I will be responding to Design Principle 6.23 of Ge Wang’s Artful Design: Motivate longer-term engagement through social and peripheral gamification.
I strongly resonate with this design principle as I believe that gamification must feel authentic and telling a narrative in its offering of incentives, objectives, achievements, and progression in order to captivate a user. I believe the social aspect of design is so crucial to designing for games and experience in experience. Examples explored in the chapter, like Cancer, which put me into the headspace of its characters invites me into a part of the psyche of the game character. This is complemented by the simple graphics which contrast against the immense turmoil portrayed using narration. Save the Date also pulls off an incredibly social, storytelling angle to the aspect of game design, which is so rare given so many games these days focus on mechanics and levels without focusing on storytelling and narration (ex. Magic Piano as an example of a game which focuses on mechanics over storytelling). These remind me of games I play like League of Legends and Undertale, which interweave extremely poignant lore and storytelling into the games. Beyond mechanics, these games create dynamics which incentive me as the player to try all the various choices (eg. Player builds, ‘modes’ in Undertale) to see where these choices lead me, and these are irrevocably tied to the narration that is presented by the gameplay.
The idea of fostering replay as a strategy to create longer term social engagement with games make sense to me, as through replay information from previous sessions, we feel more confident to take on a game or explore various parts of a game. The lore of universes in Undertale, Starcraft, LOL provide fantasy and narrative and draw me deeper into the game. Born out of mechanics, dynamics in games like StarCraft creates the need to value balance and replay, just like in LOL the creation of character mechanics and constant changes to the powers of characters lend to the need to “balance” out a game in order to ensure we can keep the positioning needed to achieve optimal social engagement.
Overall, I think social and peripheral gamification is important to create authentic narratives and foster contemplation, emotion, and replay to explore experiences we design further.
