Ville and Sanna-Kaisa had another vid-chat on Thursday, 17th.
Ville presented to us the concept of his social networked game about energy saving / energy consumption awareness. Motivation to join, keep playing and score high (i.e. lower one’s real life energy consumption) would be based upon altruism, competitivness, status gain and saving real money. I’m looking forward to a game concept with high potential!
Would a (fictive) narrative context be necessary or influential in playing the game? How are real-world-choices and in-game-choices connected via the game?
I’ll guess there will be some challenges in the game mechanics concerning gaming-the-game possibilities for its users if the motivation to score is high enough to ‘cheat’.
Sanna-Kaisa sent me a refined draft of game mechanics and description of playing material for her language acquisition game. I’m looking forward to playtest the prototype with the students in Cologne!
We also talked about the use of augmented reality gaming for history education, starting with the planned Kalevala-amusement-park, where a second layer of augmented reality would increase the modes of interaction with the topical aspects of the park (Kalevala is the finnish national epos). Of course this is a high-stakes project, with visuals and probably a complicated system of scoring, because real-life-gains (free meals, soft drinks etc.) result from playing and scoring.
Some ideas came up that may be useful generally for game design:
- What are we playing with? Digital-networked games have many advantages (see e.g. Jane McGonigal’s numerous approaches), but analog games may be approached and modified on the rules-level much more easily. Many game design handbooks, though targeting digital game designers, turn to analog models for explanation and modification of game mechanics. One famous (finnish) example is Aki Jarvinen’s “GameGame”, but you may find the same approaches and practices in e.g. Tracy Fullerton’s 2008 “Game Design Workshop” and Brenda Brathwaites’ 2009 “Challenges for Game Designers”. Both very recommendable books.
- Visuals dominate game design, especially if its in the digital domain – there truly (and maybe unfortunately) has been an “iconic turn” in this area.
‘Playing’ on the other hand, is rich in modal approaches, i.e. we can ‘play’ with – or can turn into playing material – everything our environment or culture provides. This includes abstract concepts like social roles, but also different sensory input like hearing, touching, rhythms and patterns, etc. The same applies to augmented reality: Entering a game that includes real-life objects IS in fact the creation of an augmented reality (albeit with our brains as alternate-interpretation-delivery-system). So, ‘cheap’ AR-games could be based e.g. on sounds, as a second layer of location based information in a real life (urban) environment.
