Reflective Elements In Mass-Market Games-Gandhi

This note last modified September 5, 2022

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#notesFromPaper Year : 2022 Tags : Authors: Gandhi Miller Cooper

Link to the original paper

There have been recent pushes to study games which enable social and emotional learning. Reflective games are well suited to this task. As examples, see Spent and Papers Please.

Khaled claims that reflection is under-represented within mainstream entertainment games. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to balance the conflicting needs of commercial viability and designing for reflection? This paper tackles this issue by analyzing player perceptions of reflective games in the specific context of mass-market oriented games.

Two major questions:

• How do games encourage reflection?
• Which games / game elements do players count as successful or unsuccessful at being reflective?

Background

• What is a philosophical game?
• The implied designer can be more important than the actual designer.
• There are different levels of reflection. Games are good at teaching deeper, abstract concepts and facilitating reflection, though higher levels of reflection are rarer.
• Reflection is linked to emotional challenge. Challenge can actually help us learn.
• Whitby's work discusses moments in gameplay that players reported as causing them to reflect.
• All the big stuff is important, but so is the ordinary player experience
• Many reflective games fail because they try to just bluntly put a message on top of a game that has no relation to the message
• One of the big theoretical pieces of work is Khaled's Reflective Game Design. Specifically the idea that conventional game design works against reflection

Methods

The original research questions dealt with philosophical games. As such, the survey asked players about games that tried to “be philosophical”, and whether they felt like those games succeeded or failed at that task.

A qualitative analysis was conducted. Specifically a thematic analysis with a phenomenelogical approach

Participant responses & audit trail

Results & Discussion

The paper is categorized by 4 major themes:

• Game elements that surround the message, support the message
• Games enable the intellectual exploration of various perspectives
• Relating the message to the player increases its power
• Respect the player's intelligence with subtle messages, slowly built

This paper talks about games that failed a lot, but that idea has some subtle nuances worth discussing

So finally, how do we design reflective games?

Limitations and future work

• The definition of mass-market games conflates indie games and AAA games, which probably should be talked about separately
• The demographics were mostly young Western men. Marginalized communities probably view games differently, especially when it comes to conceptions of identity.
• Future work could focus on:
  • Different communities
  • case studies of individual games
  • modifying the survey questions, potentially to focus into certain themes
  • conduct thorough interviews rather than broad survey questions