Gamification Infographic Reflection

Assignment: Leave a blog posting about where your personal life story intersects with this history and what, if any, ideas it triggers concerning the game concept that you are developing.

 My personal life intersects with this history around the Oregon Trail time frame. Being able to play that in my desktop publishing class was a great memory of early gaming while in school. The problem was, it came pre-installed on the computers, and the teachers did not know what to do with the students who would constantly want to play it.  Instead of using it has a decision making sim and engaging us in reflection as to why we choose to forge the river, killing everyone (which could of lead to a valuable lesson in thinking things out, and decision making) my teacher used it as a reward. So there I was, finish your math problems, get rewarded with Oregon trail. It worked. The reward of playtime however, led to less than stellar performance on the typing problems and temper tantrums being thrown when some of my fellow classmates could not play. Eventually the reward of Oregon Trail was no longer an option. 

This inforgraphic triggered this emotion and then triggered a wanting to create my own game well outside my means and know-how ha. I want to create a game that puts choice at the forefront of the students, but is a sandbox open for them to create their own quests and their own story-lines. I recently read an article about a game called Dayz. It essentially drops you into a zombie apocalypse with other human players, zombies and nothing but a flashlight. There is no mission, no direction, just one goal, survive. What transpires from this is an incredible experience where strangers team together, bandits create havoc, and your hard-earned supplies could be stolen or taken from you in an instant. What makes this so engaging is when you pass away you lose everything. There is a real sense of loss, which in return creates a real sense of gain when you do find something. There is also an incredible sense of teamwork and collaboration when you find other players that just want to survive and treat each other with respect. I was able to play this game and met a stranger from Europe in my first server. I was brand new and he stalked my character for three towns. He was probably testing to see If I was going to attack him and steal his stuff as I was testing him to see if he was going to follow me until he got bored and just took everything of mine. After a while I think he realized we were both brand new to this game. Through the in game chat system I reached out. We eventually decided to head to a water tower, keeping our distance still not fully trusting one another.  Eventually we took stock of who had what and we decided to help each other. We formed a pretty instant bond, over this game, we both spoke about how hard it was to find food and how many stories we heard about human players just going around taking advantage of new players.  There is a persistent day, night cycle in the game and before you knew it, we were working together for a full cycle. We took refuge in a small cabin and discussed our inventories. If you have noticed, I have not mentioned anything about the violent encounters with zombies we had because to me that was not the immersion I was coming away with from this game experience, to be honest it was not even the best part of the game. He saved my life and I saved his twice on our journey in two real life hours.  I was surviving a zombie apocalypse with someone I had never met before. It turns out he was a new dad as well and just picked up the game as I had on a steam early access sale. Even more, he was a fan of American Hockey and we spoke about the Philadelphia Flyers while sneaking around trying to find food. All in all it was pretty awesome. We both could not devote more time to our game play session, but agreed to meet back at a free time we had the next day. There was no reason we needed to work together outside of just common human decency. I even wrote about it for a class discussion I was planning to have in my management class about teamwork. The next day I logged on, and wouldn't you know my survival partner was there, and greeted me with an extra can opener he had found so I know too could open my canned goods. It was daytime now in our game server and we decided to try and find some weapons to arm ourselves with. Cities in this game are populated with not only the humans and bandits who could end your game and take your stuff, but also more aggressive zombies.  Developers put the better goods in these cities as a kind of a bigger risk bigger reward scenario. We walked about 10 real life minutes and came to the edge of a fairly large town. In a matter of seconds, I looked at my screen to see my new friend was on the ground, and over his head set I heard, "COME ON". A bandit took him out from long range. I ran. I shared that story with my wife explaining to her in no other game did I actually feel a sense of investment being lost than when that happened. The odds of us ending up in a server together again are pretty slim, and who knows now if he'll play the game as a nice guy next time he logs in.  For me I ran away so not to lose all my stuff, and even contemplated going back at night to take his things. It was an incredible experience that forced my hand into making these types of decisions. My online friend and I made up this adventure as we went along. It was an unscripted and engrossing. I want to somehow create that type of game design. I would like it to focus on economics. My thoughts are creating something where students can trade goods, hoard goods, take over fellow countries or leave them be.  I would like it to be almost like the game Civilization, but with no direction, let the students create their own story lines and manage their country as they see fit. The catch is to be prosperous the country should need” to trade, since trade creates wealth (it is also a fundamental introduction to economics concept the students should understand). They should also need to engage in diplomacy and ally themselves together for geopolitical reasons. I would like the curriculum design elements to have gamification elements of rank, XP and badges. I want to encourage the students to reflect for xp. The more they reflect and discuss with other students the more XP they'll gain to unlock badges and maybe even items for their virtual countries. This may be WAY outside the realm of what we will get into for this class, but rewarding students for their discussion and reflection is very important in my opinion for the game I will ultimately create.  Thank you.