Category: Crawford Chapter 1

“Computer games are much like candy, comic books, and cartoons. All four activities provide
intense or exaggerated experiences. Whether they use sugar, exclamation points, or animated
explosions, the goal is the same: to provide extreme experiences”

I find this very meaningful because it’s what I thought how games works, they give us experiences and feelings that makes us learn new things, game often give us different experiences so I really think this means a lot to everyone who plays games.

“Interaction is important for several reasons. First, it injects a social or interpersonal element into the event.
It transforms the challenge of the game from a technical one to an interpersonal one.”

Interacting is really important nowadays because it makes the game feel alive, when I play games, I enjoy interacting a lot because I can learn much from it and feel the atmosphere.

“A game creates a subjective and deliberately simplified representation of emotional reality. A game is not
an objectively accurate representation of reality; objective accuracy is only necessary to the extent required
to support the player’s fantasy.”

I think games can also give what people desire, some people have their own fantasy or imagination, games can give them what they want and I really support this because happiness is very important.

“Those who overrate their own understanding undercut their own potential for learning.”

In game design or in game development, we as both the players and the developers often overrate our skill wen making a game or product. The same goes for the opposite, people often underrate themselves in their in own skills when they create a game, they can be the most skilled programmer but if they don’t think of programming in terms of improving the experience for the player, then it’s hard to say whether that person is a good game programmer. The moral of this quote is that we all have the potential to create something amazing, but we can’t undercut or overrate our abilities, we can just do what is within our skill level to use as a learning experience.

“Games are objectively unreal in that they do not
physically re create the situations they represent, yet they are subjectively real to the player”

When playing games we like, whether it be the story or the gameplay, we get this subjective attachment to it that we feel immersed into the game. Games like Persona 5 makes us immersed with the characters and gameplay but also a game like OMORI can keep us attached to the characters with its storytelling, the situations the game puts us in and that we as developers put our player in must have some sort of hook took keep them playing the whole way through our game.

“the player of a game is encouraged to explore alternatives,
contrapositives, and inversions. The game player is free to explore the causal relationship from many
different angles.”

This quote means how in games it encourages the player to create their own story instead of always being presented the facts like a regular story. Games that do this often has some kind of quest system implemented that can both influence the story and give the player optional content and gameplay to go through for story reasons, an example of a game like these can be OMORI and even the more recently released Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach by having the option to the player to access multiple endings. This is all a choice for the type of game you as the developer are going for, but as a suggestion, if you make a game where your choices should matter, and if it will have one ending no matter the choices, have a good build up in the story ending to make that ending satisfying to the player.