Reflection on the Gaming Presentation

One of the key elements we had trouble explaining or defining was who are audience would be. The game concept was so expansive, and adaptable, that it could really be written to accommodate most audiences. The aspect we wanted to hone in on was social interaction in exuberant, extravagant high-spending society, so that would appeal to people in their consumptive stages of life, from teens to late forties.

We had a problem defining the audience, and ultimately communicating what the game would be about, because we didn’t have an end goal in mind for the game. We wanted the player’s options to be limitless in these ‘levels’, these stages of social interaction, but the limitless options would drown the player in purposelessness. We had a hard time trying to find a balance between a sandbox game and real fake life.

The objectives of our game were hard to describe because there didn’t seem to be any. There were plenty of goals, optional conditions a player could meet to gain a reward, but that’s all there were. Like a define-your-own-adventure book, the player would need to ‘create’ his/her own objectives through interacting with the NPCs of the world. It would have been better if we could define a particular objective for each scenario - for example, the player would have to interrupt or stop the wedding in that level. In that case, there would be multiple paths the player could take to stopping the wedding, but each path would have goals that would need to be met to advance towards the ultimate goal (objective) of stopping the wedding.

The rules were difficult to explain for the same reason as the objectives: there wasn’t a defined motivation for the character, so it was hard to define what the character would be willing (and therefore able) to do to fulfill a goal or solve a problem. For example, could the character climb around in the environment? Unless there was some object to obtain or person to talk to on a roof, it seems like that wouldn’t be necessary; but we want the game to accommodate anything the player wants to do.

The goals were easy to define. They were integrated into the interface in the List menu, and would be updated every time a player gains new info about the goal. The mechanics of the game were built around achieving these goals through dialogue and action. There would be potential for mini games built into the context of the game narrative.