Why Don't People Play Games - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 60

The notions of hard fun and easy fun are new to this project and their relation-
ships to particular patterns of agency—intention and perceivable consequence, and
twitch factors—are well worth discussing. In general the focus on either hard fun
or easy fun and the interplay between them will be characteristic of certain twitchy
AGs and genres in the former case and less twitchy ones in the latter.
People fun relates to co-presence in New Media Aesthetics but adds to it the
notion that such fun can be with people actually present physically as well as those
present in the game world. Certain games will be more conducive to the former
rather than the latter. Casual games, particularly Wii Sport and the like, are great
fun played with friends around.
Serious fun relates to altered states of mind which arise as an overall result of
gameplay and is thus related to presence, the overall state of mind of losing oneself
in a game. Thus presence might well arise through achieving a state of relaxation,
through learning a new skill or language, and so on.
So there is a relationship between New Media Aesthetics and the Xeo Designs
emotional keys of games. Essentially it seems that the four emotional keys map the
general New Media Aesthetics down onto particular types of games, game genres,
and so on.
Notice also that Figure 6.2 also begins to point toward games more akin to
reality TV such as Big Brother. We see that at the foot of the diagram that people
fun and serious fun map down onto amusement, relaxation, and eventually life. Not
everyone wants to face serious challenges in an artifi cial game world. Conversely,
those who like very twitchy games that deliver a real sense of triumph will want
goal-based games focused on hard fun that deliver a sense of fi ero (personal triumph).
Evaluating the various characteristics of a game will allow us to move the px
(player experience) marker away from the center, closer to those characteristics it
most strongly exhibits. We seem to be establishing a model that allows us to identify
the characteristics of the different types of games that different people like to play.
But who are these people? In the next section of this chapter we discuss research
into player types that focuses on this issue. But fi rst let's see how our emotional
modeling expands on our working example, Resident Evil.
For instance:
• What is the balance between hard fun and easy fun?
• How competitive is the game?
• Is social fun predominantly inside or outside the game?
• How fi rmly is it rooted in the game world or the world of real life?
Resident Evil strikes a fairly even balance between hard and easy fun but the
easy fun is almost never relaxing; there is always the fear of being attacked. There
are instances of being “safe” but these are quite rare—talking to the Trader, for
instance. The game is very competitive and personal gaming skills are very impor-
tant to success.
No real social fun exists as such inside the game, but the fun of being with
zombies; rotting dead people that you have to kill, has a certain social edge to it