Games on Gender

Game Design Documents

A game design document is a document detailing everything the game is about, how it works and who it’s for. This would be handed to people who are considering investing into this game project or even a development team.

Shred Nebula’s design document show a lot of details on how the game functions including it’s concept and idea.

Gender

Always bad guy, bad guy steals girl, guy rescue girl.
For example Donkey Kong is the game’s villain who holds Peach who is the games main

Evony is extremely sexualised in it’s adverts.

Negatively re-enforced stereotypes

 Makoto from Enchanted arms is one of the game’s playable characters is who presented and stylised as a extremely camp transvestite, he is portrayed with the negative stereotype showing that all transvestites are considered gay and overly flamboyant all the time. 

Makoto continually hits on the other male playable character Toya showing a clear attraction to him but never keeps it subtle, the issue with this is showing that all Transvestites are crossing dressing men that only think about getting into another man's pants.

Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, the game’s protagonist who is a rather large breasted tiny waist woman, she in almost all the Tomb Raider games is given a sexualised body image which has been the case for a long time as it has become one of the main attraction to the male gaming audience.

Yuna, Rikku and Paine are another 3 examples from Final Fantasy X-2, the three of them in this picture (especially Yuna in the middle) have again been made to appear sexualised which becomes a male target audience. Yuna for example wears hot pants that fits tightly onto her buttocks revealing a thick curved line.

One huge aspect of body sexulisation in the game is the use of "dress spheres" which gives gives each character a different costume for their varying powers, some are made to be more sexual than others.

Sara Connor from Terminator is a good example of a positive female role as opposed to the majority of negative sexualised roles, she becomes stronger, agile and fearless after being chased by terminator, because it is breaking down stereotypes as opposed

 

two films, positive game document

Group board game, Platformer

For our platform game we decided to create a board game that mixes Donkey Kong and Snakes & Ladders together. We made it into a dark dungeon theme with minor sci-fi elements to work with the game mechanics we're using.
The board game uses a 10 by 10 grid with each 10 squares going up in steps, each player up to four have their own counter that start from square one with three barrels that start on the finishing square and descend down the board, a player rolls a die and moves their counter to the numbered rolled, with that number they also move one of the barrels of their choice, if one of the players lands on a square where a barrel is or vice versa that player is sent back to the starting square.
There are also on certain squares objects that alters the player's chances of winning by changing their pathways by pipes descending to the player to a lower number, chains ascending a player to a higher number and black holes taking the player back to the start.

Here is the board game printed and fixed together.

 

My main role in the production was to produce the graphics of the path changers for the board, using Illustrator and Photoshop I produced the pipes, chains and black holes and past them on to my team members to place them onto the board.





Group board game, squares

After learning how the game squares works I worked with a group of five people to produce our board game that uses the squares game system to it. The result was a four sided (three sided playable) pyramid with pins inserted to make a triangle on the sides and squares from the edges, loads of rubber bands of four different colours are supplied to work as the connecting lines from one point to another, each colour of course is used for identification to each player.

Prototype

Rules

1.Assemble the Pyramid.
2.Rock, Paper Scissors to decide who goes first.
3.First player chooses the colour of their rubber bands.
4.First player connects two adjacent pins with their rubber band.
5.Second player repeats step 4 until a triangle or square is complete.
6.When a triangle or square is completed the player to make the final connection scores 1 point for a triangle and 3 points for a square, the scores are kept in a tallying system.
7.Repeat step 4 until there are no more connections to be made.
8.The scores are added from the tally and the player with the highest score is the winner



Our game was then tested with our class for feedback. The criticism we had mentioned was not making it clear how to create squares as the player makes squares by connecting the pins at the edges.

Game Mechanics

Game Mechanics are the tools and features within a game that allow it to function.

Rolling a Die
This is used to give a random value from 1 to 6 (can be more with the more dice used) which can be used for multiple things such as moving a player’s counter, deciding who goes first or even points, the randomisation from dice is a very popular game mechanic to cause various possible events into every gameplay.
For example Snakes and Ladders which uses a die for the players to move across the board, because of the use of a die the player winning or not is entirely random from the chosen rolls.

Hunting and defending is a game mechanic that works by having the players using their counters to destroy or steal their opponent’s counters while also defending their own. A good example of this is Chess which the two players must move each of their various counters each turn to trapped their King.

This is the only Level

This game uses the exact same level design with the same character and the same goal, the player must guide the little elephant through the platforms avoiding the spikes, hitting the button to unlock the door and then escape to there to head to the next stage. The only thing that changes within each stage is the mechanics which manipulates the player’s strategy to completing the stage, the first stage the character uses the arrow keys in it’s typical format to move the elephant, in the second stage the left and right arrow keys are reversed which takes the player by surprise at first because of the sudden change in the system, but the player quickly adapts to the change as it gets worked out in their head that they must now press the opposite keys to complete the level.
This game helps show how there are so many different game mechanics which can easily change the game play experience and difficulty.