The first lot of research I did was in regards to emotional games. What is an emotional game and how do I get someone to feel a certain way in a game? Sounds pretty easy at first, but upon further inspection I found it to be quite difficult. The emotions I picked for my game, (happiness and depression,) were ones I had decided on from the get-go. But how do I create that in a game? How do I express that honestly within the game?
Obviously as a gamer myself I went to my roots and played some games that provoked emotion. Here's a list of the games I played snippets of to help understand emotion within games a bit better:
The Wolf Among Us.
The Walking Dead Season 1.
Brothers.
Valiant Hearts.
Now some of the ways this affected the game is quite interesting. To start, I used The Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead's choice system and implemented that into the game. Of course, it wasn't nearly as polished as those game's version was and the choices you made didn't have as much impact, (although they did have quite a large impact in the first game,) in the game about emotion they had near to no effect. I felt like since it is such a common decision for people to have choices in their games, I felt like, almost satirically, it was going to be far more effective in the emotional game to have those choices mean nothing. Throughout the game you are constantly asked questions, "Are you a boy or a girl", "are you a nice person or a mean person", "what sickness do you contract" etc, etc. Only to get to the end of the game and have it sarcastically congratulate and then the screen goes black. I felt like since most gamers are so used to having their decisions mean something, if I used these correctly in my game I would be able to shock the player into a temporary feeling of depressing awareness of their own mortality. This wasn't as effective as I had hoped but I feel that was part of my delivery and also due to how the game's writing was written. If I had put far more effort into the text I may have had a larger impact.
The way I had the game feel more happy at the beginning is I asked my wonderful audio engineer Francis to create a happy, upbeat track for the game. Here's the kind of music I wanted, the reference to Brothers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN4VAUWuKqE
Go to the time 25:50. That's the kind of music that was implemented into the game. Also at the time 39:30 you can hear very solemn music that is kind of eerie. This is the kind of music I wanted implemented at the end of the game, unfortunately I ran out of time to see this happen.
Valiant Hearts was interesting the way it drove you to appreciate the characters through cutscenes only. Originally I was going to have characters throughout the level that you'd interact with that would help drive your character's development and help you like the character more but since it was basically a 2 week assignment I left it out for the greater good.
So as for the game about trust. So at first I thought this third assessment was going to be easy peasy. I thought I understood what trust was. Boy was I wrong. After actually thinking about the kind of game I'd actually create if I were to create a game about trust I was totally lost. After thinking about this a bit more I decided to do some research.
Firstly I looked at this: http://www.youthwork-practice.com/games/games-of-trust.html
Originally I didn't feel like applying real life games theory to a digital game would have quite the same effect but after reading through after some interesting discussions we had in class I realised quite the opposite.
In the source you will see some interest games like Nature Blind Touch where players make pairs whilst one is blind folded and led by the other player through a small forest to a particular tree wher they tocuh it and rub it. Then he is lead back to the starting point and the blind fold is taken off and the player tries to find the tree again. I thought this was a really interesting concept of trust as the blind folded person must trust the person leading him not to lead him anywhere dangerous etc.
Another one is similar, it's called Leading the Blind, as the title insinuates, 4 people lead a blind person through an obstacle course using ropes whilst the blindfolded person has to hope that they don't lead them into an obstacle. Very interesting concepts. After giving these things some thought I originally decided that the game would be two player. The very, very original idea for the game that I didn't even tell my team was going to be the game was 2 player and the chick was blind but could smell / see food only. Based on the game I just told you about I was thinking there could be obstacles, predators, holes and water around the world. Player 1 would be able to see the world but would not be able to see the food, so player 1 would have to give the chick directions of how to avoid obstacles whilst the chick tried to direct player 1 to the food. In the end the trust would come in when player 1 would eventually get the food and have to decide between sharing it and keeping it for themselves.
As far as non-trust mechanics go in our game, one mechanic I think solves a lot of issues we had was the large beam of light we had above food. I got this idea from the Borderlands series. Originally players were having huge issues finding food in the world as they had no idea what they were looking for, but since Borderlands is a popular series and a lot of people will associate a beam of light with "something they can use," this almost entirely fixed our issue of people not being able to find food in the world.
Here is the picture I originally used to describe to the group what I meant.
Overall I feel like I could have done more research towards trust for the actual final product but part of me wanted to stray away from the multiplayer concept of trust since that is using people's instincts to create trust rather than the actual game mechanics. It is only occurring to me now that there is really no difference between invoking the emotions through people and invoking them through mechanics because technically being able to do so is a mechanic in itself.
I learned a lot from this final assessment and I feel like if I were tasked with creating a game about trust again, or in fact a game regarding emotions, critical thinking or anything of the like, I would do a far better job at communicating them due to my experiences here.
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