Game Elements

 Game Elements 

So adding from what I said in my last blog, I have learned more and read more deeply into the whole concept of video games themselves than actually playing them and enjoying them from the outside instead of what's going on, on the inside of the whole game process. For this blog, I wanna talk about the whole Game Elements that surround the process of making a video game. I have read that games like everything have qualities about them and every game has a different quality about them. And they all have their own genres,  objectives, goals, and missions inside them. 

Games are activities, they are artificial/safe/ outside ordinary life, they are voluntary, they contain elements of make-believe/representation/simulation, they are inefficient, they are art, and they are closed systems.  

I also understand that there are Atomic Elements, now I didn't understand that term until now but it makes a lot of sense to what I already understand about playing video games and their Elements. Here is some Example of the Elements inside a video game : 

 ● Players: How many players do the game support? Must it be an exact number (4 players only), or a variable number (2 to 5 players)? Can players enter or leave during play? How does this effect play?

What is the relationship between players: are there teams, or individuals? Can teams be uneven?

 ● Objectives (goals):  What is the object of the game? What are the players trying to do? This is often one of the first things you can ask yourself when designing a game if you’re stuck and don’t know where to begin. Once you know the objective, many of the other formal elements will seem to define themselves for you.

 ● Rules:  There are three categories of rules: setup (things you do once at the beginning of the game), progression of play (what happens during the game), and resolution (what conditions cause the game to end, and how is an outcome determined based on the game state).

Some rules are automatic: they are triggered at a certain point in the game without player choices or interaction (“Draw a card at the start of your turn” or “The bonus timer decreases by 100 points every second”). Other rules define the choices or actions that the players can take in the game and the effects of those actions on the game state.

 ● Resources and Resource Management 

What kinds of resources do the players control? How are these resources manipulated during play? This is something the game designer must define explicitly.

 ● Game State 

In video games, someone must define the game state, because it includes all of the data that the computer must keep track of. Normally this task falls to a programmer, but if the game designer can explicitly define the entire game state it can greatly aid in the understanding of the game by the programming team.

 ● Information 

How much of the game state is visible to each player? Changing the amount of information available to players has a drastic effect on the game, even if all other formal elements are the same.

 ● Sequencing 

In what order do players take their actions? How does play flow from one activity to another? Games can work differently depending on the turn structure that is used.

 ● Player Interaction 

This is an often-neglected but highly important aspect of games to consider. How do players interact with one another? How can they influence one another?

 ● Theme (Narrative, Backstory, Setting)

 ● Games as System

The one thing that I found at the beginning that was quite challenging is how overwhelming the challenges of making a video game, for a lot of companies for example Rockstar Games, for example, they spent about 7 years developing the idea for Grand Theft Auto which was a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the first main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series since 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV. This game won major awards by  VGX Award for Game of The Year in 2013,  British Academy Games Award for Multiplayer in 2014, BAFTA Games Award for British Game in 2014, and VGX Award for Most Anticipated Game in 2012, and plenty more awards also. This game went along with other GTA games in the past had gone through a lot of tests and processes of developing this game and there was a lot of malfunctions and fails over the years but they still manage to maintain a very successful games company with other games such as Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne, Midnight Club,  LA Noire and the old controversial game called ManHunt. 

Now this game was very graphic and was very controversial across the entire world that it ended up on many news channels such as BBC, News Guardian, Daily Star, etc. The game was banned in New Zealand and confiscated in Germany. It received even more negative press when it was implicated in a UK murder, although the game was eventually absolved of all involvement.     

Game Design Research 

This part of the game development has to be one of the most important tasks of the game itself because you gather information about things that relate to your game that you want to make. For example, if you want to make a war game, you gather up information about what other game developers had done and implemented and try adding in some of your own ideas into the mix and also the way how the game will look like, Will it be a modernised War game or Will it be a War game set in a particular time back in the day such as WW1 or WW2 or Roman Times or Medival Times, etc. Also what kind of items is gonna be added into the game as well as guns, vehicles, the types of characters and voice actors, etc.

People can use Primary Research and Secondary Research of developing a video game as well. For Primary Research, companies can do Postal surveys, Telephone interviews, Online surveys, Face-to-face surveys, Focus groups, Test marketing. Also, some forms of Secondary Research include Data, stories, and sources available on the Internet. Commercial information sources is another example which is basically Local newspapers, journals, magazines, radio, and TV stations are a great source to obtain data for secondary research. They can analyze data that is collected and identify if all questions are answered. If not, repeat the process if there is a need to dwell further into actionable insights.