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.

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?

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?