Welcome 2015

Happy New Year 2015!

Hope there will be a lot more exciting quest and intriguing question in this year

Torque

                                What is better to end the year other than by playing a new game?

Torque

Overview:

Torque is 2 teams competitive game. Each team consists of two players, where one player plays as the knight while the other becomes the wizard where they need to cooperate to defeat the other team. Each team will be given their turn alternately. Each turn last for only three minutes. During that time, the team that own the turn can do the action. The action that the player can do depends on what role is assigned to him/her. The knight will try to approach the other knight and attack it while the wizard cast the support magic for the friendly knight. Even so, generally what every player needs to do is to twist their rubik to get a desired number of orb on a certain face. After three minutes passed, the turn is over and the other team can start their turn. A team win when they succeed to decrease the other team knight’s health to zero first.

Ral's Big Game

Memory and Game

Have you played Final Fantasy Tactics? If you have, you must remember how tremendous the number of game element that the game has. Although not every of them is important, but heck, in the end you will try to learn and memorize most of them. Not only in Final Fantasy Tactics, all of the games must have a set of information, whether it the rules or the strategy, that the player must remember. Try to remember how much games that you have played. And if each of them has the information at least a fifth of that Final Fantasy Tactics, the total information that you have remembered must be a billion, or more! And all of them is stored in our tiny greyish brain. Isn’t it awesome? Well, actually, no. Remember again the first time you played Final Fantasy Tactics. If you like me, who played for the first time in the PSP version, you must remember how many section of tutorial that it got. And you can access all of them even at the beginning of the game. At first, I tried to be patience scrolling and watching all the tutorials. But after half an hour, my head start to get hurt, and I went into the state “The hell with the tutorial let’s just start the game!” It shows that even though our brain can store a lot of information, but it cannot do it in one go. This is very important for every game designer. Because by making your player cannot cope with the information that the game provided, it only results with the ditching of the game, or worse, making you as the player’s swore enemy. Before that happen, it would be best for us to know more about our brain.

New Alien! Emoai

New Alien! Tickle or Treat

Somewhere Out There

Archetypes, Life, and Games

Post-Nihilism and Goals in Video Game

 Other than the cycle of expectation, doubt, reality, and relief, there is something else that we can learn from archetype in story. It is the relation between mentor and shadow. Previously, I said that mentor and shadow work to drive moving forward. Without them, the hero in the story will not have a willingness to do an adventure. In our life, mentor and shadow is the representation of good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative, all the things that work in contrast, with each is located at the opposite side of the spectrum and always fight with each other. In a story, usually, at the end of it we will see either mentor won over shadow or the opposite (most of the time it was the former). Similarly, in our life we always believe or being told that the right would eventually win in the end. If this is the nature of the interaction of mentor and shadow, the right and wrong, where they always fight between themselves and in the end there is only one which become a winner, this create a question. Is it true?

Curiouser, Curiouser

“Curiouser and curiouser," surprised Alice when she saw her body began to grow big, larger enough that even her head hit the roof. words which perfectly fits with the story of Alice in Wonderland, a story full of strange yet interesting situation that intrigue more and more our curiosity. And yes, without the feeling of curiosity, Alice would never eat the troubling cake, and so do we, as readers, won’t continue turn the next pages. Curiosity itself is strange. It could drive us to do a certain activity without the concern of the external value, something that we, as a proud rational being should never think of. However, we always experienced it. When we curious about something, what we really care about is the thing itself, which we want to know more about it. Curiosity actually quite similar with the reason why we play. When we play, we only did it because we found that the play is fun, and it is worth to do, even though we already know it will only waste our time (I believe there are a lot of people object what I have just said, but let’s just accept it, whatever the benefit the play gives to you, it actually less than the other more important activities would give).  Without the feeling of curiosity, or the reason that makes us play, we will feel the activity just as a chore, work, or order. By knowing more about it, I believe we could make a more engaging play or specifically, game. So without further a do, let’s jump into the rabbit hole.

Sword & Shield

Sword & Shield

Only a Story, Really?

Story has been with us since long. Even though there are no track record when the story first emerged, some people speculated that story has history older than the cave painting. We grow and live hearing a story, yet one question remains. Why we’re not bored with it? Why we always crave from story even though we’re already at modern civilization?

Game, Kohlberg, and Kant

Lately, there are many games which include moral choice as one of their features. Games such as Fable, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Skyrim will determine whether the action that player did is good or bad, and give the consequence based on how well mannered the player in the game. Personally, not only it makes game more interesting and gives much agency to the player, but also I believe it could help the player to measure the morality of every action that s/he did in their lives. Even though currently there are no evidence showed that the player who plays a game with moral choice feature increased in the number of his/her moral action (at least from what I know), I think it’s a good idea to see how exactly some action are seen as having positive or negative moral value. By doing so, maybe we can further improve the moral choice in our game.

Through out my research, there are two theories about moral value that captivated me. They are Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and Kant’s moral philosophy.

Archetype in Video Game

Same as the other medias, such as movie and novel,  archetype usually used in video  game as a guide to create an interesting character. However, just like what I wrote in my recent post (http://questandquestion.blogspot.com/2014/06/only-story-really.html ),  archetype does not only show a different function of character in the story, but also a part of the audience  mind. So, the question is, how we create a game that emphasize on these different part of our mind, the archetype? Is by creating a character with a certain archetype as his/her personality enough?

All Quest Begin with an Introduction

Hello and welcome to Quest and Question, a blog which try to discover the ultimate game design. Well, ultimate is such a vague word actually, it differs for every person. But for me, it is a design which is not only fun but also creates a meaningful value to its player. Most of what I write come up from many areas varying from philosophy, psychology, literature, and many more. But a note though, if you hope finding some way to trick people to become addicted to your game, by any means, close this blog and go to the others cause I will not cover those things. Most of the time I will write my short unpolished premature thought of a certain design (which I called Mutter Matter), but some other times, I will write a longer text comes from a more deep though of a certain mutter matter (namely, Tough Thought). other than that, I also will share a game concept that I made, even though it won't be too often. 

Okay, I hope what you read in here could be useful. Oh, and please, treat what you found in here as a piece of jigsaw puzzle, which will only shows its shape when you join it with the other pieces, such as your knowledge. Well, Happy reading :D

P.S. : I'm truly sorry if there are a lot of grammatical errors in my writing. I hope with the help of the mighty dragon called time, it could be better someday. But for now, please bear with it  ><