Devlog week 3

The game my partner and I designed is named “Who?”. For this game, a minimum of two players are paired together to learn more about their opponents self and life through asking questions. For example, a player could ask “Is your name Peyton Toups?” or “Do you have two cats?” A total of six pieces to complete the game, where five of the pieces are lined up in a row. The remaining piece is a moveable placeholder that starts in the center of the row and moves forward or backwards depending on a correct or incorrect response. If the answer to the question is correct, the piece moves forward in the row towards the player and if the answer is incorrect, the piece moves backwards, furthest away from the player. To “win” the game the centerpiece has to be all the way on your side of the row. The goal of the game is to get to know your opponent better and to have the centerpiece all the way to your side, similar to the game tug-of-war. According to Macklin and Sharp, “Direct actions are those in which the player has immediate interaction with objects and the playspace…” (Games, Design and Play, ch. 2).  This game requires direct action when moving the centerpiece object forward and backwards after a question is answered. Indirect actions are not present in this game because the players have to physically move the blocks after a response to the question. Challenges are another obstacle some games provide. In our game, the challenges are coming up with questions to ask the opponent and having to guess the answers to the questions correctly. This can become a challenge because a question can not be asked more than twice. Uncertainty “...can lead to unpredictable events in a game,” (Macklin & Sharp, Games, Design and Play, ch. 2) which I think can happen a lot in the game because the players are unsure what question the opponent is going to ask. The term chance applies to this game because each player has a different mindset with different questions to ask. Because of this every opponent you play may ask different questions which make it hard to develop strategies or skills for this game. Although competition is not intended to be present in this game, the concept of yomi may exist. Yomi is defined as “...knowing the mind of your opponent” (Macklin & Sharp, Games, Design and Play, ch. 3). In this game the player may predict that their opponent will ask a certain question based on the question that was asked before since a question can be asked twice. For example, if I asked my opponent, “Is your name Bobby?”, my opponent may ask, “Is your name Peyton?”.  Who would be defined as an expressive play game because a player “...expresses a feeling or concept, whether intended by the designer or derives from the player” (Macklin & Sharp, Games, Design and Play, ch. 3). Since this is a question-based game, the players express their questions toward the other player with the intent of guessing their answer. 

Macklin, C., & Sharp, J. (2016). Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative

  Game Design. Addison-Wesley Professional. Accessed 11 Sept. 2020