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.

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.

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.