Last week in class, we talked about the definition of play. It’s interesting for me because I always treated games as products instead of activities. From a higher perspective, things become more abstract, but I think they are useful. Just introduce some thought about these six essential things about the definition of play.
1. Free
Of course. The reason we play games is they brings us nothing but happiness or other emotion we need. Why we have to do something but get nothing? But on the other hand, for us developers, we can try to make some feature in our game to reduce players’ churn rate.
We all know that a certain way of getting happiness has a threshold value. Because of marginal diminishing effect, as time goes by, the happiness we get from a certain gameplay reduces. Once the happiness we can get becomes lower than the threshold value, we leave. One way to stop players from leaving is offering them different ways to get happiness. For instance, in World of Warcraft, they offered two totally different way of playing: raid and arena. Once you get bored with long, time consuming raid, you can turn to fast paced arena to find another kind of stimulation. It’s OK for developers, because you are still in the game.
2. Separate
I don’t agree all of this. Obviously, most games are isolated from rest of life, but you’ll never know if game will be more close or not in the future. Considering that our phone and wearable device become more and more popular, we can image that there may be games become a indivisible part of our life. Let’s make Ingress as an example. Sometimes you put your phone in your pocket, but you’re still in game: you’re rushing to the next portal! There is no obvious signal of when game ends.
I want to read the materials again than update this. To be continue.
1. Free
Of course. The reason we play games is they brings us nothing but happiness or other emotion we need. Why we have to do something but get nothing? But on the other hand, for us developers, we can try to make some feature in our game to reduce players’ churn rate.
We all know that a certain way of getting happiness has a threshold value. Because of marginal diminishing effect, as time goes by, the happiness we get from a certain gameplay reduces. Once the happiness we can get becomes lower than the threshold value, we leave. One way to stop players from leaving is offering them different ways to get happiness. For instance, in World of Warcraft, they offered two totally different way of playing: raid and arena. Once you get bored with long, time consuming raid, you can turn to fast paced arena to find another kind of stimulation. It’s OK for developers, because you are still in the game.
2. Separate
I don’t agree all of this. Obviously, most games are isolated from rest of life, but you’ll never know if game will be more close or not in the future. Considering that our phone and wearable device become more and more popular, we can image that there may be games become a indivisible part of our life. Let’s make Ingress as an example. Sometimes you put your phone in your pocket, but you’re still in game: you’re rushing to the next portal! There is no obvious signal of when game ends.
I want to read the materials again than update this. To be continue.