"Game fun"

Reading Week 8 

Link to image: here

For week 8 I started reading about  3 things , "Natural Funativity", "Clubs,Diamonds, Hearts, Spades: Players who suit MUDs" and a useful review on "MDA Framework"

Natural Funativity By Noah Falstein: For this reading it focused on the key phrase what makes a game fun?  and goes into brief detail on underlining the reasons for human preferences and behavior.By mentioning how we as humans have a basic drive for survival in our instinct through years of evolutionary history. The writer then goes on to say how games are a specialized form of play and that goes deep into our history as and that the overall drive to play is fundamental to humanity as it is overall all about learning about survival, reproduction and the necessary rules of behavior. I found this reading to be quite interesting as I have never looked at games from this point of view and how overall drives us as a species not only as entertainment , but also in our rles and behaviors as a species.

MDA Framework by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek: For this reading I mainly focused on the following which was under the heading Aesthetics which Talked about the 8 kinds of fun.

• Sensation: Which Described the game as sense Pleasure
• Fantasy: Which described the game as Make believe as fantasy is described as "the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable thing"s according to google dictionary.
• Narrative: Game as drama which word be more story driven (ex telltale games)
• Challenge: Which would be obstacle based such as for example a time trial based game .
• Fellowship: Which is all about framework which is described as an essential structure of a building , vehicle or object.
• Discovery: Which is described as a game in uncharted territory
• Expression: Which are described a game as self discovery
• Submission: Which is described a  game as a pastime for example possibly a sports game the player may be fond of 

I found this reading the most helpful out of them as it allowed me to read about eight different types of games and to be able to have brief descriptions on how to describe each of them . I also love how the writers use games such as charades, sims and Quake as a way of describing them in more detail as I do find at times when writers use things as descriptions to be quite hard to understand, however since I am familiar and have played a lot of these it made it much easier to understand this reading.

"Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades Players who suit MUDs by Richard Bartle": Overall I found this one Perhaps as I am not familiar with the word MUD. I did however good what it was and foud the following here which described it as a virtual world multiplayer game taking place during real time. Similar to league of legend or World of Warcraft for example. It shows off a few intersting things one of which is the Interest Graph as it shows the following players in great deatil on each of the following

1. Acting
2. Killers
3. Players
4. Socialisers
5. Interacting
6. Explorers
7. World 
8. Achievers

 I also found it helpful how it went into detail on the following things  in headings under acting

• Ways to emphasise players over World
• Ways to emphasise world over Players
• Ways to emphasise interacting over Acting
• Ways to emphasise acting over interacting

This was quite helpful as it shows changes to the programming that the administrator may consider when considering how to shape their MUD.

My Overall Thoughts

Overall I found these readings quite helpful in a few ways from seeing how game fun links to human preferences, to how administrators can consider multiple things when shaping and creating their MMO's .