The rewarding moment when everything starts to move

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the rewarding moment that occurs when a complex design project inside of a computer game is tested and used for the very first time.

Some games, such as Kerbal Space Program (KSP) and Factorio, allow a player to carefully design ideas and subsequently to test them for effectiveness and efficiency. In KSP, a player assembles complex spacecraft that are potentially intended to reach distant celestial bodies and to land on them. After having finished the design phase, the player can launch the spacecraft in the simulation phase and complete the desired mission.

Designing effective production lines in Factorio

Factorio challenges a player with the design of large factories that refine basic resources into higher goods to finally assemble final products. As recipes for some higher tier goods are complex and require multiple steps of refining materials, achieving a high effectiveness and efficiency is the key to successfully play the game. This especially is important as the player also is challenged to design the paths on which the goods are transported. By not correctly designing these paths, bottlenecks can occur and slow down an entire production line.

As a result of this, players need to carefully design their production lines. On the one hand, they need to consider the amount of resources needed to avoid having a shortage of a particular material. On the other hand, they need to find ways to efficiently transport the required amount of resources in time to avoid slowing down the production. Thus, a major part of the gameplay consist of laying out new patterns of machines and trying to connect them with conveyor belts which transport the resoures.

This mentally demanding phase of the game ends when the player finally connects a new production line to the power and supplies it with the needed basic resources. This event represents a very rewarding moment in the gameplay as the player can observe how the materials pass through the system and confirm that the design is effective (or needs some additional improvement …). Personally, I find these moments very rewarding as they conclude partly difficult puzzle phases with visual summaries of the found solutions.

In the end, by allowing players to design own projects and subsequently observe their results, a high motivation to continue searching for a solution is achieved. The gameplay requiring the development of designs can, as demonstrated with KSP, also contain learning content. This knowledge then is subconsciously practiced as players need to apply it to successfully find a working solution.

Between Let’s Plays and true appreciation of the game

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the internal struggle between being creative by creating let’s play vdeos and simply enjoying the pure gameplay of a computer game.

Creating Let’s Play videos (LPs) is a special form of playing computer games. Instead of only focussing on the game, players capture their gameplay and simultaneously provide a commentary. This results in a video-based coverage of the gameplay that is enhanced by an additional narrative.

Being a LP creator myself, I really enjoy this additional layer of my gameplay. Aside from enjoying the gameplay itself, I can share my experiences and approaches with others. In addition, by sharing LPs with others, I get the opportunity to discuss decisions and to receive suggestions how I can improve my gameplay or challenges I can address in a future video.

As creating LPs also allows for showcasing advanced and creative builds in open world building games, sharing those videos can result in a video-based exhibition. In this way, the computer game becomes an empty canvas and the gameplay turns into art. By editing the videos, LP creators can refine their videos and continue the creative process.

This additional element of playing computer games can become an integral part of the gameplay experience. Personally, I noticed that I miss it when I play games off camera. As a result, I mostly wait with playing a new game until I have the capacity to record it as I do not want to miss out on some entertaining moments of my gameplay. However, in the case of some special story-based games, I deliberately decide against recording it to fully enjoy the gameplay without feeling the desire to move on to keep the video entertaining. In those special cases, I just like to rest in the moment of the gameplay and fully enjoy it.

In the end, creating LPs is a very creative form of playing computer games that contributes to the overall experience but also prohibits to rest in a very special moment. Thus, it results in a constant struggle between being creative and simply enjoying a game.

A true form of art

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how story-based games are a true form of art that require creative as well as artistic skills during the design process and evoke feelings as well as internal conflicts in a player during the gameplay.

Story-based games are mostly designed to present complex and advanced narratives to players. The gameplay of these games challenges players with decision-making tasks to continue with the story. The decisions often have an impact on the continuation of the story and can lead to completely different experiences or endings.

In this way, these games rarely implement advanced interactions like action-based or simulation-based games. Instead, they rely on easy navigation game mechanics to allow for an exploration of the virtual environment and an interaction with it. Hence, the challenges of developing these games are a result of the need for a narrative providing multiple story archs depending on a player’s choices.

As a result of this, game designers are challenged to create and to evoke the right atmosphere. This not only requires the utilization of atmospheric visual effects or music, but also to develop complex characters and problems. Thus, the game design process of these games is comparable to film making. In addition, game designers need to present the narrative in form of texts, spoken monologs or dialogs, acting of the characters, or a combination of these forms.

This approach not only requires the creation of assets that audiovisually present the story, but also the utilization of techniques commonly found in film making and theater. Game designers implement different perspectives, cuts, visual effects, and background music to establish the desired atmosphere and to immerse a player in the story. Hence, creating and designing story-based games demonstrates that game design is a true form of art.

In the same way, playing and enjoying these type of games evokes internal moral conflicts in players due to their dense atmospheres, complex problems, and the requirement to make difficult decisions. Thus, computer games are not only entertainment, but also a true form of art.

The events were caused by me …

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the effects of playing advanced story-based computer games. As players are in control of major events of a narrative, they can start to feel responsible for the effects of their decisions.

When making difficult decisions, we often ask ourselves if going for the alternative route would have been better and reduced the negative effects. Naturally, we cannot estimate what the real effects would have been, but it seems to be a common habbit to question our own decisions. While we know these thoughts from our daily lifes, having these kind of thoughts being evoked by a computer game is a very exciting experience.

As discussed last week, I currently play Life is Strange in the hope that I can finish it before other things start to keep me again from playing it. Life is Strange is an advanced story-based game that challenges players to decide how the narrative shall continue. The choices a player makes have drastic effects and even determine whether one of the central characters lives or dies. Thus, the continuation directly affects the players as it was their choice how the story continues. They decided to perform a certain action and have to deal with the consequences.

A similar game is Orwell that puts the player into the role of a member of a security agency who gathers information about citizens of a fictive nation. By accessing their private digital data and communications, they find information that subsequently is used against the citizens when being uploaded to the agency’s database by the players. As a result, players are responsible for the fate of the observed people. By uploading certain information, citizens are suddenly regarded as a major thread and taken into custody or even killed during the story.

As a result of this kind of gameplay, players question their choices in a similar way as they would if this would be a real world event. Often, the decisions are quite complex when the player has to pick a side between two parties who all have valid arguments. By making the decision, one party might negatively react to the player. More importantly, the choice might significantly affect the continuation of the story later on in a way a player cannot predict at the time of the decision.

Personally, while progressing through the narative of Life is Strange, I found myself several times sitting at my computer after having ended a playing session and thinking about my choices. Where they really the right choices? I always tried to pick options I probably would also use when I would be in a similar real world situation. This makes it even more complicated as it results in a test of my own principles. Hopefully, my choices will lead to a happy ending of the story and not reveal that I did a huge mistake at some point. In the end, those games teach us how to make decisions and to accept their effects as a part of life and the passage of time.

In conclusion, experiences made in advanced story-based computer games affect our real lifes as it were our conscious decisions that led to certain events. These kind of computer games use the immersive effects of playing computer games with the challenge of making complex decisions in an environment and setting we might also experience during our daily lifes. Suddenly, it is no more just playing a game, it is a test of our personality and the experience of feelings that are real even though being evoked by a simulated environment.