player has to balance their meetings and presentations, with exercise, remembering to eat lunch and some downtime all in a busy work schedule. This would play a lot like The Sims, where your character would have status bars for job happiness, hunger, and fatigue for example. You would be successful if you’re able to maintain that balance so everything is positive.
Side Hustle: This is a game where the player has to manage not just their lives in terms of their day to day job, and the health and happiness of their family but also operate multiple side jobs like a podcast, content creation, or consulting, all at the same time. Another game similar to The Sims where the balance between all the factors needs to be maintained for success.
Low Battery: This is a game where the player has to vacuum as much of the house as possible before the battery on the Dyson runs out. You would find success if you are able to vacuum the whole house on a single charge. Some of the fun variables of this game may include that someone else has recently used the vacuum so when you pick it up it may not be at full charge.
Close Those Rings: This is a game where the player has to make sure they exercise and “close their rings” on the Apple Watch every day. The player would be able to choose between many different activities in order to close the rings and some activities would grant more calories burned than others. Some activities, like walking outside in the winter, would have pitfalls like ice and snow. If you fell you may be injured and that might prevent you from closing your rings the next day.
Exercise 1 .5: Your Childhood: List ten games you played as a child, for example, hide and seek, four square, and tag. Briefly describe what was compelling about each of those games.
Gorgon: Gorgon might be a made-up name but we used to play this at church after everyone left after night services. We’d turn off all the lights and it was basically hide and go seek but in the complete dark. It was compelling because of the combination of doing it in the church, and doing it in complete darkness. We had so much fun playing this.
Chess: I really enjoyed Chess when I was young. I played in a few tournaments. The competitive aspect was what made Chess compelling to me. I played often against my cousin, who was better than me but I could eventually win against him. I played in a number of tournaments when I was young and enjoyed playing against and beating kids I didn’t know.
Super Mario Bros 3: I remember being the first kid in my school to get SMB3. It was available in the US months before Canada and my grandparents brought it home from Florida with them for me. It was a groundbreaking game and even at the time, I remember thinking this is one of the best games ever.
Sid Meier’s Civilization I-II: When I was in early High School it was clear that I had a preference for games that made me think. I wouldn’t be in education today if not for Civilization. It instilled a passion for games, and history, that I carried forward for the rest of my life. I ended up becoming a history major, and a lot of my work in game-based learning surrounds games in social studies contexts. Civilization is the perfect balance between the past, and counterfactuals. It was fun and addictive.
SimCity: Another formative game for me for the same reason as Civilization was. SimCity was all about imagining what was possible and then doing it. I also enjoyed the challenge of min/maxing in SimCity to try to have the biggest city or the largest population possible. In the end, it was also incredibly fun to burn your city to the ground when you were done.
Duck Hunter: Duck Hunter was all about the amazing NES Zapper that you used to shoot. It was amazing that this was possible in the 80’s and 90’s. I found peripherals so compelling at the time, I ended up saving my money and buying the SuperScope as well. I am not a “gun person” and my family weren’t into guns either. I think my fascination with this was absolutely about the technology itself.
Top Gear: I still LOVE racing games but Top Gear was the first that felt “realistic” in the early 90’s. At the time, it was the top of the craft in terms of racing games.
Aerobiz: I honestly still play Aerobiz and its successor, Aerobiz Supersonic, all the time in SNES emulators. It is a pretty standard management game when you manage an airline and its routes and airplanes. Even now, it is incredibly well made and a fun, engaging play. Games like this and SimCity really set the table for my future passion in Management/Sim style games.
Final Fantasy: Final Fantasy rounds out the three main genres of video games I continue to be interested in the most (RPG’s, Sim/Management, and Racing). We now have a pretty firm understanding of the appeal of Final Fantasy. At the time, the story and gameplay were like very little we had ever seen. I’ve recently re-played FF1 and completely understood why it was so immersive. Some of the FF games don’t hold up as well over time (2 for example) but the original FF is still a great game.
Age of Empires: This was the game of my late-teens and early 20’s I played Age of Empires non-stop. By this time, I was firmly entrenched in my interest in management/city-builder/sim games as well as a passion for history. AoE scratched all those itches at the same time with amazing graphics AND multiplayer as well. It is still regarded as one of the all-time great games and I was absolutely in the group of people who thoroughly loved Age of Empires.
Exercise 2 .3: Objectives: List five games, and in one sentence per game, describe the objective in each game.
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Control the destiny of a civilization through the ages.
Cities: Skylines: Build the city of your dreams in a realistic and immersive simulation.
Oxygen Not Included: Survive with your colony on a new planet with limited resources and even less oxygen.
Minecraft: Build or create anything you can imagine in a voxel sandbox.
World of Warcraft: Play alone or with friends as a hero of the Horde or Alliance in an open, persistent world
Exercise 2 .6: Challenge: Name three games that you find particularly challenging and describe why.
Oxygen Not Included: ONI has hidden depth. It is really easy to get started but has a steep learning curve in order to advance into the late-game aspects of the game. Games like this I find challenging mostly because I find it takes more time and research than I am typically willing to invest in order to exceptionally good at the game.
Valorant: I want to be good at Valorant, even if only just so I can play with my son and not feel like a complete loser. Valorant, and games like it, I find difficult because of the pace and the enclosed space. I am used to slow, intentional, methodical, open game play, Valorant is non of those things.
Most MMO’s but let’s use World of Warcraft: I think its important for me to differentiate games I find challenging but am still decent at, from games that are challenging and I am terrible at. WOW and most MMO’s are in that first category. I am a pretty good video game player, and I very good MMO player. That being said, there is a level of MMO playing I have never been able to obtain for the same reason I am not exceptionally good at ONI - it takes an investment of energy that I simply do not have anymore. There are hundreds of thousands of very good MMO players, there are very few amazing ones. The reason is the same reason this rule applies to almost anything in life: it takes dedication to rise to the top. So I find MMO’s challenging. Most of the time I am able to rise to the challenge, some times I fail - the point is that I keep seeking challenge.
Exercise 3.4: Objectives: List ten of your favorite games and name the objective for each. Do you see any similarities in these games? Try to define the type or types of games that appeal to you.
As someone who plays and talks about games (kinda) for a living, I knew exactly how this was going to turn out since I’ve done a similar exercise and certainly evaluated my gaming preferences before. The word “Open World” appears five times on my list. The word “Simulation” appears three times - and you can argue that you could add the word simulation to Oxygen Not Included and Icarus as well. I LOVE management games of almost any genre. A quick look at my Steam list shows not just big simulation/management ideas like city or colony builders either. I own multiple versions of Farm Simulator, as well as landscaping simulators and cooking games. As someone who has always had a VERY good PC, I love open-world games that have beautiful (or at least amazingly detailed in the case of Fallout) landscapes. Its not surprising that the game I have played and enjoyed the most over the last 2-3 years is Satisfactory. This is an Open World factory simulation. It ticks all the boxes for me.
Oxygen Not Included - Survival Management
Sid Meier’s Civilization V - 4x History Simulation
World of Warcraft - Open World MMORPG
Cities: Skylines - City Building Simulation
Satisfactory - Factory Building Simulation
Minecraft - Open World Sandbox
Skyrim - Open World RPG
Fallout 4 - Open World RPG
Icarus - Open World Survival
