I have no words & I must Design - Greg Costikyan

We have recently read a section from Greg Costikyan's book, "I have no words & I must Design"

From this we took notes and tried to summarize each section into a few key points.

The Text in White is what our group came up with at first and in Green is what the class agreed on

Interaction: Costikyan talks about the relation of Puzzles to games, Puzzles are static, Games are interactive.

A Puzzle needs purpose for a player to successfully interact with a game

Players choices and Interaction shape the game state

Goals: A player needs a goal to achieve otherwise what are they playing it for?

Create purposeful and Progressive interaction

Struggle: A game needs to the correct level of struggle to involve the player in the game, without struggle a game would be too simple and the player would have no challenge, at the same time a game can't be impossible.

Every game must have some struggle, without this there is no sense of achievement and victory, however it can't be impossible

Structure: A games structure filters the players through so they can achieve their goal, structure adds to the struggle.

Players need rules within the game world to add challenge, make it more interesting and influence behaviour

Endogenous Meaning: Something in value in a game doesn't have value in reality.

Things have a value and meaning within the game,  keep the game fiction

Evaluation: Interaction, Goals, Struggle, Structure and Endogenous Meaning are all needed to create a game and all required by each other to work correctly

The elements do appear to be linked together. All these elements do not necessarily mean fun

After this we then applied these to a Key Stage 1 flash game on the BBC Bitesize website

The game we applied this to was Clock Works and is used to teach children about telling the time

Interaction: The interaction comes from trying to solve the question which is asked.

Goals: To select the correct answer from the 3 options given

Struggle: Working out the time on clock, adding the time stated in the question and getting the correct answer. The times to be added to each other aren’t always simple.

Structure: The structure of the game is basic however it is there in the 3 options that the player is given, this provides the structure to answer the question and therefore progress.

Endogenous Meaning: The values which the player must use to get the answer don’t have any meaning outside of the game, however the skills they will learn will.

Evaluation: All these elements are needed to create the game and hopefully make it fun for the players


A link to the game is below;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize/numeracy/time/index.shtml