Literature Review
Game and Game Design
Game Mechanism
Game mechanics mainly means how to execute the game, rules, and systems that govern how a tabletop game works. It defines the actions players can take, the outcomes of those actions, and how those outcomes are resolved.
During the gameplay, the players may have interactions either with other players or the game itself. There are plenty of games that the players play against each other, while cooperation games are nowadays also popular.
While having interactions with other players, the authenticity of the game operation is also one of the main elements when it comes to the combination of social issues and game design.
There is a category that authenticity is one of the main elements in the whole game mechanics. — Serious games.
In serious games, there are purposes than pure entertainment. For example, to educate, train, and raise awareness about a particular issue or topic. For these kinds of purposes, game mechanics are especially important. It may directly execute the educational or training objectives.
The simulator is one of the popular series in both serious games and the video games industry. With the purposes of training and learning simulator games become popular. One of the important reasons is that the players gain experiences that may be outside their lives. One of the well-known simulators is The Sims.
The Sims is a life simulation game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. In The Sims, players create and control virtual people, called Sims, as they live, work, and socialize in simulated neighborhoods.
Players can create custom Sims by selecting their personality traits, appearance, and life goals. Once a Sim is created, players can control their actions and help them navigate their daily lives. Sims have needs such as hunger, hygiene, and social interaction that players must fulfill to keep them happy and healthy.
In addition to meeting basic needs, players can also guide their Sims to pursue careers, develop relationships, and raise families. The game offers a wide range of activities and interactions for Sims to engage in, including hobbies, parties, and vacations.
To finish a game, game designers need to decide what is the winning condition for the game. Winning conditions are the conditions that the players need to fulfill, to win the game. There are different kinds of winning conditions, such as collecting more points than other players, cooperating with other players to defeat the game, or finishing the missions.
In this study game mechanics are subdivided into three factors:
Interactions between players: The players’ decisions affect the results thereby producing interactions between the players.
The authenticity of the game operation: The game operation rules fit the real incidents.
The goal of the game (Winning condition): Game goal design, such as: winning together, single winner, defeating the game, etc.
Visual Design
Since humans rely heavily on the sense of sight, the visual design may be essential in game design. In the process of visual design, there are some important elements that may affect the players: Line, shape, direction, size, texture, color, value.
Layout settings: The Layout of the cards, rule book, game boards, etc. (Including texts and images)
Character design (Realistic): The characters appearances are realistic.
Color plan: The color design plan of the whole game, including the cards, game boards, rule book, etc.
[…] in my opinion, this was the easiest and the most fun. After all, the news will not tell about how my friend from Lugansk wanted to poop during the bombing, and how he expressed his frustration when he did not have access to the toilet and suffered. Honestly, this is an essential situation, partly comical, partly tragic. The news also doesn’t talk about how animal behavior has changed after the shelling started. I thought: a dog is also a person, and his story is important too.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/ pc/sharing-stories-ukrainiancitizens-in-what-s-up-in-a-kharkivbomb-shelter
Game and Game Design
Content Narration
Content Narration is the core of the story, what the game wants to elaborate on and what the game focuses on may bring out a different result. Therefore, the content narration is one of the core criteria of the game design. Content narration in game design refers to the use of various narrative elements to tell a story or convey information to the player. This can include things like dialogue, cutscenes, incidents in the games, environmental storytelling, background information, and other methods of presenting information to the player.
One of the types is called reality-inspired games, which is considered to be one of the games that may be a performative documentary, a term suggested by Florent Maurin. Robyn McMillan, Darshana Jayemanne, Iain Donald (2020).
One example is a game that based on the Russian-Ukraine War — What’s up in a Kharkiv bomb shelter by Dahuanna. She created the game while inside a bomb shelter. The game collected the stories from the people in the shelter. This game records the painful struggle of people in shelters during the war, but different from the journalist, the self-indulgence and helplessness of people are also presented in the daily details.
