Month: August 2013

Game Design 101: Gamers wants to be Loser

Just by looking at the title, it’s a bit controversial, but believe me, it happens to the most of us.

Jesper Juul, explained in his book, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, said that it is normal for human to have a desire to feel good, competent, success, and become a winner. We do not want to feel failure. We are afraid of failure. However, that is not the case with games. Players failing in games is natural, it is normal. This is when the problem arise. We love to be winner and hate to be loser, but playing games comes with the cost of experiencing failure, inadequacy, and incompetency. Even though they know they hate failing, players will still playing games. It is called as the Paradox of Failure, which can be stated as below:

  1. We generally avoid failure.
  2. We experience failure when playing games.
  3. We seek out game, although we’ll experience failure that we normally avoid.

Game have something which we do not like and normally avoid in real world (failure, losing), but we still want this kind of unpleasantries still linger inside the game, although we hate it. “It’s just a game” is a good explanation for this because the real world failures are fatal, failure in game is not. So, how to explain how this paradox occurs in the first place? Let’s take a look at two questions below.

  • Why the game is so hard, but I would still play it over and over?
  • What makes the game fun? Continue reading →

Done, or a New Beginning?

Finally…. I mean, finally.

It’s been almost a year when I started to proposed the topic of game development life cycle to Mrs. YW, and it’s finally done. August 15th 2013, the signatures have been given and it’s finalized. It’s written in Bahasa Indonesia, so sorry for the inconvenience. Well, FYI, my research is about proposing a new process model in game development process, dubbed as Game Development Life Cycle (GDLC). Many of colleagues (even my professors) persuade me to give a name to this proposed GDLC. I’m so happy that I got a lot of support in this research. The end product of my thesis is a book, authored by myself. Here’s a sneak-peek of my book (it’s Bahasa again). I already have a plan to translate it to English, but I guess it must postponed.

Here are some pictures taken directly at my workstation. Everyday I work here, so I guess I’ll give it an honor to appreciate how meaningful this desk to me.

My Workstation

My Workstation

My Partner in Crime (HP Envy 14 Beats Audio)

My Partner in Crime (HP Envy 14 Beats Audio)

The End Product (Niew's Tale)

The Niew’s Tale

My Thesis Journal

My Thesis Journal

The Book I Wrote

The Book I Wrote (End Product)

Alright. It may be the end of my undergraduate thesis, but a new question arise: will I continue it in my magister program or will I choose a whole new different topic? Is it really the end of my GDLC, or it’s just a mere beginning of something greater? Only God knows. Let’s hope for the best.