Game fun

The Biggoron sword

 This weeks reading tasks focus on how elements of a game work to make a game something enjoyable and fun. In the first article, the topic of 'gameification' is discussed. Gameification is the idea of turning tasks into something entertaining, this is seen throughout games. In my opinion this is seen most commonly in what are known as 'fetch quests' in games. A fetch quest is when you are tasked with bringing an item to a character for some sort of reward. An amazing example of the gameification of a fetch quest is the quest to forge the Biggoron sword in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is a long enough quest that requires you to trade many different items with many different characters in order to finally be able to forge the sword. There is a section in the quest where you need to deliver some eye drops to the Goron in order for him to forge the sword for you but the eye drops will go bad after a certain amount of time. This time limit forces you to find the quickest path from Lake Hylia to the top of Death Mountain in order to deliver the eye drops before they go bad. The addition of this time limit creates a sense of urgency in this quest and also makes it into a race of sorts. This is a very simple way of making a relatively simple task into something much more interesting. 

The second article that I read was an academic paper about why people find games fun and why they sometimes don't find them fun. Something that I saw spoken about a lot in this paper is that people tend to find games more fun when they can play them with others. The Wii and Guitar Hero were mentioned as particularly entertaining things within gaming. But gaming with others seems to be a double edged sword. Many people also spoke about negative expereinces that they had while playing games with others. This most commonly happened while playing online games where players would experience verbal abuse from others while playing.

These articles have brought how important it is to take relatively boring elements and make them something more interesting in a game in order to keep players engaged.