APD Week6 -PLAY and FORCES (revisit)

Context

In the context of Water Pressing game and 3D Pinball in Window Media Games.

I have a specific definition about “forces” when this term comes to mind: something that is not controllable. Based on the fact when it comes to games, we always play by “rules”, bringing forces to merge with the idea of “play” is challenging and it seems impossible to me at first.

On the journey of generating the ideas of playing without controlling (not gambling), I came across the platform that I (and most kids in my generation) had: Water Pressing Game. The system works simply as you press the button to create pressure on the water and the flow will move the balls to get in the basket and that is scored. Later when Windows was published, they came with the “upgraded version” of this platform: Pinball.

What keeps me interested about these games is the way they keep us to interact with how the system work. It seems like we have the control of pushing the button, but we have little of the idea how the results will turn out.

Method

Gathering materials to create a handmade water pressing games.

Later: changing to making an animated gif in Adobe After Effect.
 

Response

The first intention I had was to make a simple water pressing game. It comes with only one button where player can press to create forces on the water flow to get the rings hooked to the stick. I went through some instructions to observe the method that makes it work, also how to handmade some parts that are unusual. However, since everything was shut down during the lock down time and I could not gather all the materials, I had to change my direction of doing something else.

I thought of making a GIF image to demonstrate the game machine instead. That was the first time I used Adobe After Effect to make a sketchy hand drawing images, since I want to make it as less digital as possible. After all I had to import the images in to make the gif, which for me the result turned out was not what I expected.

Reflection

Choosing an unfamiliar alternative to make a GIF image is somehow resembles the way I used to play Water Pressing game for the first time: I had the option but not the total control and somehow that made the game/process challenging, but also more exciting at one. Even though the result was not guaranteed, in fact, it seemed to be unpredictable and that plays a huge part in making a better interaction between user and “play”.

Thinking about what people had to play with when technology was missing, for me, it was an interesting topic to explore and kept me wondering what hooked me to keep playing these simple game machine without the boredom getting in the way. According to Collin(2018), games get boring when they are too repetitive with little to no variation, are predictable and offer no surprises to the player, don’t present enough of a challenge for players, have poor pacing that requires too much work for too little reward, or simply aren’t fun from the beginning. Perhaps, it was the variation in results that made this game work.