Author: AshleyBromiley

I don’t have much to say about the whole beginning part of this one. It was really interesting to hear bits and pieces of the personal lives of the various creative people who make video games. I feel like most people in this industry have their various quirks, and like one of the men said, most of them also have hobbies that span across many fields. I know that’s true for me as I’m involved with many things from theatre to drawing to rock climbing to programming. I also related to the bit about wanting to make a game for people who feel like they never have anything made for them. Unusual people. People who want to do more than just shoot zombies. I tried to get that across when I took the game design class but I got too ambitious and didn’t have time to finish anything. I was too worked up with creating something meaningful that I was inhibiting myself from creating anything at all. What really struck me about this reading was the section with Nina Freeman. “I only feel normal when I have sex.” I don’t want to go into too much detail in a public blog post but that really means something. And not just that. She goes on to describe why she thinks autobiographical games are so powerful. It’s forcing someone to experience the same things as you in hopes that they will feel the same way. That they will understand what’s going on inside your head. I feel like I have a lot to say about this but I either can’t say it or don’t know how to say it. Yeah I don’t really know. This one was just too real.

Because this is late, I can discuss the content of these next two chapters in terms of the game we played in class. That is not my idea of fun. My least favorite part of high school, and even some classes like this one in college, is when the instructor says “now we are going to play a game.” Really? You mean now I have to stand up and interact with people? No thanks. I was riddled with anxiety when we had to choose our card because I didn’t want to be the killer. In fact, if I did get the killer card I would have demanded we redrew. That’s just not my idea of fun.

The same goes for video games that are meant to be played with others. For example, in Little Big Planet, the only person I would play with is my brother, because he could sit right next to me and I could tell him what to do. But when he didn’t want to play, instead of pairing with a stranger online I would sit there with two controllers plugged in and try to do the 2 player levels on my own, controlling both sackboys at once. These are the length I would go to in order to avoid interacting with other people. That’s another thing that bothers me about LBP and why I have yet to Platinum (get every single trophy/achievement to earn the platinum trophy) the game. You need to play online with other players in order to earn all of the trophies. I don’t like having to depend on random people to complete a game. One of the trophies was to have a certain number of people “heart” a level you created and posted to the server. And no one hearts anything. Unless you made an amazing level of equal quality to the content posted by the game creators there is no way to earn that trophy on your own. You’d have to resort to the online forums of PSN where people join together to help each other earn these ridiculous trophies. Because I don’t really like playing a game knowing I can’t beat it (and by beat I mean earn all the trophies, because honestly that’s why I play PlayStation). I understand other people don’t feel this way, but I’m a little special and I like video games like this to be played alone.

I do understand the connection that results from playing an active game with someone though. I think that connection and resulting intimacy is the whole reason I dislike it in the first place. I have a lot of weird social anxieties and playing video games for me is a way that I can shut myself in my room and eat snacks all day to relax, not a way to create more anxiety by having to deal with other human beings.

I spent a lot of time as a kid watching my brother play video games, even though I’m the older sibling. The reason I enjoyed this is because 1) he is good at video games and 2) if he does do something wrong, I’m close enough to him (both emotionally and in physical space) that I can yell at him and/or swipe the controller from his hand and say “let me try.” However this is vastly different than watching people play games in class. I get so frustrated with this that sometimes I have to look away. And the reason I don’t interact and try to help people who are playing is because I’d be yelling at them. I have very colorful vocabulary when referring to video games and it’s probably more respectful that I just keep my mouth shut. Same goes for why I never volunteer to play. I don’t want other people telling me what to do or to have to follow someone else’s agenda. I enjoy the solitude (unless of course it’s a close friend or family member playing with me that I can convince to play my way).

The first chapter talks a lot about avatars and how the ability to customize these characters can really emotionally invest us in the game. A great example I have found of this is the character editor in Fallout 4. I spent over 3 hours detailing my character and my character’s husband in the game. I was referencing pictures of myself and my boyfriend at the time trying to make the in-game avatars look as close to me and him as possible. I knew nothing about the story so I didn’t know [spoiler alert] that my husband is killed within the first 10 minutes of the game! I spent 3 hours of my life making him my dream man and he was taken away from me in minutes. I cried. I actually cried.

Aside from this I can’t really say I was ever that attached to my avatar, although I do always try to make them resemble myself in a way that still looks good. What I mean by this is that when I make my Mii avatar for example, I always think the version they come up with based on my photo is hideous. There are some feature options for Miis that make me think “why would anyone ever choose that nose?” So what I do is I make the character look the prettiest (in my opinion) and make the things like the hair and clothes resemble me. I’m always quite disappointed when avatars don’t have long hair options because that is one of my favorite things about my outward appearance and I rarely get to express it with game avatars.

