Week 8 (3/31/17)

As I mentioned in last week's post, I read Tynan Sylvester's book, Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences, over the course of this week. After reading the book, I have learned a lot about the process of designing a video game and how all sorts of different elements exist in a video game in order to make them enjoyable and memorable.

I specifically looked at the book's second part, "Game Crafting" in order to gain a better understanding of the tools video game designers utilize, and how video games affect people on a psychological level.

However, before I discuss some of the key ideas that I found in the book's second part, I found that the author defined video games (and games in general) in an interesting way during the first part of the book. According to Sylvester, "A game is an artificial system for generating experiences," (Sylvester 44). Now, if you ever search up, "What is a video game" on Google, you will find a very basic definition that looks at the physical identification of a video game. In fact, here is exactly what Google spits at you (copy and pasted) as the first search result.

vid·e·o game

ˈvidēō ˌɡām/

noun

1. a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen.

When you compare the two definitions, you can see how Sylvester identifies the psychological feature of video games as a key component of a game's definition. As a game designer, Sylvester knows the importance of understanding human psychology in order to make a game entertaining and memorable for the consumer. With the psychological element of a video game, it is important to understand that games can affect a player just as any other sort of action or experience that a person encounters in day-to-day life. Additionally, it is important to note Sylvester's inclusion of "artificial" in his definition. Although video games are made by humans, they do offer a lot more diverse types of experiences that can't simply be obtained in nature. In addition, these games can be structured so that a specific experience is created that may be beneficial or advantageous to the human player.

During my reading from last week, I encountered a research article by the title of, "The Benefits of Playing Video Games," by Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C.M.E. Engels. In this paper, the authors discussed the importance of "play," which is an important concept in developmental psychology. The authors looked at "play" in the eyes of psychologists such as Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky, and described "play" as an important part in childhood development for yielding social cognition. The authors of the article related this psychological concept to video games and explained how video game studies have shown that "play" can also be obtained through video games where players/participants develop behaviors that reflect the particular game they were tested on. This process of learning from video games is due to the fact that video games are immersive. As discussed in another paper that I read last week (the one by Jagad Lakshmi), the immersive nature of video games is the reason why people can transfer what they learn in a video game to real life.

Anyways, the reason why I brought up what I read last week was to explain the importance of immersion in video games. Sylvester's book does a great job discussing the tools designers use to make a video game immersive, as well as design choices that should be avoided that reduce immersion. Sylvester describes immersion as "when the mental division between the player's real self and his in-game avatar softens, so events happening to the avatar become meaningful as though they were happening to the player himself," (Sylvester 40). The author later describes in great detail the process to maximize immersion in three parts. According to Sylvester, "First, [video game designers] create flow to strip the real world out of the player's mind. Second, we create an arousal state using threats and challenges in the game mechanics. Finally, we use the fiction layer to label the player's arousal to match the character's feelings," (Sylvester 42). Sylvester discusses how in-game player decisions increase the amount of flow among other game mechanics. He also dives into the multiplayer function of video games where players actually learn to think in complex ways of Game Theory (the mathematical study, not the YouTube channel) in seemingly mind-numbing games like shooters. This has led me to reconsider my previous beliefs that games like Halo are more mentally complex than they first appear.

There was a TON more fascinating things that I read and learned about in this book that I have not thought about before reading. If you are at all interested in reading the book, I highly suggest it and I will give a link to the book on Amazon here.

Next week, I will begin writing my 10 page paper on my project. Yay!