APD Week #9 - Play and Abstraction

Weekly Response

Response link: https://youtu.be/2utY5F0-3FY

• Theme

In response to the theme of Play and Abstraction, I come up with an abstract game concept of a text game based on English and simple symbols. Players should learn the story through plain texts and symbols, and find clues to get to the next levels.

• Method

Firstly, I thought of an extremely simple narrative to be the main procedure of clues. And I observe each word to find which is the most suitable for hiding clues. The aesthetics are simple and abstract. The black background and white texts show a sense of programming of computers. Then I made this demonstration video of gameplay using AE.

• Context

Abstract forms do not exclude representational images but may extract things from the original and leave little to the original subject (Pamela, 2003). Instead of showing photos that directly show things to the audience and let them get a comprehensive knowledge of everything, the abstraction of texts weakens its straightforwardness and provides more room for imagination and personal understanding.

I got inspiration from a puzzle game named Word Game which is based on Chinese characters. The player is playing as the character ”我”， which represents self in Chinese. I really appreciate this gameplay, Chinese characters have many strokes, and each character represents an object so that clues can be designed easily. But it is difficult to utilize this idea in English because a number of letters constitute a word(object). I tried and found it was challenging, thus I added symbols to support it.

https://wordgame.cc/

• Reflection

It was hard to think of ideas under the topic of abstraction. Things that come to my mind are all shapes like triangles and squares. But later I found letters and characters are an abstract form of showing objects. While the idea of playing with letters is novel, I had a try but found English letters are too simple because most of them only have one to two strokes. I felt it was a great concept of the game if it only make use of English letters. However, this time I also added symbols that may be not that abstract.