Entry 1

This past week I had the pleasure of beginning my reading of Game Design Workshop: A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, by Tracy Fullerton. A lot of what I read in chapter one came across as common sense practice. However, one point that was touched on really stood out to me simply because I feel it is heavily undervalued and often ignored, especially in undergraduate and even graduate settings where there is still adjusting to group development dynamics. The point in question is authorship. Being able to compromise and trust team members to do their job and implement some of their creative vision to the game is something I know to be crucial but I am also aware that I struggle with at times. I tend to develop a very clear and specific vision for the games I work on. That being said, entrusting that vision to others and being accepting of the fact that they will take artistic liberties or tweak it to leave their own signature can be a hard pill to swallow. However, as I was reminded by the text, it is crucial for two reasons. Giving team members a sense of authorship not only boosts their sense of investment in the project, but it also is ultimately what makes games such unique works of art.

Exercise 1.2: D.O.A.
Take one game that you’ve played that was D.O.A. By D.O.A., I mean “dead on arrival” (i.e., a game that’s no fun to play). Write down what you don’t like about it. What did the designers miss? How could the game be improved?

The first game that comes to mind when I hear the term D.O.A is the very unfortunate release of Fallout 76. The abysmal release of Fallout 76 was also the most recent, matched only by the equally poor reception of Anthem. The new multiplayer derivative of Bethesda’s incredibly popular Fallout franchise fell flat on day one of release and has taken almost an entire year to get back on its feet. The game was released unfinished and that much was clear, but was never admitted. Fallout 76 released stripped of all human NPCs, all meaningful and engaging narrative, reused and outdated Fallout 4 assets, and an over evaluated micro-transaction marketplace. These pitfalls alone were enough to make any non-Bethesda game D.O.A, but Bethesda fans are resilient. The real kickers that put even some of the biggest fans over the edge was the fact that the game was released riddled with bugs (not Atypical of Bethesda), frequent server errors and overloading, avoidable glitches, collision exceptions, easy exploits, dumb and unresponsive AI, and frequent progress loss due to the above mentioned server errors. The perfect myriad of debacles all but killed the game on release, with its first major patch addressing the slew of errors came months after its initial release. By this time it was too late and since then Bethesda has been hard at work doing damage control and attempting to re-brand. Unfortunately, the game’s reputation has made its bed.