Game Fun

I read the article called "Natural Funativity" by Noah Falstein. The article talked about how humans developed a thinking of "survival" as fun. I found it fascinating to read that humans get attracted to most types of entertainment where there is threat to survival. This is because anything that threatens a humans survival automatically commands the humans full attention. This really made me realise why people are so into survival based games and other forms of entertainment where survival is the theme. 

The article also talked about mental fun. This relates to our brain wanting to be trained as if you would train your muscles to become stronger. The brain likes to practise and improve on recognising and acting to things. This is why games like "Tetris" are so popular as people like to make patterns and by practising and playing the game, the brain learns how to be more efficient at making these patterns. I found it insightful that mental fun for a human is achieved by making these patterns within their brain.

I also read an article on "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS". This article talks about MUD (multiplayer real-time virtual world) game genre and how they can be seen as games, pastimes, sports and entertainment. The article also talked about the various different play styles such as the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socialiser and the killer. There was a section of the article which showed the different ways to emphasise different playing styles when making your own MUD game which I found interesting. The tips were very informative and made perfect sense on how you would craft your game if you wanted to focus on one playing style in particular.  

I also found another article quite fascinating "The Paper Chase: Saving Money via Paper Prototyping" by John Henderson. The article talked about the benefits of paper prototyping. I found it interesting to see how beneficial the use of paper prototyping is avoiding the cost of paying employees to do various art and code that may not even be used in the final design. I found it very insightful as the article said that paper prototyping costs effectively nothing and can cut off the final cost of the project as well as let the developer know if the game is even worth pursuing. This is great knowledge to know for future if I am ever planning on making a game that I can approach it from a much smarter way of prototyping.

"Coding isn't always the answer to prototyping"
Created by: Jivago Alves
Source: creativecommons
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