Game Studies / Lectures & Exercises
Daphne Lai Yu Cheng / 0366380
GCD 61504 / Games Studies / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylors' University
Week 1 (22/9/2025):
Game Design: Art and science of creating interactive experiences for the purpose of fun and playfulness. A combination of creativity, technical skills and user psychology.
1) Player Experience
- Focus on Emotion
- User Centered Design
- Flow State (locked in/autopilot mode)
- Playful Experiences (PLEX)
2) Gameplay Mechanics
Primary Mechanics: Core actions players perform in the game.
- Movement/Turn Actions
- Dice Rolling
- Card Drawing/Playing
- Resource Management
- Trading
- Exploration
- Positive Feedback
- Negative Feedback
- Dynamic Feedback Loops
3) Storytelling in Games
- Player Agency
- Environmental Storytelling
- Narrative Arcs
4) Balance and Challenge
- Difficulty Curve
- Skill vs. Luck
- Player Progression
5) Enhance & Refine Game Design
Feedback and Iteration: Ensure the game is playable and enjoyable at all levels. Help indentify any design flaws or areas where the player experience may be impacted negatively.
- Playtesting
- Feedback Loops
- Fine tuning the experience
Immersion and Worldbuilding: Elevates the emotional engagement of the game. Adds depth and context to the actions players take, making them feel more significant.
- Immersion
- Context for actions
Challenges in Game Design
- Over complication
- Failing to Adapt
- Monetization vs Player Experience
Figure 1.1 The Game of Life and Scrabble (22/9/2025)
Week 2 (29/9/2025):
Education: Simple knowledge acquisition. Problem solving, critical thinking or real world application.
Challenges and how to balance fun and education?
Serious games and edutainment require a balance between engagement and learning.
Strategies for fun and balance
1) Learning through play
Real world scenarios allow players to learn through trial and error while engaging in strategic decision making.
2) Layered learning
Layering gaming experience, how to use game elements to enable learning, how to strategise. Players can unlock educational elements as they progress or explore certain features of the game.
3) Game Mechanics as Educational Tools
Problem solving, using the game's mechanics to directly teach concepts. Games that require problem solving or puzzle mechanics to unlock levels or rewards.
4) Storytelling with Purpose
Using narratives as reinforcements, create a narrative that reinforces educational objectives while remaining engaging to ensure that the story provides emotional stakes and relevance to the educational content.
Avoiding over intstruction in gameplay mechanics
- Edutainment Fatigue, avoid making the educational content too forced and feel like a chore.
- Focus on fun mechanincs that naturally integrate learning.
- Use gradual learning by not bombarbing the player with information all at once.
- Intrinsic motivation: Players are driven by curiosity, exploration and achievement.
- Extrinsic motivation: Rewards like points, levels or badges reinforce progress.
We listed out our current ideas for our proposals and consulted with Ms. Anis. She provided us with feedback on how to improvise them. After class, we played another table top game, A Quiet Year. It was quite a complicated game at first but it was interesting because it requires players to think critically and creatively :D
Figure 1.2 A Quiet Year (29/9/2025)
Week 3 (6/10/2025):
Week 4 (13/10/2025):
Week 5 (20/10/2025):
Week 6 (27/10/2025):
Week 7 (3/11/2025):
Exercise 1: My most favourite video game & what makes this game playful (22/9/2025)
Choose a video game title or table-top game that you really, really like. Is there one that kept you returning to play it, even though you have stopped playing for quite some time?
According to the list of Principles of Games Design in this lecture, review the best parts of the game that makes you a fan, as well as the parts where you think the game could use some improvements (Enhance and Refine).
Present your findings from the position of ‘PLAYER’ in the report template.
Exercise 2: Non digital to digital - Evolution and remediating this game (6/10/2025)
Identify a non-digital game which has been converted into a digital version. This can differ from the one you played together with your groupmate.
Discuss on:
1. Brief explanation of the gameplay
2. Differences and similarity of play dimension (real life vs on screen)
○ Tip! Pick a game with either real-time or turn-based action; describe its core game mechanics and explain how the player experiences them temporally during both play dimensions.
3. Benefits and disadvantages of three-dimensional:
○ Tip! Find a game that has appeared in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional versions; compare, and give grounds for whether three-dimensional is beneficial or not in games.
Week 2 (29/9/2025)
1. Heartbeat: Has potential, keep the game speed, create more engagement, come up with a way for the next person to cover back (protagonist & antagonist).
2. Lost in Translation: Come up a winning mechanism, can look at existing game mechanism.
3. Medical: Make something different with happy family, think about the narrative, more scenarios, the roles can have more conditions.
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