[Tuesday] Unit 1 - Week 1
- Emily Koonce
- Jan 24, 2022
- 1 min read
Read and watch the following:
The Game Over Analyzer, director. The Art of Failure in Video Games | Designing Difficulty, Tragedy and Death. YouTube, 21 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pIljlIlQ5E.
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press, 2016. https://onesearch.library.northeastern.edu/permalink/01NEU_INST/i2gqis/alma9951590564001401.
Anderson, Craig G, et al. “Failing up: How Failure in a Game Environment Promotes Learning through Discourse.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, vol. 30, 2018, pp. 135–144., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.03.002.
Muncy, Julie. “It's Time for Videogames to Embrace the Power of Failure Again.” Wired, Conde Nast, 12 Oct. 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/10/videogames-need-failure/.
Answer each of the following:
Identify a Trope or Cliche in games. Give examples of games that have it. [short answer]
Respond to this weeks' reading. Is there anything inspiring/useful for you? (Must read Juul) [paragraph]
Find a game (not mentioned in class or reading examples) where failure is creative/instructive and intrinsic to its design concept. Go beyond simple loss or deaths. What is the game saying about failure? What types of failure is it teaching, discussing, or rewarding? Is failure fun? Be prepared to present this game in class. [paragraph]
*Exta Credit. 1 point: Take a game that is considered EXPERIMENTAL / INNOVATIVE and analyze where it “fails” and where it succeeds.
DUE BEFORE MONDAY 1/31
1. I want to mention one of the typical cliche/tropes that many video games have is the Bland way to increase the difficulty level: Whenever we choose to play on the hard mode, we expect the game to be more difficult, less forgiving in its design. But instead, they provide us same enemies but make them a 'bullet sponge': They increase enemies' health and attack power, allowing them to soak up more damage. In my opinion, this is a bland way to make a game challenging. I have observed this trope in many games like God Of War, Assassin Creed, Resident Evil, Devil may cry, Uncharted, Tomb rider, and many more, primarily in third-person shooters.
2.No one likes to fail;…
The most overused trope in a video game or, hell, even in movies, is that "Plan A never works". Take any example 'God of War,' 'Sekiro,' 'Assassins Creed,' 'Cyberpunk,' 'Resident Evil,' just to name a few. After starting the main quest for adventure, it pretty much-guaranteed everything that can go wrong will go wrong in the first half of the game. The player will face difficulties and fail; this failure will be a fictional failure imposed by the narrative. The most common trope and another cliche example is the appearance of Final Boss showing at the start just to torment or beat the main hero and then again return at the end just to be destroyed. This trope is soo…
I would like to bring up a narrative cliché that I have observed in a lot of campaign focused games and any other form of media, and that is focusing on any NPC character more than others and then killing them off or removing them from the current story. This pattern is happening almost everywhere lately, so much so that often times we already know a particular NPC might not be around soon because of death or any other reason. We can see this in most major movies, TV Shows, in games like Destiny, GTA, Mass Effect and these are just some that I have played.
The point I am trying to make is the narrative cliché that games are…
A cliché that I have observed in most of the survival/shooter games is that when there is a big action sequence with a lot of enemies coming up, you will always find a great amount of loot/ ammunition. From the designer’s point of view, it is understandable as the designer wants the player to be well equipped before getting into the action scene. But overdoing that has established into the minds of users that when there is a lot of loot available, they’re programmed to think that there’s a big action scene coming up. We can see this phenomenon repeatedly occurring in The Last Of Us, The Last Of Us 2, Days Gone.
I’ve always believed that failure is part…
1. One of the cliches in the game is the ubiquitous weapon settings in FPS games. For example, the cold weapons (bows, arrows, crossbows, swords) in many FPS games are infinitely used with unlimited bullets. And weapons with a fast rate of fire must have low damage, weapons with a slow fire rate must have high damage, which can be understood as a way to balance the values of weapons, but it is a cliche.
2. As a game designer, it is very important for us to design failures in games, because for players, every win or loss increases the sense of stakes, without a villain winning at least once, players will never be afraid of them, never feel threatened…