"Hello Kitty Online" (HKO) seems to be a side project by Sanrio Co. to test the waters of social gaming online; a virtual space in which members can create avatars and communicate interact and socialize. I suspect that when HKO was released, it was intended to be used for just that by Hello Kitty's Target audience of pre-teen girls.
Our class decided to get online with our own objectives: 1) "occupy" the world of HKO by protesting against whatever wrong we accuse Hello Kitty of doing and 2) see if the sever which we occupy could handle such a volume of players (roughly 30 of us participated). We fulfilled our first objective by finding and surrounding Hello Kitty on our sever and filling the public chat box with things like "WE WANT DEMEOWCRACY!" and "Hello Kitty is of the 1%!". We found that the server accommodated our volume of players rather well. Overall, it was a fun exercise in changing and breaking the rules of a game in order to experiment and/or have fun.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Makign a Game; personal analysis of what I made so far
My game "Undisclosed Contents" is a text-based adventure videogame made with Inform 7. The embedded narrative is that the player is trying to smuggle a briefcase of undisclosed contents past airport security and onto a commercial flight. The game takes place entirely at an airport. The player must navigate throught the airport and find appropriate and/or necessary channels to get their briefcase to their flight by relying on specific narrative feed directly to them at each even and location within the game.
the Culture behind the game is that of criminal heist movies such as "Ronin" (1998) and Ocean's 11 where the protagonist is a professional criminal/mercenary (or aspire to be one) and must outwit and/or outfight anything or anybody that gets in the way. [spoilers] "Ronin" inspires the game with the notion that the means are much more interesting than the ends, and that the object in question is reduced to a simple plot element (ie: in Ronin, the briefcase that everyone in the movie kills or is killed over never has its contents disclosed; the contents can really be, well, anything, and whatever it is, it's enough to kill, steal and lie over) [/spoilers]. This kind of game would fare well in a market of people who enjoy games that are heavily narrative driven and in a market that has a pricepoint that people who may enjoy paper-back novels would appreciate (ie $5-$10 range). This is mainly due to the nature of the game's presentation, mechanics and aesthetics.
the Culture behind the game is that of criminal heist movies such as "Ronin" (1998) and Ocean's 11 where the protagonist is a professional criminal/mercenary (or aspire to be one) and must outwit and/or outfight anything or anybody that gets in the way. [spoilers] "Ronin" inspires the game with the notion that the means are much more interesting than the ends, and that the object in question is reduced to a simple plot element (ie: in Ronin, the briefcase that everyone in the movie kills or is killed over never has its contents disclosed; the contents can really be, well, anything, and whatever it is, it's enough to kill, steal and lie over) [/spoilers]. This kind of game would fare well in a market of people who enjoy games that are heavily narrative driven and in a market that has a pricepoint that people who may enjoy paper-back novels would appreciate (ie $5-$10 range). This is mainly due to the nature of the game's presentation, mechanics and aesthetics.
Game Session Report 1: "Are You a Werewolf?"
"Are You a Werewolf?" is a game where players are divided into two teams: villagers and werewolves. There is one person who stays on the side and is the narrator, who oversees the game and makes sure that the game is played correctly and knows the assigned identities of each player. The game is played in rounds signified as days, where werewolves conspire and eliminate a villager per night while the villagers have to find who among the players are the werewolves and lynch during the day. This is a game of reading others, being accused, and knowing how to deal with being accused. Villagers can easily wrongfully accuse and lynch fellow villagers because the werewolves have to rely on secrecy and cunning in order to persuade the fellow players that they themselves are not werewolves, allowing them to strike for another turn. The villagers are not completely in the dark, as there is one villager who is a see'er, who at each night can confirm with the narrator whether or not a single selected player is a werewolf. The See'er can try to guide the village to deliver rightful prosecution, but is always under risk of being compromised and killed rather quickly in the night by werewolves. Each turn ends when someone is lynched. The game is over when the number of villagers is the same as the number of werewolves.
The game was pretty fun, even when played among people who are relatively strangers. If requires players to tap into what they know or have b learned of human actions and reactions and how to deal with them. In an exciting and sometimes frightening way, the dynamics of the game can feel like what one could expect during a 17th-century witch trial: accusations towards others can be as simple as "he looked at me funny," "she's been rather quiet" or "you are awfully quick to accuse." The first few rounds were heavily directed by James, our instructor that introduced the game to us, but after a few sessions, some of the players among us grew comfortable enough with the rules that the main group split into two different sessions, each with a game master who had played a only few sessions, demonstrating how quickly the game can be learned. Overall, pretty fun and can even be used as an ice-breaker game.
The game was pretty fun, even when played among people who are relatively strangers. If requires players to tap into what they know or have b learned of human actions and reactions and how to deal with them. In an exciting and sometimes frightening way, the dynamics of the game can feel like what one could expect during a 17th-century witch trial: accusations towards others can be as simple as "he looked at me funny," "she's been rather quiet" or "you are awfully quick to accuse." The first few rounds were heavily directed by James, our instructor that introduced the game to us, but after a few sessions, some of the players among us grew comfortable enough with the rules that the main group split into two different sessions, each with a game master who had played a only few sessions, demonstrating how quickly the game can be learned. Overall, pretty fun and can even be used as an ice-breaker game.
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