Week 02 - Playcentric Design

In Chapter 1 of Macklin and Sharp’s “Games, Design, and Play” the basic game elements are discussed. The six elements are “actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players.” In our Tuesday and Thursday classes, we looked at games on deepfun.com and discussed within groups how we could alter these basic elements from listed games and turn them into something completely new. With our game, Human Battleship, we had a little bit of trouble determining the goal for the game. We couldn’t immediately find out what “players [tried] to achieve while playing” our game. With this, we decided that we would introduce a round system and point system, with each remaining “battleship” counting as a point for the crew and each sunken battleship counting as a point for the enemy team. The overall structure of the game design with the group was something that was a little hard to come up with, as this was my first time approaching a game “as designers rather than as players.” I assume that the feeling was similar for my groupmates, but we have a rough idea of what we want the base rules to be and how the round/point systems work.