It’s week one and we're beginning this course by familiarizing ourselves with casual online games, designing user experience as well as personas. Our reading today includes: Designing New Casual Game Experiences: Competition and Social Interaction Converging Website and Games; The Origins of Personas; and Perfecting Your Personas.
Thoughts on the readings
Designing New Casual Game Experiences: Competition and Social Interaction Converging Website and Games: This report gave a good introduction of what casual gaming is and where it stands in our society right now. There are a lot of interesting things I learned. When I play casual games, I do not think twice about the different components, rules, and the technical work behind the games. But there are a lot of parts that come together to form the simple games we play online or on our phones. For example, learning about the different phases of creating a beta version of a game, or the idea of competition, avatars or chatting with other users. These are all fairly new concepts to me and I intend to learn more about casual game as this term goes on. In the meanwhile, let me show you some casual games I’m familiar with. I'll be sure to do a small review on them later on. (From left: Labyrinth, Jawbreaker, Tetras, Bubblewrap)
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The Origins of Personas and Perfecting Your Personas: I was a bit more familiar with the concept of personas as I took DAC 201 last term. One of the more interesting facts that I learned is that designers tend to design for themselves rather than their end-users or implied designee. The persona is a great tool to help the designer stay focused on the end-users. Below, is a sample of the persona I’ve done.
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I am very familiar with a wide variety of games, and when I read about the avatars and multiplayer aspects, I didn't think of casual gaming.
ReplyDeleteAll of the games that I have seen that have these types of concepts require hours of play and can get quite intensive. So I'm still not sure what defines a 'casual game'.
Great stuff, Mandy! I'm impressed with the creative design and your input so far!
ReplyDeleteKaren: Thanks you.
ReplyDeleteThien: I agree with you. And like gill said in class, casual gaming is a very hard to define terminology. I'm not an avid gamer, so i tend to stick to games that are simple and meant for one sitting. I do think, however, that having avatars and multiplayer can make it less of a casual game, but the way i look at it, it's a lot less casual than let's say, gears of war or cs etc.