Firstly, I want to discuss a part I liked about the lady that played Words with Friends
while waiting to pick her kids up from school. It started off as just playing a word in the
five minutes her kids needed to pack their things to her having so many games that she
couldn’t finish by the time her kids were ready and ended up thinking about what word she wanted to play instead of listening to how her kids’ days went. I feel that I have the same problem with games like Words with Friends. I find that I have to allocate time for it
instead of just being able to play here and there like you would a solo game like Candy Crush. When I play a networked game like Words with Friends I feel like I need to do the best  possible instead of just the first move that pops into my head. I can play a Candy Crush level over and over again but the exact Words with Friends game will only be there once. When I played the game I often found myself sitting at my desk for an hour with a word unscrambler open in another tab just so that I wouldn’t miss any high point words. I couldn’t bring myself to play anywhere else because I wouldn’t have access to my “cheating” method of playing and so I wouldn’t want to put down a bad move. The fact that it wasn’t something I could play in a few minutes while waiting for something is what led me to stop playing it. That and the fact that many of my friends also lost interest in the game for whatever reason, and playing with strangers that it matches you up with isn’t as fun as beating someone you know in real life.

Another thing that was brought up that I really related to was game servers being shut down and the games being gone forever. I experienced this with a game that I love called U.B. Funkeys. It was basically Skylanders before Skylanders were cool. The game was discontinued  in 2010 for reasons still unknown, and the community around it has since dissipated. Luckily, there is still a local version of the game that can be played but the online server was taken down so players could no longer interact with each other. There was so much backlash that the company ended up putting the servers back up for a while (they may even still be up, I haven’t checked in a while). It just baffles me how a game with such a strong community could be shut down like that. Especially when they had the potential to be such a successful game. This game was literally just like Skylanders, Disney Infiniti, and that LEGO game. You had little figures that you would put on a hub and they would show up on your screen. The only difference was that U.B. Funkeys was solely for PC while Skylanders and the others were for all of the gaming consoles. I’m telling you this game could have made it big. I even made money from ad revenue running a blog about this game. It was really great and I wish the game still existed. 🙁 (I could make another example out of Big Fat Awesome House Party but that didn’t have nearly as big a following as this game. I miss that game too.)

Through a majority of the seventh chapter, I tried to figure out why it was called “Architects” instead of “Game Design.” Not until the last few paragraphs did I realize that Sicart did this on purpose as he feels game designers should instead be called architects of play. And that makes sense doesn’t it? The purpose of building a game is to have people play, so creating a context that allows for little to no appropriation or meaning kind of defeats the purpose. Architects design buildings so that there is a context for people to inhabit but so that they also have the ability to appropriate the space as they see fit. Most rooms in a home, save the bathroom and kitchen which have built-in appliances and fixtures, can be used for whatever the homeowner wishes. The same should be said about games. Games are a form of play, and therefore players should be able to appropriate that context how they see fit. I really enjoy this analogy because growing up two of the things I was most interested in, and still am, are game design and architecture. So I understand that spaces in architecture usually need to be multipurpose and how it relates to designing a game in such a way to allow for a lot of appropriation within in.

 

Aside from this I also found the discussion about design in general to be quite relatable and interesting. When he said the design of things, like games, requires not only a technical understanding, but also an understanding of people, their needs and desires, and how they interact with objects. Human psychology plays a significant role in how we approach games and play and how or why we appropriate a space to what we do. Considering these things when designing games in necessary for ensuring that people will want to play it. Facebook uses psychology to make people stay online longer and post more things; games can use psychology too to understand what makes people play games and how to make it more pleasurable for them.

In the next three chapters of Play Matters, Sicart discusses playgrounds, beauty, and politics. I like the idea that playgrounds are meant to be places of play, but not meant to imply any specific game or type of play. This is what makes a playground different from a basketball court or soccer field. To quote Sicart, “a play space is a location specifically created to accommodate play but does not impose any particular type of play, set of activities, purpose, or goal or reward structure.” Thinking about playgrounds this way makes me think of other places that aren’t designed for play, but that still allow for play to take place without necessarily confining play to certain parameters. I like to think of the world as my playground and people and things my props. Like the playgrounds designed from real things that are mentioned in the book, things like this in real life can be turned into playgrounds. It is kind of like how free runners and parkour enthusiasts use abandoned industrial buildings and the architecture of the city to play around on like a jungle gym, as Sicart describes briefly in his book. I look at the world in that same sort of light, and more often than not I have the desire to climb things like a kid would a tree with low hanging branches.

