Week 02 - New Games, Old Traditions

This week, we began learning about how to design a game that is engaging and successful using six elements. Actions, rules, goals, objects, play space, and players make up the formal aspects. For a play-centric design to succeed, these pieces must work in harmony, but we must also factor in just having fun. In A Playful Path, De Koven expresses the importance of enjoyment when designing a game. He at first says that “most games don't encourage playfulness” (De Koven, pg. 32) and then elaborates on the many ways to find playfulness in the games or game-like things in your everyday life. In this unit, we are homing in on folk and new games, games that are considered unofficial, unmarketable, and a reflection of the culture that plays it. This type of play is something often learned at a young age or is very easy to get into. 

Folk and new games thrive off play for its own sake and positive socializing, and the author presents all kinds of opportunities to be playful. By expressing how he “love[s] how we play together, playing for fun, not keeping score” (De Koven, pg. 46), he reminds us that games can be both for competition and just pleasure. The point of many new games was simply to encourage interaction and silliness in activities that had little to do with winning and losing. 

Now that my group has begun the process of building a folk game, we see how difficult it can be to balance creating a playful environment and implementing formal structure to make the game engaging or have good replay value. “From Ball Pits to Water Slides” lays out the importance of structure when designing. The reading relates to the history of playgrounds and amusement parks and how to make something appealing for children. The target audience is something important to think about, especially the players’ needs. “Here, at last, was a place that had been built specifically for you and then left to your dominion,” (Brown) is how the author explained the success of McMillan’s design. Where previous designs only were made by adult creators for certain child groups, McMillan’s engaging model targeted 1) the users, 2) the wants and goals of the users, and 3) the objects and space the users played in. Essentially, understanding the demand made the final product easy to figure out. 

There is also the issue of creating a game relevant to the current culture, one that works for the people of now. Some of the activities during the New Games Movement wouldn’t be well received now, and McMillan encountered an adjacent issue as different needs sprung up. Brown writes that “…he often chafed at the demands and restrictions of his corporate partners” in his later designs to catch up with the boom in safety regulations of the 1980’s. For us as design students, it means we should be aware of the limitations and restrictions of properly designing a new game. That of course means constant playtesting, modifying, and reinvention of what we want to make in order to find the most fun, not efficient, way to play.