Tag Archives: edge design

PAX East: Game Genres

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View of the expo hall, with crowds of gamers at videogame booths

PAX East Expo Hall

I recently attended PAX East—a three-day gaming event in Boston—and it was quite an experience! Video games, board games, and card games everywhere! Tens-of-thousands of gamers—some in quite elaborate costume—packed into rooms, standing in long lines, playing games at tables, in booths, and on spare patches of floor, and generally having fun—very serious fun.

There were sessions, too. One that I found particularly interesting was The Genre Divide: Reassessing How We Define Videogame Genres by James Portnow, the CEO of Rainmaker Games. Unlike the other sessions I attended at PAX East, this one actually had an academic paper reference—MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek (2004)! More importantly, this session got me thinking.

James Portnow’s core argument was that a game’s genre should be defined by the Aesthetics of game, not the Mechanics. According to Hunicke et.al., Mechanics “describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms,” while Aesthetics “describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.” Portnow is arguing that we should categorize a game by the reason why you go play that game. For example, one Aesthetic is “Sensation” or “game as sense pleasure”. In other words, we play some games for the way they stimulate our senses, such as the beautiful visuals and audio of Journey. Another Aesthetic is “Fellowship” or “game as social framework”. These are games we play to be playing with other human beings. The interactions don’t have to be direct, such as the ability to leave notes in Dark Souls, but they do need to be a primary reason why one plays the game. Games can have many Aesthetics, but the idea is that they probably have one or two that are the primary reasons people play them.

Female avator standing in a beautiful

Martian Boneyards — Aesthetic: Sensation?

So what does this have to do with EdGE? We’ve had a hard time figuring out the genres for some of our games, and maybe, part of the reason is that the genre system itself is at least partially broken. But if we go with Portnow and try to categorize our games by their Aesthetics, where do we get? Certainly the primary reason folks played Martian Boneyards was Fellowship, but after that, what would one say was the balance between Sensation, Narrative, Discovery, and Expression? And what about Canaries? We wanted Narrative to be a reason—and didn’t achieve this—so maybe some mix of Challenge and Expression? As for our latest batch of Leveling Up games, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, I left PAX East with a new lens with which to view our work… and what more can you ask of a conference.

Making Science Games is Hard

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This has been a tough week. Our team works on skype – a four person meeting –hammering out the level design for games we want to a) be really, really fun and b) require science learning in a way that can be cleanly measured. By that I mean we need to not only make sure the science in the game is reasonably accurate (enough not to teach “bad” science) but also we need to isolate players’ understanding of concepts so that we can say “yes they are learning that concept” or “no they aren’t”. It’s not like I thought this would be easy, but this was one of those weeks where the rubber really hit the road.

We were working on a game that focuses on work and energy. We wanted to use mills as generators with flowing water, thinking it would be fun to make puzzles where the player had to divert some water off to do tasks in the game, but make sure they had enough to power different mills at the end to open a door – something like that….but….

The physics of flow rate and change in velocity (keeping mass conserved) was our first hurdle – and then onto how different amounts of energy would be produces depending on where the water was hitting the mill, way too many complicating factors, how could we get players to focus on any one concept when nature makes them all happen at once?

It’s tempting to break a complex phenomenon down into each layer of physics, teaching them one by one…but it sure makes a boring game. We instead decided to step back from the mill game. We went back to fundamentals of what makes a good game.

We want a simple, repetitive game mechanic that is intuitive and fun. Then the context can do the storytelling. So we are starting with an n-body code. A bunch or particles that have an attractive inverse square force (like gravity). Let’s start and make that fun and then we will have lots of places to go from there. Stay tuned….