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.

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.

Taking D&D as an example, the improv principles would certainly apply here, since all would be essential to advance the story. Like improv, D&D is a imagination-based social game and requires the participation and commitment to the game from all players.

The game’s mechanics would certainly allow for a participant to be disruptive, but that would affect the aesthetics for the entire group, rendering the game unplayable in he short-term.

Since the game designer would not have much control over players’ actions, my opinion is that enforcement of the improv principles would be a task delegated to the players themselves.

I would make a text game where a player, or players, receive a pool of random words and have to use them to form a coherent text, their choice of prose or poem.

Their works, along with the original pools of words, would be uploaded to a central site where others in the community could rank them or try to use the words themselves.

The anonymity of the system would take care of any self-consciousness issues, and players could freely practice in order to improve their works.

I thought that the problem with these games was more related to the UI than the games themselves. I couldn’t do anything at all in Galatea and Aisle, as they didn’t understand anything I said. I could progress a little in Slouching Toward Bedlam, but soon I didn’t know what to do.

Facade was a lot easier for me to play. It understood everything I tried to say and I could actually get to the end. I think there’s a lot of replayability in this game and , since the UI doesn’t get in the way, I think it’s worth the time.

My game is based on Jack and the Beanstalk, and also inspired by the film Wall Street, since greed plays an essential part in both stories.

The player controls Jack, who starts with a minimum amount that he needs to trade up at the stock market. He is made offers for stocks, but he doesn’t know the value of the stocks until after the trade; the only information available to him is the pitch from the salesman. Some of stocks will give Jack a profit, while others will make him lose money.

In the game, the stock market is a parallel to the giant of the original fable and it’s constantly trying to defeat Jack. Given that the market has a better probability of getting better trades, it’s unlikely that Jack would win.

This would make a difference from the moral of the fable, which insinuates that greed pays off.

Although the mechanics are simple, the game incorporates a 7 of the 8 types of fun: drama (if using the narrator role), fantasy (for the role-playing), challenge (trying to read other players), social (the game needs a large group of players), discovery (the story and roles being unveiled), expression (again, if the narrator role is used), and submission (for the capacity of immersion).

The game’s main attraction seems to be the social aspect, however, and I think that might impact its aesthetics if played online. I feel that part of the fun is trying to read other players, and I’m not sure how to successfully implement that online. One could probably use web-cams, but they would still lose most of the body language.

My idea is based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You have a player as  a cop as a moderator, two robbers, and some innocents. Each player starts with 10 points. The robbers know each other roles. At the beginning of every round each player gets another 10 points and a new role.

The cop starts by sending a message to other players, asking for a confession. From there you have these scenarios:

A robber can confess or not. A confession includes accusing the partner.

An innocent can accuse two players he might suspect, or he might stay silent.

If both robbers confess, each loses 5 points.

If one robber confesses and the other stays silent, the one that confessed keeps their points and the accused loses 10 points.

If the innocent is right on their accusation, he gets 10 or 20 points, depending on how many accused he got right.

If the innocent only gets one accusation right, then the robber that wasn’t accused could “kill” the innocent and take 20 of their points.

If both robbers stay silent, and no one accuses them, they each get 10 points.

The game can be played for as many rounds as desired, or a limit could be set at the beginning of the game.

My idea is for a physics-based game where the main character is a magician who has to balance several objects into a tower. The point of using a magician is that the character can levitate the objects to put them in place, and the loss of touch sensation wouldn’t impact the player’s immersion into the game.

The levitation process would involve intricate finger movements, though I haven’t designed a way to make those intuitive to learn and at the same time present a meaningful challege to the player.

I’ll take a parallel to film theory for this one. While catering to a large audience might seem like common sense, there is a school of thought that says that film can work on a much smaller but very powerful scale. One such example can be made from the films of Jean Rouch. While his films can look sub-par for the common viewer, Rouch believed that film could bring positive change to those involved. In his film Human Pyramid (1961), for example, Rouch employed a group of mixed race students from the Ivory Coast to tell a story about racism in society. While the film doesn’t make any effort on production values, the students involved in it actually overcame their prejudices and became close after the film. The film worked as a kind of social therapy, as was intended by Rouch.

The same could apply to games, in my opinion. Player-centred design makes a lot of sense if you want to reach a big audience, but games could also work the same way as Rouch’s films, even if only at a individual level. This seems to be the case with Passage. Although I’m not familiar with the designer’s decisions for the game, it seems to be a very personal project that he happened to share on the net.