• Creative environment EXTROVERT
may result in some groups being astonished or disappointed when their “baby games” are developed further in a way that they had not expected!
This method can also help if you want to design a game for a certain device (i.e., a cell phone); the device, with all of its functionality, is the start item instead of the dice.
Dull world
• Boring
• Reruns on TV
• People are fat and ugly
• No change
• Strong traditions
Disneyreich
• Retro always in
• Entertainment docu TV
• Talent shows
• At home only to sleep
• Very distinct subcultures
• Rivaling subcultures
STABLE
• A map of four possible future worlds
sion and large gaps between the rich and the poor, and MultiMonsterMania was a cross-society game that street kids could use to get money, either by programming cool stuff or breeding cool monsters.
This method can be used to widen the design space, especially if creating games for that world, but unlike the other methods, it sets the conditions for the game, rather than stating anything about the game itself—a potential downside. Also, there is a risk that all the creative effort goes into imagining the worlds, leaving nothing for the games. This is of course easily solved by letting the exercise run over two occasions. Also, if more than one group is doing this, they can benefit from describing their worlds to each other; any group may then pick any world that inspires them.
interactions November + December 2008
• Prototyping MonstroCity: from left to right, Anders Quist, Leif Ryd, and Anders Mårtensson. Below, a MultiMonsterMania monster.
In this exercise, participants list a set of opposites, e.g., rich-poor, introvert-extrovert, nomadic-stable, hot-cold, science-New Age [ 6]. Thereafter, each group chooses two sets and uses them to create a diagram with four quadrants combining the two opposites. They then try to imagine four future worlds (one for each quadrant) strongly characterized by these properties.
These future worlds are then used for inspiration. Either the worlds themselves become the environment of the games (e.g., a first-person shooter game set in a post-holocaust world), or one can take imagination a step further by trying to come up with what kind of games would be played in this particular future. Both approaches can result in very odd game ideas, but the latter may be more demanding. However, it can also be more rewarding; during a workshop in 2001 [ 7], this approach led to the idea of MultiMonsterMania, a collectible card game system in which some cards had programmable content and others had DNA—the patient could breed monsters. The background was a world with lots of self-expres-
Gameplay Design Patterns— Designing With Special Interactions in Mind Gameplay design patterns are a way to describe the patterns, or parts, of gameplay and the interrelations between them. Patterns can be high level and deal with emotional outcomes (e.g., tension or immersion). They can be very low level and deal with components (e.g., dice, cards, or avatars). They can also fall somewhere in between, dealing with interaction (e.g., bluffing, betting, movement, and so on), information (e.g., symmetric information, public information etc.), or game conditions (e.g., safe havens, race, rewards, etc.). There is a collection, by Holopainen and Björk [ 8], but even without this you can find and name the patterns
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