All posts filed under: DIGC 310

Kickstarter Boad Game Review: Hitman Holiday

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This week I drew up the last designs for the board game layout. The other team members will have their own designs to present too. We’ll be deciding on the design next week. I want it to be less square and more round, and configure multiple paths onto the board. I’ve drawn a figure eight, a flower like structure, and a 3 ring board. Each circle in the designs are representative of time and ‘years’ at uni. I’m not sure how you will navigate between them yet. Hitman Holiday places ten assassins in one resort, with only one task: be the “Number One Killer.” The developers, Medieval Lords, from Brisbane, Queensland, created the only successful board game (besides card games) funded on Kickstarter, in Australia. 212 backers pledged $19,606 to help bring Hitman Holiday to fruition, in March, 2015. Why? Because Medieval lords effectively reduced the risk of investing for players on Kickstarter, and I’ll list how below. The theme is not culturally bound – except the majority of player models are Caucasian. This might reflect the promotion and ability to distribute within …

Not Monopoly, Again!

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The board game design is not finalised yet, but we made progress with the game mechanics. I’m pushing for a quick 30 min game that does not depend upon money but is all about the debt you collect. It’s my antithesis of monopoly. After the lecture on Mods and Machinima, my first thought was: how do you mod a board game? You can’t install a pre-constructed object and implement it into the game data structure. You would have to do it yourself – even learn new rules. The thing is, I learnt it’s not that complicated. You just have to convince yourself and others, that Monopoly could be good – if we got rid of the houses and we all got super powers. “Board game mash up: Cluedo + Scrabble” Hide & Seek Productions have developed a multi-platform guide that puts different board games together to revitalise the play. Boards games can become boring, predictable and long – especially if its some the most common family board games: Cluedo, Monopoly, Scrabble, and Trivial Pursuit. Hide & Seeks book ‘The Boardgame Remix Kit’ …

Are you a ̶B̶o̶y̶ or a Girl?

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When a game asks what gender am I – I select female, even though I identify as a male. This is always the case in MMORPGs, and was for Runescape. A choice of gender presented as binary options doesn’t really represent gender, beyond the physical expression of movement and clothing (both of which appealed to me more in the female form). If I have difficulty relating to the gender choices in games imagine the challenge a transgender player would experience, or a female only presented with a male choice (NPR 2015). My choice of Female revealed two key relationships between my identity and the game: gender exploration, which leads on to gender exploitation. The exploration aspect of choosing a female, is exactly that: I desire to play a female instead of a male. Games allow me to transfer myself into an avatar. Moore (2011) describes this as a “tranformation onto another ego”. I’m not only representing a female, I am also actualising a performance that affects other players too. I can be a different person interacting with someone else. But alas, I’m still …

Independent. Or Studio. There is no both.

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McCrea’s asserts that the Australian game industry has recently made bold new choices, fostering a union between studios like Melbourne based mobile game studio Firmint, and independents developers.  But apparently you can only be one, not both. I came across a different perspective from an ex-employee of Firemint, Logan Booker, in his article on Kotaku My First Week As An Indie Game Developer. Logan’s article documents the reasons why he left Firemint to develop his own game. The first reason was the limitation placed on him due to the contract stipulating that he can only work on games for that company. This restriction is a common clause found in most developers contracts. Not something I expected from Australia’s gaming industry supporting independent game developers. Maybe the game industry is still suffering from some of the issues which destroyed itself in the past, like bad work cultures. But in this case its pushing people to commit and risk their jobs to be an independent, and its working. After the article on Kotaku, Booker found a partner, created the studio Screwfly Studios and finished his game …

Outside The Crosshair in Counter Strike

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After my first round of Counter Strike my friends laughed at me for how much of a loser I was at sucking so much. Shortly after, I bought the game on Steam and embarked on a long 3 year journey to reach the top 3 players on an Australian server of 100,000 for the map CS_Office. But Counter Strike became a lot more than a violent, team based shooter that I was really good at. I learnt a lot about how to preempt an enemy’s decision, adapt under pressure, and coordinate a team – I wish these could be listed on my resume. I discovered mods, hacks, custom servers, custom game modes, friends, and international friends.  “In a first-person shooter looking and shooting, tend to overlap” (Bittanti 2006). But it was outside of where you were looking that mattered most to me in Counter Strike. Counter Strike is a universe of servers, and each server was inhabited by recognisable players native only to that world. To describe this experience I’ll use Klastrup’s (2007) fantastic description: game worlds are “persistent online representations, which contains the …