1.) In your opinion, what makes games fun?
To me, what makes games fun are their challenges and story elements. When I play a video game, I usually continue playing to see where the story will go or to overcome challenges to obtain goals. I enjoy getting immersed in new worlds and involved in character development. I often chose games that are basically interactive stories, and feel a bit distant from ones that aren’t story driven. However, I somehow find myself wasting several hours rolling up objects into larger objects for ‘Katamari’. I think the reason I end up playing somewhat “mindless” games like that is because of the challenge it presents. If I know that if I roll up an object that’s ten meters wide in less than two minutes, I “win”, it makes me want to do it, for some reason. As long as there’s a challenge to overcome, I’m interested. I think there are other things to the Katamari games that make it fun, maybe the music and whimsicalness, and variation of challenges presented. Card and board games present the same sort of small challenges, and in those cases, I feel that it’s the competition that makes them fun. They’re shorter and you can get less invested in them than video games, but there are still smaller obstacles to be overcome.
2.) Which of these things (if any) were present in the I <3 Bees ARG? If not present, what made I <3 Bees fun?
In ‘I Love Bees’, there are obvious challenges that people had to overcome to obtain what they wanted. To “win” the game, they had to solve problems and puzzles. If the puzzles were too easy, it would probably not hold their interest for long, so they had to be difficult enough to be stimulating and challenging. Some of the people in the community called themselves ‘lurkers’ and thought they didn’t have much to contribute and didn’t like speaking up, but because they all wanted to figure out what was going on and why, everyone had to tell the community what they knew. The people that had difficulty communicating had to overcome that challenge if they wanted to reach the end goal. The game is also definitely story driven, it is described as “a Web-based interactive fiction that used websites, blogs, emails, jpegs, Mp3 recordings, and other digital artifacts to create an immersive back-story for…Halo 2”.
To me, what makes games fun are their challenges and story elements. When I play a video game, I usually continue playing to see where the story will go or to overcome challenges to obtain goals. I enjoy getting immersed in new worlds and involved in character development. I often chose games that are basically interactive stories, and feel a bit distant from ones that aren’t story driven. However, I somehow find myself wasting several hours rolling up objects into larger objects for ‘Katamari’. I think the reason I end up playing somewhat “mindless” games like that is because of the challenge it presents. If I know that if I roll up an object that’s ten meters wide in less than two minutes, I “win”, it makes me want to do it, for some reason. As long as there’s a challenge to overcome, I’m interested. I think there are other things to the Katamari games that make it fun, maybe the music and whimsicalness, and variation of challenges presented. Card and board games present the same sort of small challenges, and in those cases, I feel that it’s the competition that makes them fun. They’re shorter and you can get less invested in them than video games, but there are still smaller obstacles to be overcome.
2.) Which of these things (if any) were present in the I <3 Bees ARG? If not present, what made I <3 Bees fun?
In ‘I Love Bees’, there are obvious challenges that people had to overcome to obtain what they wanted. To “win” the game, they had to solve problems and puzzles. If the puzzles were too easy, it would probably not hold their interest for long, so they had to be difficult enough to be stimulating and challenging. Some of the people in the community called themselves ‘lurkers’ and thought they didn’t have much to contribute and didn’t like speaking up, but because they all wanted to figure out what was going on and why, everyone had to tell the community what they knew. The people that had difficulty communicating had to overcome that challenge if they wanted to reach the end goal. The game is also definitely story driven, it is described as “a Web-based interactive fiction that used websites, blogs, emails, jpegs, Mp3 recordings, and other digital artifacts to create an immersive back-story for…Halo 2”.
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