Another term “Newsgames” which Ian Bogost(2007, Ch.2) mentioned in the chapter on Political Processes. Not all the games are comedies. The reality is complex and as people all have their own experiences in daily life, the tragedy may even sometimes be more persuasive.
This study divides this criterion into six factors, including:
The Authenticity of the background story: The narration of the background story is based on reality.
The completeness of the background story: The background story is fully explained, for example, the story era, the general living standard, the environment, etc.
The Authenticity of the characters’ background content: The background stories of each character are fully described, such as birthplace, family background, daily life, etc.
The completeness of the characters’ backgrounds: The background stories of each character are based on reality.
The authenticity of the single incidents: The single incidents in the game are based on reality.
Easy-to-understand narrative: The texts in the game are easy to understand. (For example, the words are not abstruse.)
Game and Game Design Game Components
This category includes tangible physical elements that players can physically interact with and feel through their senses. The appearances of these elements are various, from abstract to realistic, or even fantasy and fiction.
Aesthetic appeal, functionality, material, and common figures or boards are four essential factors subdivided in this study.
The appearance of the components in the game may affect the players’ comprehension of the storytelling, which in this study focuses on the spectrum between abstract and reality. Different figures in chess play different roles, which have different appearances. For instance, the king and queen, the knight and the pawn.
The functionality of the game components shows the rule of the mechanism of the real world. The components symbolize the elements in the real world.
The material of the components is the initial factor that may affect the players with the sense of touch.
The common game board may increase the chance of interaction between the players if the rules and the board are well designed. Such design choices may significantly impact the players' emotional response and ability to absorb information.
In this study, these effects are divided into four categories:
Realistic modeling: The appearance of the game components is realistic. For example currency, tools, character models, etc.
Different categories due to different functions: In response to the content the components are subdivided by different functions. For example, incidents, issues, currency, dice, track board, point tokens, etc.
Sustainable material: The components are made of sustainable materials, such as hemp, recycled paper, wood, etc.
The common game board and/or properties: The players’ boards are connected to the main game board, or the players share a common game board or properties
Literature Review
Game Design and Emotion
What makes a game conspicuous? In Katherine Isbister’s book How Games Move Us — Emotion by Design she talks about the elements that would affect the players’ emotion which includes meaningful choices, flow, social emotions, avatars, nonplayer characters, and character customization. Two of the factors that make games different from other media, as Katherine claims, are choice and flow, which also have the potential to stir up waves of emotions. To explain how designers apply these factors to stimulate emotions, the author mentions the idea of social play — collaborative interactions between players, and the reasons why playing together matters. (The games that will be introduced below are briefly explained.)
Meaningful choices
Players make choices in order to proceed with the game and the outcome of making choices may affect the result of the game. The example, The Uber Game, shows the possibility of what meaningful choices could do:
To the human brain, playing a game is more like actually running a race than watching a film or reading a short story about a race. When I run, I make a series of choices about actions I will take that might affect whether I win. I feel a sense of mastery or failure depending on whether I successfully execute the actions in the ways I intended. My emotions ebb and flow as I make these choices and see what happens as a result. I feel a sense of consequence and responsibility for my choices. In the end, I am to blame for the outcomes, because they arise from my own actions. This rich set of feelings that I have about the solo experience of running depends on the active role that I play in the experience—that is, on my own meaningful choices.
The Uber Game by Financial Times
The Uber Game was released in October 2017 by Financial Times with a team of eight, a news game that let the players understand the topic emotionally. This game elaborates on the topic of the gig-economy platform and the people that make these kinds of system into full-time jobs. By setting different choices (meaningful choices), the players have to make their decisions as Uber drivers and try to make ends meet.
By making a game that catches the readers’ eyes, the team extended the traditional way of just giving the readers the “right” answers. The readers who played the game have a conversation about the game forcing the player to “make errors”, by oversleeping the readers might lose what they planned to do. Yet other readers pointed out that it could be a concept that people believe they could win the game because they could choose. The game shows that the people who drive Uber as a full-time job have most of the time no privilege to choose from.
