When my son was about 11, my boyfriend introduced him to the relatively new game of Sim City. My boyfriend was very into the game, and spent a great deal of time setting up and maintaining his city. My son, however, always followed the same pattern: every city he set up was soon destroyed by fire, tornado, or mechanical monsters. This frustrated my boyfriend to no end. He saw it as a failure on the part of my son to master the game. He was wrong.
My son was perfectly capable of playing the game correctly. He just didn't want to. Watching the city be destroyed was far more intrinsically motivating to him than maintaining a city.
The creators of the game had seen destruction of your city as a bad thing: an event to be avoided and contained with skillful maintenance and reaction. The excitement of watching the city burn had not at that time been considered as a motivating factor in the game. Ten years later, I notice that this motivation is addressed front and center on the Sim City Overview page on the EA Games Web site.
When designing games, it's important to think about motivations that could come into play, other than the ones the designer intends. Imagine the designer of the 'perfect' educational driving game realizing only after the game was finished that teenagers were playing the game by running lights and hitting pedestrians on purpose. Points, schmoints.
1 comment:
A good portion of the fun my brothers and I had when we were little was setting up the little army men all over the basement floor (uh-oh, given away the fact that I didn't live in So Cal when I was a twerp). We rarely had them in little combats, nooooo, we went and got the 4 square ball and dropped the big bomb! Why was there satisfaction in seeing the little men flying all over the basement???
Post a Comment