The Essential Experience

Today, our focus was on articulating the “Essential Experience” of our games; as opposed to the first two weeks where we were mind mapping and brainstorming potential ideas and/or loglines for a foundational design of our games’ essential experiences. Having these plans made it much easier for us to be able to begin articulating our games’ essential experience.

But what does it mean to articulate the essential experience? Fundamentally it is the core emotions and feelings that the player experiences as they play the game.

Task 5 – Behaviours and Experiences

For this task we were prompted to look at our materials and the research we had previously done and to write down the following:
“I would like players to *Experiential Verb* *Something*”
e.g: “I would like players to *feel* *sad*

With this prompt, the log lines that I came up with were:
“I would like players to experience the wonders of exploring a vast and immersive world” – being able to fully engross oneself into the game is one of my main priorities and goals of this game. The feeling of leaving all of your issues behind and becoming one with a story is something that I strive to achieve within my game.

“…to feel the despair/sorrows of escapism” – it is a wonderful thing to be able to engage so deeply within a source of media you love that you can wash away everything that makes you anxious; but it is equally as horrible to return to the reality that you ran away from in the first place. I want players to understand that escapism – although being a wonderful remedy – is not a cure for any negative experiences that someone must endure. It is simply a temporary treatment that doesn’t treat ones problems at the core; while it may be helpful to some, it can be just as addictive and dangerous.

Task 6 – Emotions behind games

In order to further help us understand the emotions that we want our players to experience when playing our games, we were introduced to Dr. Robert Plutchnik’s wheel of emotion:

This wheel of emotions showed us different levels of core emotions that we had envisioned our games portraying towards our players. These different levels allowed us to explore in more detail what we wanted to invoke within players; combining these different levels of different emotions felt like being able to mix different hues, chromas and saturations of colours in order to expand how many colours were available to us. The feelings I wanted to evoke within my players were: Rage, Disgust, Joy and Amazement

We then had to create a short description of our essential experience and place it onto a grid with 4 different emotions at each extreme

Although the emotions I wanted to evoke in my players were “Rage, Disgust, Joy and Amazement”, I decided to place my sticky note at the far left quadrant of “Anxiety and Unpleasant”. I did this because I wanted the core game play to be difficult and stressful – hence rage and disgust. However, the joy and amazement would arise when the player would overcome these hurdles within the game and were able to bask within their accomplishment (Joy) and could unlock new areas, characters and story (Amazement). The reason I wanted to do this was to show the struggles and difficulties that escapism can cause someone, yet there is always a way to improve your life and experience the joys and amazing experiences that await no matter how hopeless everything seems in the moment.

Play Structures

Another thing we looked into was play structures, now that I knew what general direction I wanted my game to go towards, I’m able to analyse game structures and which one would suit my game the best. The four key structures of play that we explored were:

• Competitive Skills-based, rule-based (Chess)
• Luck-based, Rule-bound (Poker)
• Vertignous, embodied thrill-seeking (Rollercoasters)
• Roleplaying, socially negotiated, improvised rules (LARP)

I would consider the first two structures to be catered towards “games” whereas the other two are forms of “play”. Because “games” will always have set rules and actions for players, whereas “play” has more creative freedom as to what actions are available to those taking part. Now that I had identified examples of games that would each fit in these categories of play I decided that my game would sit somewhere around here:

Your game’s “Driving Force”

This is what the development of the game needs to focus on in order to make your game appealing and interesting. This is a key part of game development and design as it just isn’t possible to cater towards every archetype of gamer, you need to know your audience and what your focus is.

I believe that the driving force of my game is its story. At the start, it seems to be the mechanics or the technology – However, the mechanics and technology are merely a medium for the story to be told on. Neither the technology nor mechanics would make sense without the story of the world.

An existing game that I feel takes on this exact change from mechanics to story within its driving force is Inscryption, at the start you are just playing a board game – until the player beats the board game and realises that the entirety of what they had just completed was act 1. Inscryption is an interesting case study of this as even in the steam page of the game, they only market the first act of the game and allow it to intrigue players at the beginning – but those same players only stay towards the end of the game because the story that unravels is just too mesmerising to look away.

Review

This week has taught me that every game must have a specific experience that is trying to be shown to the player, this experience must be known and worked towards throughout the entire design and ideation process behind creating a GDD.

Essentially, knowing your target audience and knowing what you are trying to create must always be outlined – which I will show for my game in my GDD