#10 (My Favorite Board Game and Why)

I really fell in love with the game Prisoner's Quest.

First of all, the game receives a 5/5 for immersion. Ian Bogost, Author of "How to Do Things With Video Games," claims that "tactility can please the body" (82). I have experienced this with this particular game. There is something about being able to move you character piece through each room, conquering the board as you go. Although the "world" of Prisoner's Quest is confined to a board, the cards and characters are vibrantly rendered enough to immerse me in that world (82). The immersion I experience in the game allows me to invest emotionally while playing, giving me more incentive to play and win, and even try out different characters.

In Jonathon Degann's Game Theory 101, the most important component of a successful game is Story Arc. That is, a beginning, middle and end which turns the game into an "adventure in which the players and the pieces are characters."

This is exactly what Prisoner's Quest is all about! The story arc is simple: You and four other players are in castle, and you must discover rooms to escape, attacking and defeating the other players throughout. The characters are wonderfully created in that they each have their own appearance, statistics, and one can imagine, personality.  Players of the game can project their ideas of who their character is, what they would say/do, etc. into gameplay. The story arc and the game design allow for maximum creativity allowed in a structured board game. These work together to keep the player engaged throughout game play.

Because Prisoner's Quest immerses the player and has an engaging story arc, the game is very successful. I want to play it again and again!

#4 (Environments and Story Arcs)

McLuhan has a few main ideas about environments: how they were, during the time of print technology, and how they are now, during our age of electric technology. "Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible," he states (McLuhan 68).

 McLuhan also believes that "anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly" (McLuhan 68).

So what is an anti-environment? Simply something "that raises the unconscious environment to conscious attention" (Alice Rae).

In Jonathon Degann's Game Theory 101 the most important component of a successful game is Story Arc. That is, a beginning, middle and end which turns the game into an "adventure in which the players and the pieces are characters." I don't think this is hard advice to follow; in fact, I think most people enjoy a good story, which typically has a story arc.

If McLuhan is correct, then video games themselves are environments. Many of them are antienvironments, like the Stanley Parable, a game that directs the user's attention to itself as a video game. So what could our environments in video games, combined with the story arcs (or lack thereof, in few cases) tell us about our society right now? Increasingly, games like the Stanley Parable mock the established, invisible environmental rules established for first person games. We can see an increase in antienvironment games, which play with environment including such accepted, basic rules such as Story Arc.

Perhaps we have started to understand the rules we have created for our video games, for our virtual realities. Perhaps we are moving into new territory, developing games which question the environments we have created, allowing us to "see more clearly" our real-world, offline environments.

It may be a stretch, but I wonder if by manipulating the environments in video games, we are beginning to become aware of the invisible, "active processes" in our world now. Maybe manipulating our virtual environments will show us how we can change the environments in our society today.