Summary Response Week 10: Games

CPSC 601.24 Week 10 Part 2

Papers

In this response I will discuss two papers, one which examines player types in health games and another which talks about variations in games.

Games

Games design is an interesting topic, a designer has to create a game that will challenge people while playing it keeping it interesting but not so challenging that it becomes frustrating. Some modern video games fully of glitzy graphics are essentially no different as games then early RPG shooters. Other simplistic games, such as Mario Brothers, are still fun to play even with a hokey style.

If game design is really about a set of rules (maybe a stretched definition) then we can think of variations to the rules as modifications to the design, like knocking down a wall is a modification to the design of a house. Consider a game like tic-tac-t0, a horrible game because it's entirely determined by the ordering of the players - provided that nobody plays the centre first. So rules of the game make it boring. Simply adding a new rule to the game might have a complex outcome that isn't obvious, the free-parking bonus in Monopoly, for example, makes the game last far longer because people are less likely to go bankrupt.

The researchers of the 'remix and play' paper create a taxonomy for rules by 'mining' a set of variants for poker. They then apply this taxonomy to rules for Halo2 variants. They find out that some rules are 'spoiling' and others 'satisfying'. But more interestingly they bring up how some variants - because of the limits of customizability of Halo2 - require that people voluntarily submit to the rules. Because the set of people playing has no social relationship, a huge set of enforcement and trust issues are brought up. This issues have been thoroughly studied in game theory and economics and psychology.

This paper is bad, not because the claims they make are not valid or their methodology is flawed, but because they have nothing to say. The research questions that we could ask and the studies that could be performed is effectively infinite. To be good the research must be interesting, but the conception of this paper is boring, nothing interesting could have even possibly come out of this research.

The second paper discusses the player types in multiplayer health games which are, unfortunately, a thing. The researchers review a specific example of such a system which was deployed at low-income schools in the United States. They found through interviews and quantitative analysis that each of the users could be categorized into a certain type based on their behavior. What was interesting is how affected some of the participants seemed to be by their relative status - or the idea that they would be shamed because they caused their team to lose. Without considering this a designer might have simply 'exposed' the steps every student in the system to try to encourage them. The freeloader problem seems like it could be solved by having 'real-world' intervention followed up by removal from the program.