(Almost) Everything I Learn About Game Studies

Prime Suspect is the kind of game that becomes more and more interesting as you develop it. I don't want to say I was excited about it, but that I love it when we finished it, as all our ideas came together and seemed as amazing as we want them to be.

The idea came out during a brainstorming, as initially we had 4 ideas, but none of them was good enough for every each of us. In the end, we decided to keep what we love most about every concept and mix it up into a new game inspired by the story of L.A. Noire.

The story is simple: a murder took place in a prestigious restaurant and you play as a detective in order to unmask the cold blooded killer when all you know is that the crime weapon was a knife and the victim was a famous critique who wrote a really nasty review about this place . The suspects are the staff of the restaurant: the chef, the sous chef, the waiter, the waitress, the hostess, the bartender, the security guard, the dishwasher, the janitor and the manager. Each character has two sets of cards: the general set and the guilty set. The general deck offers information about the time of their arrival, general features of their personality or how they could have access to the crime weapon. The guilty set of cards has really relevant data for the case, as there are statements of the characters that point to the killer. One of the players needs to play the dealer (somehow, an equivalent of the Czar in Cards Against Humanity). He secretly picks who the killer is and shuffles in the guilty deck of cards. What prevent the game from being boring is the fact that characters can have statements that might point to more than one character at once. In order to win, the player needs to have four cards that point to the same person. Among those 4 cards, there is a clue that makes obvious who the killer was and you need the other 3 in order to make this card valid.

We wanted to avoid the thing that annoys us most when playing a board game: the blank spaces. I have always felt that they mess up with the player's thrill because when you lend on a blank space, you do nothing that turn and that's uncomfortable for a fun board game. With that being said, after placing the characters on the board, we filled the remaining spaces with events (in which you can have an extra clue, switch a card with another player, steal a card from another player or post-pone your investigation by missing a turn).

Another cliche that we avoided was the aesthetics of the board. Instead of writing the name of the characters in the space they were placed, we made them profile polaroid pictures (which are actually our digital sketches) and wrote their names on them. In order not to mislead the player, we filled the spaces where characters were placed with specific icons.

Even though I was a little reluctant about creating a board game at the beginning, I can say that I enjoy the result now and working with my team was very fun and inspiring, as they managed to make me want to give the best of myself.

"On your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds?"

Napoleon on Deathbed by Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse

This is a question I received during the Q&A sessions of one of my presentations in high school. I'm going to be honest with you and say that took me by surprise, as it seemed to me people embraced my topic and my presentation stood out. Moreover, my former classmates are not gamers and the fact they really paid attention to me made me consider that I "nailed it". But there comes this sassy question, full of irony, whose answer should not sound like an excuse for playing games by any means. I realised then that people tend to believe that playing video games results in a kind of awful addiction that lead you nowhere, except for maybe regretting wasting precious time of your life in a virtual environment that doesn't help you achieve anything in real life. For all of these people, I will try to develop my answer to that sassy question and prove they are wrong.

First of all, the development of an addiction is strictly related to our personality, the way in which we classify priorities and use our ambition. I would relate that to our education, as we need to grow up with a system of values well implemented in our habit. Video games are indeed a good source of entertainment but when are they prevented from becoming an addiction? The answer is "when we are balanced". I don't necessarily refer to stunning time management skills, but to the amount of fulfilment in our lives, so that we are not tempted to replace ourselves with the avatar in video games because the things work better for him and seem to be easier to achieve.

I have never been addicted to anything, including video games, but I have to admit that it happened to spend too much time playing them. That wasn't because I particularly enjoyed them, but because I couldn't get through a particular level. The difficulty of the level then triggered my ambition and I wasn't at ease until I managed to complete that level or that part of it that kept me busy for such a long time. Eventually, my curiosity followed up and I continued playing a little bit more because I deserved to know what comes after the level that gave me hell for a while. However, the most important thing in this is to know when to stop, when to put your avatar on stand by and continue your life, with your own duties and gaining your own achievements based on your own real experience.

Going back to the main question of this topic, I actually googled for top five regrets of the dying and I found this article on The Guardian, dating from 2012, in which the hospice workers were asked about the most common regrets they heard from the patients. So here's the top:

1. "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."
2. "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."
3. "I wish I had let myself be happier."
4. "I wish I had the courage to express my true self."
5. "I wish I had lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me."

As far as I know, no one told the hospice workers "I wish I had spent more time playing video games". Anyway, reading all of those things made me think of five deep human cravings that video games help us fulfil very easily, in a fun way.

1. Avoiding the negation, this sentence could be written as "I wish I spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up."
Playing video games has tremendous family benefits. As a kid, I remember my dad was very busy and I got to spend little time with him, but when the moment came, we were both playing Mario and Bonkheads together and it felt like he had always been there, with me. A recent study proved that parents who are playing video games with their kids have stronger real life relationships with them and the kids are more likely to talk to them when a difficult situation occurs.

2. Social games like Scrabble, Charades, Draw Something, Farm Ville and many more help you develop stronger relationship with your friends and avoid a daily routine. Michigan University was conducting a research that proves these games are incredibly powerful relationship management tools, as they help us stay connected with people in our social network that with otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together.

3. There are times when we push ourselves way too hard for our own good and as a result, we fall into an awful depression that may prevent us from even talking to our beloved ones. A study by East Carolina University found out that online games can outperform drugs for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Playing a game for 30 minutes a day is enough to create a dramatic boost in mood, which increases happiness.

4. The avatar we create in a game is our way to express our true selves. The most heroic, idealised versions of who we might become and everybody can see that. Sometimes we can see the cravings and aspirations of the others or their personality by simply having a look at what they play as and how they create their character to look like.
Stanford University has been doing research for five year now to document how playing a game with an idealised avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making as more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.

5. It is true that we are part of society and unavoidably, we are somehow defined by the people we work with or spend the majority of our time with. Sometimes we want to break free from the quotidian, we want to be someone else or do things that are not possible in the real world. Video games are amazing parallel worlds that et you have a break in this whole rat race we are all trapped in. But, if you ask me, the best part of them is that sometimes they are so marvellous that they convince you to want to become a game artist. Cheers for those games!