Week 11

Learning Journal: 

As usual, we began with our class discussion about games we've been playing. The games we talked about were Red Dead Online, which prompted us to explore the topic of why we might choose to play as the 'good guys' or the 'bad guys', along with Fable and Mass Effect. It's almost always more fun to play as the villain, which is an interesting thought. In my experience, this is something like taking a 'break' from the morals that you hold in real-life - it doesn't, however, mean that these morals are false or hollow. Having the option to play as a villain or to do things in a game that may be considered reprehensible in the real world, such as assassination or thievery, can be cathartic in a way. It's difficult to put into words the easy gratification that comes with such actions, but I firmly believe that there is an important distinction between behaving badly in a video game and behaving badly in reality. 

We also talked quite a bit about Gartic Phone, which is sort of like a digital Telephone/Pictionary mix. The conversation about morality in games ended up in a dead end, as it's not easy to define and the class doesn't have enough games in common to argue the different sides. 

We spent the rest of the lesson continuing work on the assignment. Our group made some fantastic progress today, and began truly figuring out the systems mechanics. We decided to make our map size 200x200 blocks (equivalent to meters in-game), after testing the original plan of 100x100. This was too small for us to use, because we were happy with the player speed and unhappy with how fast a character could move across the board. However, it still seemed a bit flat with characters moving at a single speed. As a result, we gave them two speeds - walking and sprinting. This is also a common feature of survival games, but we didn't get around to discussing whether or not sprinting would chew up a character's stamina. We have a time frame of approximately 30 minutes per level, including solving the puzzle at the end, so we needed a way to chew up some time to keep all the players busy without forcing a 'crunch' at the end. We'd still need to work on what kinds of puzzles we want; at this point we have a rough idea, but nothing that we could actually expand on yet. 

We didn't learn much that was new, as today's class had no content. 

I'm not too stressed about this class. The only thing that makes me feel a bit out of my depth is the discussions about games we've been playing. I don't have much of a range of gaming experience yet, and I don't want to end up repeatedly mentioning the same three games over and over.