During this week’s study, I first listened to the summer tasks of my classmates, which were speeches prepared for a video game. My classmates prepared excellent games such as “Ghost of Tsushima”(Fig.1） and “Dread Hunger”（Fig.2）, which enabled me to understand the underlying logic of the operation of these games and what their designers wanted to express. For example, in “Dread Hunger”, players are forced to “pull together in the same boat” : everyone shares an icebreaker, resources and environmental threats; But in fact, the purposes are not the same: two of the hidden “wolves” (Thracers) in the players aim to disrupt the voyage, cause accidents and assassinate in the chaos. The core charm of the game lies in this structural conflict between cooperation and betrayal, which also brings emotions such as “excitement” and “tension” to the entire game process. This is also what the game designers want players to experience.
Figure.1: Promotional artwork for Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions, 2020).
Figure.2：Gameplay screenshot from Dread Hunger (Digital Confectioners, 2021).
The other part was that the professor gave us a word “movement” and then asked us to conduct a group seminar around this word and Make a Make a map of associations. We successfully extended many things about “Movement”. For instance, “life”, “time”, and then extending from life to “food”, “water”, etc. We draw from each other’s ideas what we don’t possess. This is also what the professor wants us to learn: drawing inspiration from other places is far better than working in isolation. According to Hagen said “game designers frequently “recycle and reinvent” ideas from existing games and genres rather than creating from scratch”(Hagen, 2009, pp. 1-15)
References list：
Hagen, U. (2009) Where Do Game Design Ideas Come From? Invention and Recycling in Games Developed in Sweden. In: Proceedings of DiGRA 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. DiGRA.
Sources：
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut | PlayStation (Thailand)
Dread Hunger Review (PC) – Hey Poor Player