Next is beauty. Sicart went into three different descriptions about why play might be considered beautiful, although I only really understood one of them. That was the part that described beauty as the feeling you get when you watch a skilled athlete or gamer. The feeling is similar to the feeling one gets when looking at an incredible view in nature, I think. It’s a feeling of being both impressed and in awe. Specifically, when he goes into detail about the game GIRP, it helps you understand a little bit how an abusive game such as this can bring an appreciation to the act of rock climbing, as the game is almost as difficult as the sport itself. (I played the game myself and got up to 16.7m before quitting. The bird was particularly annoying.) And if I may add, I believe that the beauty in play can also come from the game itself, especially in video games which incorporate music and art; things that on their own can also be described as beautiful.

Lastly is politics. Going into this chapter I was expecting it to discuss the games and play that have political themes; for instance, a game that informs the player of some political movement or raises awareness for some cause. This is on the right track to what he is talking about, but it’s not quite there. In order for it to be play, it needs to be on the edge between autotelic and purposeful. The play must be able to stand on its own without the political context, but also have political meaning when played in the correct context. The “political effect, the expression of political action through play, happens only when [it] is played while” in the political context. “Political meaning emerges from the play community and from the ways in which play threads together context, form, and situation.” I understand where he’s coming from, that it’s only really meaningful when the play has double meaning, but I find that games and forms of play can have political meaning by addressing things that are controversial or relevant to the news. Like what I thought originally before reading this chapter can still apply. Raising awareness through play can still be an effective political movement if done the right way because it can encourage people to make political statements that they otherwise would not have made.

(This is late because I left class early and didn’t learn about what the assignment was until after it was already due and then I had strep for two days.)

As the title suggests, Play Matters is a book discussing what play is and why it matters. It doesn’t just discuss play as in what a child might do with toys or games; it also discusses how every day agendas can be considered play. In the first chapter, this is what I found the most interesting. In one of the first few paragraphs, it discusses how even though there may be things in your life that you have to do, it is possible to approach them in a playful way. I try to enjoy myself always, but more often times than not I end up being unhappy with one thing or another. One way I like to remedy this is to make a game out of whatever it is I’m doing to make it more pleasurable. I hadn’t noticed before, but I essentially play my way through most of my days as if I were some sort of character in a really boring video game. Sometimes I count the number of steps it takes for me to get from one place to another, even if it’s only five or six; or sometimes I see how fast I can do a task. I even turned reading this book into a game by seeing how many pages I could read before the professor for my next class started talking. Like it says in the second chapter, you need to have “the attitude of play without the activity of play.” That way you can make your life more pleasurable even when doing mundane tasks that wouldn’t otherwise be enjoyable. That’s essentially what playfulness is. I found it interesting the distinction between playfulness and play. Play is an activity, meant only for that purpose, while playfulness is an attitude that can be applied to things other than play as I’ve mentioned above.

Another part that really got me was that it said that play is not necessarily fun and positive, but can also be dangerous too. Play is pleasurable. It says “play can be pleasurable when it hurts, offends, challenges us and teases us, and even when we are not playing.” This really spoke to me on a level that I don’t think any other “textbook” has before. A lot of the time I am being playful it is because I do not take something seriously, but still want to do it or interact with it. This has caused a lot of disruptive and frowned upon behavior for me in the past, but it really makes sense why. “Through playfulness, we open the possibility of expressing who we are…Through playfulness, we bring the creative and personal expression that play affords to a world outside play, and therefore we make the world personal.” That’s probably why I disagree with so many people. I see the world from a completely different perspective than anyone else does. So basically what I’m trying to say here is that even though playfulness can be great as a form of expression and personality, it can also be disruptive and destructive.

Lastly, I’d just like to briefly talk about the things we play with. Toys. I really like the comparison between the appliances and the computer. An appliance is nothing more than a functional object with no emotion, but a computer is a playful object needing a player to complete it. It has emotion. All iPhones might be made the exact same way, but the contents of the phone differ vastly from one user to another. While phones aren’t toys in and of themselves, they can be used as toys through apps and games. Toys are the pure form of play as they are meant just for that, although I do find it much more interesting to be playful with things that aren’t toys than just to play for the sake of playing. For example, when my little cousins want me to play dolls with them or with some other toy they have, I do not take as much pleasure in it as I do playing with something that was not meant as a toy. My brother and I used to draw on the cardboard drink holders from McDonalds and turn them into UFOs for our alien dudes. Nowadays I use apps and social media to play with things that aren’t meant to be played with. But at the same time, I do enjoy the pure play or video and board games, it’s just the toys that require my own creativity that I do not find as pleasurable.