After reading through oiligarchy postmortem a few questions about my own work have come up. First of all, what does putting the player in a position of “privilege” do for my message? Does the game play and mechanics represent the politics of the situation? What is necessary to add/take away from the game in order to help the player understand systematic discrimination?
Making the decision to put the player in my game in the “bad guy” position is a concern to me because initially, I thought that it might undermine my message or at the very least, make the game seem too cynical. However, it seemed to be the most powerful way to get the idea of systematic discrimination and polarization across because the player is directly responsible by stamping each character in an effort to assist or keep them from passing through the gates. Where I find it’s going to be effective or not is in the feedback, and right now in my proto, I don’t see it being effective in two reasons. First, is the overlord character’s getting angry enough feedback for the player to care or not? Does it matter whether or not Tom Tancredo is angry? What matters is what the overlord can DO as the result of his satisfaction/dissatisfaction. So, there needs to be some way the player is affected as sneetches go through the gates or not. How does the game get more difficult or easy based on gate input? The second reason feedback in my game is lacking is that there is no “good” that results from “good” actions (such as allowing brown sneetches to go through the gate). Is this necessary. And what type of “good” happens? Although I don’t want these good actions to be directly rewarding the player in the sense that it helps them win the game, there needs to be a reason and motivation for the player to be curious enough to be defiant…
In terms of conveyance of politics through the gameplay, the mechanic of stamping the sneetches has the potential to be very powerful (although in my proto it feels kind of janky due to convoluted code :P ). Right now I don’t think it’s too terribly powerful because I only have a small amount of characters to work with, but once I get the individual sprite code hammered out for one and I’m able to easily duplicate them, I think there will be something there due to an increased number of characters on the screen. The reason being one, the amount of chaos the player has to manage and two the feeling of dealing with the mass discrimination will come across (I hope). Again this goes back to the feedback for the player and the visualization of winning/losing the game.
So what I need to hash out this week…
- Determine different types of feedback that occur throughout the game play - it needs to be more than just an angry/happy overlord. Sounds like I need to actually start writing my game design document since I’ve been lazy about that. I will do that this week!
- Improve individual game code so it’s easier to duplicate characters (right now it’s a bit of a pain). Not sure if it’s possible but worth a try. Hopefully if I’m able to make the character code more efficient, the game will feel less janky.
- Work on game art. Although it’s just a proto at this point, I’m seeing the need to spend a little more time working on the characters, gates, overlord and I need to figure out backgrounds.
Questions? Comments? Derogatory remarks?
