Three levels of player enjoyment

Good visual idea from the author Stewart Woods.



Source: WOODS, Stewart. Eurogames: The Design, Culture and Play of Modern European Board Games. McFarland, 2012.

Slender

I'm a big fan of indie games like Braid and Limbo. The latest (free) addition to my collection is SLENDER.

SLENDER is a short experimental horror game based on the Slender Man mythos. The Slender Man is a faceless creature with long arms in a black suit. A living nightmare from horror tales for children.



SLENDER is a first person horror game created by independent studio Parsec Productions, where your only goal is to find 8 manuscripts about the paranormal creature.

The more directly you come in contact with the Slender Man, the faster your sanity drains away. You can’t look directly at the Slender Man, or your game is over. So it’s a kind of horror hide and seek game.

The game has a lot of good features:

1) Simple first person mechanics: you only need to walk and aim your flashlight at the scenery. Perfect gameplay;

2) Very fast: you can play the whole game in fifteen minutes, and each time you play it the manuscripts (the goal) are in different places;

3) Disturbing graphics and good horror atmosphere: it’s the perfect combination for a dark environment experience;

4) A good narrative: as Dille (2007, p.16) wrote, it is important to remember that the history is working in unison with gameplay. The more your story can be told through gameplay, the better. SLENDER has a good balance between horror narrative and the gameplay, you can feel really scared playing this game.

I’m very happy with indie initiatives like SLENDER. Let's support this cause!

Check the creepy trailer below:



And to download it for free from the official website, click here.

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REFERENCE:

DILLE, Flint; PLATTEN, John Zuur. The ultimate guide to vídeo game writing and design. New York: Skip Press, 2007

Common elements between games

By Vince

In this present post I want to discuss a wide notion of essential elements that we can find in any kind of game. Take a few seconds to make a brief reflection: Which are the similarities between “Quake” and “Poker”?



Quake is a classic first person shooter with a deep story about a massive alien war in a high technological future. Poker is a traditional and abstract card game about creating card sequences to earn points.

Both games are very unique but – in a first moment – have nothing in common. But I think it’s possible to establish a list of common elements amongst two games. Let’s check some possibilities:

1) First of all, both games have a purpose. In Quake You need to destroy aliens and in Poker You have to make the best card sequences.

2) Both games have players and rules. In Quake You can play against the computer alone or in a multiplayer session; Poker needs at least two players and gets better with five or six people playing. But essentially all the players need to follow the rules that define boundaries. If You are not following the rules You are cheating and this is not fair play.

3) Both games have limited resources. In Quake are life, stamina and ammunition. In Poker is the deck of cards with four cards of each kind.

4) Game mechanics: in Quake your character aims and shoots to kill aliens stage by stage with a wide range of weapons. In Poker you pick cards trying to create the best combos and eliminate opponents.

5) We have conflicts and possibility of fun in both cases.

I think it’s possible to generate a wide list with a lot of similarities, but instead of it I want to purpose an exercise to You: search your memory and try to find two games of very different categories; in the next step, try to create a list of common elements as You saw above.

Good work!

Szia!