Since the readers are making choices that they planned to win the game, and the reality/true stories of the Uber drivers happened to contradict what the readers have experienced in their lives, the sparkles by chance create a space to shift their perspective and open a start of important conversations.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/ item?id=15458957)
https://ig.ft.com/uber-game/
https://source.opennews.org/ articles/how-and-why-financialtimes-made-uber-game/
Game Design and Emotion Flow
Psychology researcher Mihály Chíkszentmihályi claims in his work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, that people enter a pleasurable state of complete absorption with what they are doing. In this state, the sense of time will be altered. It is also known as being in the zone.
Chíkszentmihályi notes that flow can be experienced in a wide variety of activities, including work, play, and creative pursuits. He also identifies several key characteristics of flow, including:
Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
A sense of merging of action and awareness
A loss of self-consciousness
A sense of control over the activity
Altered sense of time
A feeling of intrinsic reward or enjoyment
In the psychology research field, flow is a mental state in that people concentrate, get fully involved, enjoying the process of the activity. When the challenge level of the activity is too much, it could create anxiety and frustration; conversely, when the challenge level is too low, then the participant might not engage and feels bored. The similarities that this mental state is familiar to the zone of playing games are the concentration of the task at hand, a sense of controlling the activity, an altered sense of time, the immediate feedback, a loss of self-consciousness, a merging of action and awareness, and clear goals.
When we are in a state of flow, our brains are fully engaged in the activity and we are more likely to absorb and retain information. This is because when we are in flow, we are more focused, attentive, and receptive to new information. In the state of flow, playing games may be one of the concerns with effectively enhancing memory and learning, as we are in a state of flow due to the immediate feedback and opportunities. For instance, playing chess may improve memory and learning skills. Players may need to remember various strategies and moves, think ahead and anticipate their opponent’s moves, develop a creative mindset while finding solutions to problems, and focus and concentrate on the game.
As we continue to play and learn, we may gradually learn, develop skills and absorb and retain information.
https://www.verywellmind.com/ what-is-flow-2794768
Gamification by Design by Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham Ch.2
Game Design and Emotion
Playing together
When it comes to games, the trace of the game development shows that the rules, the stories, the equipment, etc., are created for games to let people come together and engage at the moment, for example, card games, playground facilities in the park, chess, mahjong, The Sims, World of Warcraft.
When playing together, you and your fellow players take in-game actions that have real consequences for one another’s moment-to-moment experience, as well as consequences for one another’s in-game virtual bodies and selves. p.44-45
Isbister mentions three elements that are used in game design to evoke rich emotional responses in players: coordinated action, role-play, and social situations.
Adults can play when they need to solve or prevent disputes, to anticipate and buffer forthcoming periods of social tension or to keep the attention of a partner away from a resource. Play is used by adults to gain advantages at an immediate level and to establish good relationships at a short-term level. Therefore, the exploration of adult play is a window onto complex cognitive abilities enacted to manipulate social situations. [Elisabetta Palagi (2018).Not Just for Fun! Social Play as a Springboard for Adult Social Competence in Human and Non-Human Primates. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Issue 72(90).]
Coordinated Action
Coordinated action in games refers to a situation where participants play together to achieve a shared goal. This may involve the coordination of the participants’ actions in order to achieve a particular outcome, which may be a team-based game in which the participants work together to achieve the goal.
For example, in a soccer (football) game, each player has a specific role in the team. The players need to work with others in order to win the match. This requires coordinated action, as each player has a specific role to play in achieving the goal. Not only does this need communication, trust, and a shared understanding of the game’s rules and objectives.
Pandemic (2008)
The board game Pandemic is one of the famous cooperative board games, designed by Matt Leacock, and first published by Z-Man Games. The game is capable of two to four players, and each player plays one of the seven possible roles: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations expert, contingency planner, or quarantine specialist. The goal of the game is to discover all four cures before the game ends within eight rounds.
