Thursday 8 March 2007

pleasure, pain and play

All games, including digital ones have aspects which make them ‘fun’ to play. What ‘fun’ is, is different for each person. Freeman (2003) says that there are many genres in games that can be classed as fun including ‘solving puzzles, exploration and collecting items’.

There are three type of characteristics in games which makes them pleasurable and these are reward, flow and iteration. Reward is something you get for completing a target or an objective within a game. This can be things such as an item or money but it could also be improved skills or access to hidden cheats. The idea of rewards is that it encourages the player to play on by rewarding efforts at regular intervals which will also benefit the player later in the game.

Iteration means to do something again. Yet it is different from repetition because repetition is purely about doing the exact same thing whereas iteration is changing something very slightly and repeating. The point of iteration in games is to maintain ‘enthusiasm and attention to the point of an ending’ Atkins (2003b)

Flow is what the player feels when they get extremely involved in a game. They feel almost as one with the avatar they are supposed to be controlling on screen. They take the perfect shot or run the perfect race. It is often easy to feel the flow with pacman. Pacman is a game where you are a little yellow circle who eats dots. You are placed in maze like complex and to progress to the next level you have eat all the dots on the level. You are constantly being chased by ghosts who will gladly take one of your lives. Fortunately you can turn the tables and eat a special dot which allows you to become immortal for a few seconds and eat the ghosts once chasing you. The ability to feel flow is quite easy in this game and this is what makes it very fun to play, for me at least. Sometimes when trying to avoid ghosts and turn corners to eat dots, you feel like you are not really controlling pacman but he’s going everywhere you want him to. It almost feels like pacman is flowing round the course eating dots on the way. Confusing the ghosts by running round in circles makes you feel like you have a definitive advantage over them. In the later levels where the ghosts become cleverer, your ability to dodge them is probably more luck than skill but it feels like you are wholly responsible. It is this aspect of the game that has made pacman an extremely popular digital game.

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