Exercises

1. Choose one of your favorite games and describe it using one or more of the kinds of play described in this chapter: competitive and cooperative play, skill-based play, experience-based play, chance-based play, whimsical play, role-playing, performative play, expressive play, or simulation-based play.

Fight the Landlord also called Doudizhu：competitive and cooperative play skill-based play chance-based play

Doudizhu is a card game invented by Chinese people. The game consists of 54 cards, including two joker cards, namely the big colored joker (also known as big King) and the small black and white joker (also known as small King). There are usually three players in the game, one is the landlord and the other two are farmers. Both sides play cards against each other. The landlord plays first, and when one player from either side finishes playing, the other side wins.

2. Take the game you described in Exercise 1 and try to apply another kind of play to it. What happens when a skill-based game becomes more whimsical? Or simulation based?

To eliminate the landlord concept, each play requires the player to roll the dice, and the player with a large number of cards plays the card, but the other players without cards can give any card they don't want to that player

3. Turn a competitive game into a cooperative one. How will the rules of the game change? The goal?



The goal of cooperation is to fill the board without winning or losing.


4. Choose a game of skill and turn it into a game of experience, or vice versa. How does the game need to be modified to turn it from one type to another?

Two Dots

The player’s goal is to know the whole storyline by pass each round.
In this case, the game needs to lower the difficulty of the level and add a double link at the end of each level, so as to get a new story, and the player can understand the story by going through the level.

5. Redesign a game based primarily on chance and uncertainty (Candy Land, roulette) to rely less on chance and include more player choice and strategy. Try to play it with some friends. How is the play experience different?

Blackjack

Can let the player know the banker's cards in advance, so that the player can play more conservative (bigger than the banker on the line), can also be more aggressive (must be bigger than the dealer anyway, must continue to ask for cards, if not he will lose)

Monument Valley is a game that really moved me. It's a journey of forgiveness.

The story opens with the silent princess IDA and a series of floating ornate castles. We don't know where she came from or where she's going. She and the spirit in the dark have an uninvited appointment, wandering for a long time, perhaps only for a new understanding of their own, to find a home belongs to her. During the journey, when the foot becomes a cliff, when water and waterfalls block the way forward, as long as the perspective is changed, the world in front of her is another scene, here, she found a new way of walking. She needed a new way to retrace her former path. When she entered the crow's nest, this is a kingdom without king, the original king had already lost himself, leaving only the wandering crow in the circle of the triangle around. Finally, at the top of the nest, she found the key. The slope to the ground, no understanding. Salvation is the courage to face the darkness alone, and the determination to bring flowers to a monument and the end of the journey is to return everything to its rightful owner, to find who you really are.

I love this game. Aside from the aesthetics of the game itself, the most important thing is that I think the whole game is like life. Long life, numerous challenges, most of the time to a person to face difficulties and challenges. Occasionally there will be friends to accompany, but eventually will go their separate ways, the kind of sad parting, let me want to cry; When we meet again, we are as happy as the friends we have missed for a long time.

I feel like a little girl in a game, who doesn't know what she's going to do, and who needs trial and error to make progress. There is no time limit and there is no need to compare with anyone. I am especially like me, who is clumsy in both games and life. I am not good at competing with others, and the biggest challenge is to walk a long way alone.

“while every poem or every song is certainly a system,games are dynamic systems in a much more literal sense.”


The simpler the mechanic, the more likely the player is to feel peaceful, simply because a more complex mechanic demands concentration and can be very frustrating if not well mastered. However, if the player finds the task too easy to complete, they will lose interest in the game because it no longer provides them with a challenge and therefore there is no point in continuing. Monument Valley has struck the right balance in dealing with this problem.