After setting up the game the players will need to discuss the strategy and the plan due to unique abilities according to different characters, in order to achieve the shared goal. Each player will have four actions per turn, including moving pawns, treating diseases, sharing knowledge with other players, and building research stations.
The players need to work together to collect sets of city cards that match the color of the disease. After collecting enough cards, the players may use them to discover a cure for the according disease.
The game ends when either the cures for all four diseases are found or too many outbreaks occur.
Resource: https:// boardgamegeek.com/ boardgame/30549/pandemic
Resource: https://www.polygon. com/deals/21294556/dndhow-to-play-dungeons-dragons5e-guide-spells-dice-charactersheets-dm by Emily Heller
Game Design and Emotion
Social Avatars and Role-Play
From the perspective of game designers, it is possible to create a limited time and space that fosters meaningful social interaction and narrative. Games allow players to imagine the stories of the world and its characters, enabling them to shed their daily social roles, such as being a daughter, a student, a coworker, a guest, or a neighbor. These roles are often tightly connected to the "real" world, with various factors such as innate characteristics, family, education, career, and relationships that one seeks to maintain.
When players adopt the roles of avatars in multiplayer games, the game transforms into a real-time social interaction, not just in video games but also in tabletop games. As players adopt their in-game identities, they engage in real-time interaction, either virtually or analogously. In this situation, players become immersed in the role they are playing, leading to the possibility of rich emotional experiences.
Dungeon & Dragon is one of the famous role-play games originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc.:
Dungeon & Dragon
Dungeon & Dragon is a role-play game that requires a Dungeon Master (DM) who runs the game and multiple players (usually 4-6 players). Each player creates their own character, choosing their race, class, abilities, skills, and equipment. The DM can help with this process and provide guidance on what might be appropriate for the campaign.
In D&D there are five different races: elf, human, gnome, halfling, and half-orc, which correspond to different classes, for instance, fighter, rogue, and wizard. Moreover, every character has their own moral alignment which the players need to consider (from lawful good to chaotic evil). In certain situations, the players will determine how their characters would react due to their moral alignment.
The DM creates a story or campaign for the players to embark on, including locations, NPCs (non-player characters), and quests or objectives.
The game is played in rounds, with each player taking turns to describe their actions and rolling dice to determine success or failure. The DM describes the world and NPCs and makes decisions based on the players' choices and dice rolls. If there is combat, players take turns attacking and defending, rolling dice to determine hits and damage.
As the players complete objectives and explore the world, the story progresses and new challenges and obstacles arise. The game is typically played in multiple sessions, with the players working towards a final objective or goal. Once the objective is complete, the game can end or continue with a new campaign.
https://w.itch.io/keep-meoccupied
Game Design and Emotion Social Situations
When creating multiplayer games, designers act as social engineers— using game elements to create social situations that are interesting and compelling, scenarios where players have fun together. How Games Move Us — Emotion by Design p.63-64
Isbister mentions a case Keep Me Occupied (2012) by Anna Antropy, a game designed for the 2012 Occupy Oakland movement.
KEEP ME OCCUPIED
Keep Me Occupied was designed for the OAK-U-TRON 201X, a mobile arcade cabinet built by RPM Collective that participated in Occupy Oakland's January 28, 2012, Move-In Day March.
Two players play at a time. They have sixty seconds to ascend as high as possible. To ascend, they have to cooperate, occupying switches and holding open doors for one another. When time is up, each player leaves their avatar behind to hold open the last switch they touched for all future players.
Everyone who plays contributes to the success of the group. Even players who aren't traditionally skilled at video games can occupy switches earlier in the game, helping all future players in a big way.
