In Murray’s article, I strongly agreed with the idea that story telling comes before the game because as the author puts it, “storytelling is a core human activity.” We have told stories since the beginning of time and still do to this day, albeit in different forms. In my response last week, I talked about how I thought not all games had narrative, but most do and narrative often enhances the game tremendously. I think
Koster lists 7 types of people: linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. He also talk about the Baron-Cohen distribution curve of systematizing brains and empathizing brains, stating men were typically more systematic and women were typically more empathetic. He also mentioned that those with extremely systematic brains would be considered autistic, which I found interesting because males have a higher chance of being autistic.
Koster discussed the difficulty of creating of game with the perfect difficulty and the perfect design because people are different and they have different interests. Not only that, but people change. As men get older, they tend to lose interest in video games. He examines gender difference between video game players. I understand that all these gender declarations are generalizations and there are of course some exceptions.
He said that females prefer modeling social relationships with little spatial difficulty. Something I found interesting is that female tend to increase interest in video games after menopause. I would be interested to see the evidence behind that claim. Males tend to prefer complex topological games with strict hierarchies. Overall, I’d say these generalizations are pretty accurate. So with all these differences in people, how do you create the perfect game?
Koster later talks about how people who tend to break traditional stereotypes as children tend to continue to break these stereotypes as adults. He says this “argues pretty strongly that if people are to achieve their maximum potential, they need to do the hard work playing games they don’t get, the games that don’t appeal to their natures.” I completely disagree with this and do not understand how the first point argues the second point. First of all, many studies have shown that people excel at things they are good at and things they like. I would think that playing game that don’t appeal to their natures would decrease their productivity. Secondly, people who tend to break traditional stereotypes as children break those stereotypes because that is who they are and thus they are appealing to their nature.
