Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Concerning
artifact validation method
, the game exercises an approximative
automated validation combinedwith the offlinemutual agreement. Here, the “approx-
imative” means that the winning conditions of the game is not equal with desired
artifacts we want to acquire from the game (i.e. the hidden term relationship), they
are only aligned through the scheme of the score computation: the player receives
points only when he effectively reduces the search result set with some negative
terms—but those negative terms are not necessarily related to the given task term,
nor the terms related to the task term always yield decrease of the number of returned
results. However, player probably achieves best score, if he tries out some truly task-
term related negative terms, which reduces the number of cases when players tend
to play without following the game's purpose.
Regarding
problem decomposition
, the game's purpose (of exploring term rela-
tionships) is naturally composed of many small tasks (terms to be attached with
relationships), therefore, we found to trouble in an eventual problem decomposition.
The
tasks can also be considered equal
in their difficulty if we consider them within
a single domain: although the individual players may find different task terms not
equally difficult, no systematic difficulty differences could be considered without
some external knowledge about the task terms (to eventually form a gradual diffi-
culty mode of the game). Of course, the difficulty differences between the tasks can
be expected
between the domains
for which the term relationships are collected: the
player performing well within a general domain may completely fail in some specific
domain.
8.1.1 Player Motivation, Ladder System
In
Little Search Game
(LSG) some of the attractiveness is motivated by the element of
challenge
(i.e., by the opportunity to outdo oneself), which is represented by a mental
challenge for players to come up with negative terms which really help them. The
second part of attractiveness is
competition
. The challenge aspect is always present
in the game, even if the player plays it alone. On the other hand, the competition
depends on the comparison with the other players through the ladder system.
For LSG, the ladder is in fact the critical point where our attractiveness and
throughput requirements initially contradicted which caused design complications.
Unfortunately, the desired competition aesthetics (fueled by comparison through
score and ladder) contradicted the requirements on game's throughput. A fair com-
petition in Little Search Game requires that the players play with the same task terms,
so their scores (sourcing from search result count decreases) could be directly com-
pared. This, however, results into only few task terms, over which the may players
play. In addition, players naturally tended to make many attempts over lesser num-
bers of task terms (they tried to refine their negative search terms). As a result, many
term relationships would be created, but with only few source terms (dense and small
network). And our desire was the opposite: we aimed to create a sparser network
with more source terms (concretely, we opted for 10 relationships per term, since we
Search WWH ::
Custom Search