Someone once told me that, in any movement, the person who staples the leaflets is as important as any of the more visible heroes who march at the front of every protest. This game is inspired by that idea. [3]https://w.itch.io/keep-me-occupied
Anna Antropy described her idea, “[…] What was important to me was that even less-skilled players could contribute—they might only make it as far as an early set of switches, but because more successful players hadn’t occupied those switches yet, these players could hold them down and save all future players the time they would have otherwise spent on them.[…]”
The collective’s unique experiences are accumulated through a low-skill-demand approach. Since the simple avatar and the individual coloring, the players are able to recognize their contribution to the whole. With a minimal design and clear emotional goal, Antropy constructed a social situation for players that reflects their hope and aspiration from their social movement action.
Methodology
In order to find out which element affects the players’ behavior the most, the study provides a survey based on two tabletop games Electropolis and This War of Mine. Both games narrate themes that have an amount of information. The participants will play both games and fill out the AHP survey. To deeply understand the players' emotions while playing the game, this survey will be divided into survey responses and interviews.
Electropolis
Electropolis is a 2-4 players strategic city-building board game. The players are the mayors of the ever-growing city and need to construct the best city plan to meet the never-ending demand for electricity. With different sources of producing electricity, there are pros and cons that can affect the result. While the players are making decisions, the trend cards that are drawn at the beginning of the game are also a part of the factors that may influence the result.
The goal of this game is to earn as many electric power points as possible in the eight rounds. During the eight rounds, the players will need to choose the random-picked tiles and build up their cities and they also need to pay attention to the trend card that they pick at the beginning of the game. The air pollution will also affect the end result. If the air pollution point is higher than the support point from the residents, the minus points increase in exponential growth.
The components of Electropolis include building tiles, trend cards, development cards, a turn order board, city boards, city center tiles, player tokens, a citizen’s support track, an air pollution track, a score track, and a rulebook. These components are in a minimalist style to present the different energy production methods and transmit the impacts of each method by embedding the information in the rules.
The designer of Electropolis hopes to convey the importance of the choice of electricity consumption and its impact through this game.
This War of Mine — The board game
This War of Mine — The board game is a tabletop game that is meant to be a survival stimulator which is first made from a computer game. Different from other war games, players are not the soldiers or heroes that are trying to win the war or defeat their enemies, they are the citizens that try to survive in the war.
The story of the game is relatively long, and it could take up to five to seven hours to finish the whole game. There are different phases in the game: Morning, Daytime, Dusk, Evening, Scavenging, Night Raid, and Dawn. Each phase has one or multiple players taking the lead to finish the tasks. In this cooperative game all players need to discuss the movement of the characters, and one of the players will take the final decision (all players take turns to take the lead). The decisions may affect the characters and the condition might change.
The nondescript art design is decided on purpose which suggests the game could be taking place in any modern city. The senior writer of the game, Pawel Miechowski, intended to immerse the players in the game and make them feel that anyone (including themselves) can be one behind the battle line. The report from Dennis Scimeca (2014) wrote:
To capture what war is like from a civilian perspective, developer 11 Bit Studios, based out of Warsaw, Poland, is researching everything from YouTube videos and interviews on Amnesty International to books about the Kosovo War in the late '90s.
"Everything you can see in the game is a translation of real facts into game mechanics,” Pawel Miechowski, senior writer on This War Of Mine, told Ars Technica during a recent preview demo. “We’re still doing research about real conflicts in Sarajevo, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, all the modern conflicts.”
“My grandmother, she passed away a few years ago, long before I started to think about this project, but I can recall her talking about really similar experiences [to those we're trying to capture in the game] during the Nazi occupation,” he continued. “That you need to stay with your family, you need to support one another.”
The components of This War of Mine includes a Journal, the book of script, scenario sheet, save sheets, 1 board, 4 plastic dices, 12 plastic miniatures, 4 plastic discs, 200 cards, 186 assorted tokens, 33 plastic markers.
Comparison between two games
With the four criteria, game mechanics, visual design, content narration and game components, the two selected games are analysed into tables, and with the definitions the participants will fill the survey after the game play.
