{"id":103,"date":"2008-07-12T14:01:11","date_gmt":"2008-07-12T14:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/?p=103"},"modified":"2008-07-12T14:01:11","modified_gmt":"2008-07-12T14:01:11","slug":"designing-the-fun-out-of-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/designing-the-fun-out-of-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing the fun out of games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, this is going to be a bit of a rant. I suspect that it also might make me look a bit sad, playing computer games on a Saturday afternoon, but here goes&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In my spare time I&#8217;m currently playing one of the Nancy Drew adventure games, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bigfishgames.com\/download-games\/3251\/nancy-drew-the-haunted-carousel\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Haunted Carousel<\/a>. Now usually I like the games in this series as a bit of brain candy, they&#8217;re very traditional adventure games, not too hard, with a bit of a sense of humour. But I have (or rather Nancy has) just spent over an hour playing &#8216;barnacle blast&#8217;, a variant of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iLIAaq9_zYM\" target=\"_blank\">Little Brick Out<\/a> (incidentally the first computer game I ever played), so that the tokens gained can be used to win a harmonica. In an adventure game. Grrrrr.<\/p>\n<p>There is no way to skip this embedded game or alternative way of getting the tokens. You just have to play it over and over again. And again. And again. Until eventually by luck (or I like to think, the magic of shouting at the computer) you manage to complete the game. I play adventure games because I like <em>adventure<\/em> games (and, admittedly, have practically no co-ordination whatsoever) and to have a &#8216;twitch&#8217; game forced upon me half way through is surely just bad design?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, rant over. I feel better now. I wonder what I have to do with that harmonica?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, this is going to be a bit of a rant. I suspect that it also might make me look a bit sad, playing computer games on a Saturday afternoon, but here goes&#8230; In my spare time I&#8217;m currently playing&#8230;<br \/><a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/designing-the-fun-out-of-games\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[63,14],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-game-design","tag-usability"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71sY0-1F","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}