Journal Wk12: Serious games

Re: Journal Wk12: Serious games

Dafur is Dying: The most striking message for me is that even though the game tries to recreate the situation, I’m still just an outsider sitting on a far away computer. I thought that the gameplay was very effective in delivering the message – getting water for the village was very hard, until I used the youngest character.

DriverSeat: The message of this game is that senior drivers can be less agile on the road. I understand that the goal of the game was make the player feel the impairments that afflict senior drivers, but I can’t tell if the gameplay actually conveys the impairments or just suffers from bad design.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG: I couldn’t get very far in the game as I kept getting busted by the cameras and hall monitors, but I think that the message was to provide an insight into what caused the shootings, as opposed to the outside view we get from traditional media.

Oiligarchy: The message is to show a battle of greed vs resources and how easy it is to deplete those. I thought the gameplay was very effective here: after setting up a few drills, it just got even easier to setup even more to the point that I was draining all the oil wells available, money was not a problem even when activists started destroying my plants. I eventually caused the Last World War and the planet was destroyed.

Design idea: Art driven design

Re: Design idea: Art driven design

My idea is inspired by the game The Path and the style from the film What Dreams May Come and based on Impressionist and Romantic art.

Players are given a main quest to complete, but have the choice to engage in side quests at their will. The main quest has a benign theme, while the side quests will have a darker theme, such as looting villages. My design goal is to make the side quests more appealing to gamers.

As for the visual and aural style, if the player is on track on the main quest, then the scenery will have an Impressionist style, with heavy use of colors. This will be accompanied by Impressionist music, such as Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The idea is to create a very light and colourful aesthetic if the player is following a benign path.

If the player decides to go on the side missions, the scenery will assume a Romantic style style, but with very low colour saturation. The design goal here is to create a more realistic, but darker atmosphere. Music here would also be Romantic, such as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.