Game Mechanics
Visual Design
Content Narration
Game Components
Survey Design
To execute this study, the participants will play both games that are named above (Electropolis and This War of Mine). The duration of the event is around three hours in total. Most of the participants participate on two different days.
To further the understanding of the influences of the game encompassing the social issues on game participants, an in-depth interview will be followed, which may help comprehend more details of the end effect after the participants play the game.
The question “What factors influence the players by paying attention to the social issues or learning related knowledge while/after playing tabletop games?“ of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) survey is designed into four main criteria: Game mechanism, visual design, content narration, game components. After playing the two games the participants will fill out the survey. The AHP survey will be used in this study and later analyzed into a weighting table.
AHP Survey and the Participants Requirement
The purpose of the Analytic Hierarchy Process is to classify the elements of decision-making into a hierarchical structure and to use a nominal scale to make a pair of comparisons between the elements, to quantify the human feelings and preferences that cannot be measured, and then to build a pair of comparison matrices to obtain the feature vectors that represent the priority of the elements. (Cheng-Ta Wu, 1999)
The number of experts is around 15-20, and the participants should either play games regularly or work on design, visual, or social issues area. With the background of these areas, the experts may decide what criterion would have a strong impact through games.
Interview Content Interview with the players
Due to the limitation of the survey, it is essential to make interviews with the participants. The question will be focused on “Emotions in the games, especially boardgames/tabletop games.”, which is one of the important parts of this study. What is the trigger (elements, incidents, interactions, etc.) of the emotional impact while/after the gameplay? And if the players (in this case, the participants) will remember the game and the information of the game in the future, when they see or are in the same situations, and vice versa.
The purpose of the Analytic Hierarchy Process is to classify the elements of decision-making into a hierarchical structure and to use a nominal scale to make a pair of comparisons between the elements, to quantify the human feelings and preferences that cannot be measured, and then to build a pair of comparison matrices to obtain the feature vectors that represent the priority of the elements. (Cheng-Ta
Wu, 1999)
The number of experts is around 15-20, and the participants should either play games regularly or work on design, visual, or social issues area. With the background of these areas, the experts may decide what criterion would have a strong impact through games.
Interview with tabletop game design studios
To have a deeper understanding of the details of tabletop games encompassing social problems/issues, the study made interviews with two studios based in Taiwan. The content will be analyzed and discussed.
Analysis
This study ranked the main criteria and the factors according to the AHP survey, and the results are described below.
The Weights Analysis of Main Criteria and Factors
The results of the weight calculation are shown in the table. The CI and CR values of all items are less than 0.1, which is consistent with the requirements. The relative weights of game mechanism and content narration are the highest in the main evaluation criteria, indicating that these two factors have the most significant impact on players' impressions. Under the four main criteria, the first four factors with relatively higher weight are interactions between players, color plan, easy-to-understand narrative, and sustainable material. In the game design process, priority will be given to game mechanics and content design.
The Weights Table of the Main Criteria and Factors
The Analysis of the Overall Weights of All the Factors
The top five items with the highest overall weights, when all criteria are measured together, are Interactions between players, the goal of the game, the easy-to-understand narrative, the authenticity of the game operation, and the color plan. As shown in the table below.
Discussion and Conclusion
There are fewer studies that discuss the comprehensive factors that affect the players. Therefore this study would like to apply the result of the survey and the experiences of the tabletop game designers to the further practical game design process. This chapter will present the main findings of this study and suggest practical applications for the upcoming design project.
Discussion
The encompassment of social problems into the design process of the tabletop game was found to be a challenging operation in the interview with the game studios. At the same time, the results of the survey analysis showed the importance of the game mechanics to the overall impression.
Interview with the Players
Participant M.-H. T.
