Week 1 - Introduction

Like most people, I am taking this class to earn the Game Design and Culture certificate. But more than that, I want to go into game design as my future career. I think that this class will help me to understand how to create games that are worth playing, not just fun games. Like Sicart said, ”Play is not necessarily fun. It is pleasurable” (3). I want to create games that tell an interesting story, whether that story is happy, sad, or somewhere in the middle. In this class, I want to learn how to make games that grab the players' attention and compel them to keep playing. If the player thinks about my game and wants to play again even days after, then I’ll know I have succeeded. 

In that way, I am really looking forward to learning how play can be carnivalesque as Sicart describes it. I want to learn more about the “expressive capacity of play” (Sicart, 10). What fascinates me is that even though comedy and satire are crucial parts of the carnivalesque nature of play,  Sicart emphasizes that, “again, the result is not fun but laughter— pleasurable but risky, and potentially harmful” (11). The distinction between fun and laughter is interesting — and still somewhat confusing. I am looking forward to learning more about what play actually is, and how it is very distinct from fun. This implies that there is a form of serious play that can be wholly removed from fun yet still be enticing and pleasurable. As someone who wants to tell compelling stories through play, I am very interested in learning about how play can be separated from fun and still be rewarding. 

One of the most recent games I have started playing is very carnivalesque. I usually prefer longer, narrative-driven games. But, since my schedule no longer has large swaths of open time for me to really dive into a game, I have started playing shorter and less cognitively demanding games. The one I have been playing the most is Balloons Tower Defense 6 (BTD6). The game is (unsurprisingly) about monkeys who have to defend a stretch of road from invading balloons by popping them before they reach the end. It is a satirical take on the classic tower defense genre which usually includes large military weapons, powerful wizards, or any other icon of traditional power. It contrasts this preconceived concept of power with, well, monkeys. The carnivalesque nature of BTD6 is that these monkeys become those iconic power symbols. Certain monkeys can be upgraded to comical levels of power — such monkeys include: sniper monkey, pirate monkey, nuclear submarine monkey, phoenix wizard monkey, and monkey god. 

It is a great example of how play can be satirical (carnivalesque), compelling, and serious. While the game is fun for much of the time, it can become quite intense when you have spent over an hour setting up your defense and it is on the verge of collapse. I would love to make a game that can strike that perfect balance — a game that can be both fun and serious at times. So I would like to know more about how play maintains this balance — how play “finds equilibrium between creation and destruction in the embodied laughter [and] also presents a number of characteristics that embody this carnivalesque tensions” (Sicart, 11). To tell an interesting story requires a balance of both compelling play and serious narrative. I think that this class will help me better understand how to achieve that kind of balance in my work.