What makes M.-H. T. emotional during the game is the mind wanting to win. He mentioned that the game This War of Mine is slightly different because the players are not playing against each other, but let all the characters survive. The mindset of winning doesn’t decrease, but the will to compete against other players doesn’t exist. The randomness and the unknown of the game make it interesting and impressive. The reason that he projects his emotion into the game is the decision-making among the unknown incidents. The fear of facing the unknown and surviving makes him dive into the game. For M.-H. T. background story of the game is, in this game, more important than the characters. Since any character could make the same choice when facing unknown incidents, what makes the difference is the mystery and the unpredictability.
Participant J. N.
When playing the game, J. N. mentioned that because he was interested in that game/issue, he played the game. For example, one of the online games called Stone Age was the connection with Taiwan. What let J. N. dive into games is mastering the mechanics of the game, and being able to get most of the points (if it is a game that is points-oriented, which may also be connected to the game Electropolis). When playing This War of Mine, J. N. mentioned, he tended to decide the choices relative casual because it is not real, but playing this game is more actively engaging than TV series or movies due to available choices. What let J. N. recall the game is how he could refine the gameplay. On the other hand, the game This War of Mine provides detailed and realistic descriptions and detailed portrayals of the characters, players may project their emotions into the game.
Participant C.-S. C
In game This War of Mine, the part that fascinates C.-S. C is the inability to clear the game and the need to think about strategy and puzzle solving. But if she had to say which game has impressed him the most recently or the game that she likes the most, it would be Machi Koro because of its fast pace. It is fun during the board game, but the ending feels surreal. It's like there's a sense of ritual missing as if the gameplay doesn’t exist. If it comes to emotional fluctuations, it may be the plot is deep and you get caught up in it, or it's a state where you know you're not really going to fight but you're really nervous and shaking.
Interview with Game Design Studios
To understand the process of game mechanics design, this study interviewed two studios and tried to analyze their experience in the design process. Two of the studios have different tactics for designing games and the summaries of the interviews are down below:
Taqun Workshop
Taqun Workshop is a tabletop game studio based in Taiwan since 2014. This studio focuses on the social issues that are happening in Taiwan. They claim that communication between people is the most important core of the team.
The designer of the team pointed out that in their experiences how they create a deep impression during the game is to design a rule that stimulates the context of the social issue and creating a rule that makes the players interact with each other. The designer said, “There are a lot of social issues that are caused between peoples and to re-create that scene which allows the players to experience what had happened is what makes it impressive.
Oro Studio
Oro Studio is a one-person studio, also based in Taiwan. The designer has passion since he was in middle school.
Oro Studio points out that when in the post-production period he will tell the players about the reason for adding this game mechanic, which is connected to the theme/ topic. After the game test, he will ask the players if they recognize the connection. Most of the players (non-game designers) might only provide the answers such as, the game is impressive, it is interesting or the characters/ incidents are overpowered or too weak. The non-game designer players rate the game with subjective viewpoints. It may usually be far from the balanced values from the mathematic calculation, but what the players feel is in this post-production period is more important than other criteria.
Conclusion
When interviewing the participants, it was observed that different player types have different purposes for playing the game, as mentioned in Gamification by Design (G. Zichermann and C. Cunningham, 2011), which classifies players into four main types: Explorers, Achievers, Socializers, and Killers. The gamer traits of the three participants did not fit perfectly into a single category, but were a mixture of types, but still preferred one of the traits. The criterion mentioned by all three participants with different characteristics was game mechanics. The following are some of the factors that affect the players/participants' emotions after analyzing the combination of social issues and games from the survey results and interview contents:
Create emotional projections through authentic incidents and character descriptions
The randomness of the unknown
Interactivity between players
The sprightly rhythm of the game
Feedback system
A game experience that allows one to repeat and refine one’s skills
Comprehending the results of the survey and the interviews with the participants and the studios, the game mechanics is the most important criterion of all.
The further practical process will be focusing on converting social problems into game mechanics, converting the historical evolution into rules. After testing the game the participants will be interviewed and re-examine whether the results of this study are consistent with the further practical design process.
