Gamifying your Play Experience

Today I’d like to talk about something different and perhaps a bit less scholarly than my previous posts. I want to share with you some gaming experiences I’ve had and an idea that my friends and I call “Gamifying your Play Experience.” Have you ever set additional constraints or rules to yourself in a video game? Ideas like, “I’m only going to play non-lethally” or “My character will never use Magic.” I think that adding these types of limitations can add a lot to the experience, and specifically how much you personalize the game.. ​
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Skyrim was huge for me in this regard. On creating my second character (yes I’m a HUGE dork) I really wanted to make someone different. My first character was this magic wielding Argonian that just wrecked everything. I didn’t want this for my second character, I decided early on that he would be a thief. A Dunmer who wasn’t a murderer. Which made the start of the game very hard for me, as I would sneak around… get noticed… runaway and try to avoid dying as much as possible. I really wanted my character to be part of the underbelly of society and inherently poor, he would use Alchemy but wasn’t skilled enough to use Magic, etc. 

Which is all interesting but what made my character really intriguing was that I didn’t want him to be Dovahkiin (the main protagonist in the game). My way of accomplishing this was that I never initiated the first quest in Whiterun (one of the cities in the game). Since I never started this mission, within the game my character never pursued the Dovahkiin quest line and there were no dragons spawning in my world. The very thing that Skyrim was marketed with, didn’t exist in my game. My world wasn’t plagued by Alduin (the main antagonist), and I was just a dude. Oddly enough this was the playthrough that really stuck out for me and I put probably another 100 hours into this character that spent the bulk of his time gathering herbs. ​
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While playing Firewatch I came across an article by Polygon, suggesting to toggle off the “Show Location on Map” UI feature. Knowing that the game was already pretty short, I figured “Why not?” They really weren’t lying, it really put me deeper into the game world. I was forced to pay more attention to landmarks and focus on the world around me. I’d argue that it allowed me to appreciate what was built, much more so than if I was just following a minimap.

Recently I started playing Farcry Primal, and a good friend was telling me about how she was playing the game with no HUD. As I started looking into the HUD options, I had a lot of questions... “Really no targeting reticule? No interaction prompts??” … “Nope, none!” Inspired by my experiences in Skyrim and more recently Firewatch, I chose to start the game this way. I didn’t want to know what I was missing or become too used to playing this game with a HUD.

 It was a pretty jarring experience at first, I felt dropped into a world that I knew nothing about. Quickly a Mammoth killed me in the tutorial, I chuckled and learned that I had to actually throw my spear… not just stab at him wildly. Perhaps playing so much Dark Souls has given me a lot more tolerance for petty things like dying in video games. Stumbling forward into the world, spear in hand, I felt so exposed. I was like a newborn, with no knowledge of how this world worked or the dangers that surrounded me. I did relatively well in my initial “hunting” quest, but even so it felt sloppy… and that was great. I wasn’t a skilled hunter yet and that just added to my play experience. 

My first experience meeting enemy humans was pretty hilarious, as it was so early in the game I didn’t expect them to be enemies. So I wandered right up to them, only to have them freak out at me… what proceeded was a lot of running, yelling at the screen, and bashing their brains in with a club. It was a mess! (I have to reiterate that I have NO targeting reticule!) I wasn’t a cool coordinated dude taking out my enemies, I was this weird primal guy that’s just trying to survive. This is a really interesting gaming experience, considering so often we’re put into the role of “Sam Fisher” or “Master Chief.” I have no power armor, no combat training, I currently don’t even have chill…

I eventually found my chill...

Something I noticed with Farcry Primal, and Firewatch after removing the location indicator, was that removing elements of the UI forced me to focus more on the game world and I felt more connected to it… less distracted if that makes sense. Something I hadn’t realized that in other games I use the minimap as a crutch, really ignoring the world around me and navigating purely by it. It’s interesting how a piece of the UI that’s meant to aid the player, could potentially invalidate the work of a good level designer. I’m definitely not suggesting we remove UI/HUD elements from our games, there’s a broad spectrum of users (some more casual than others) and you don’t want to alienate you demographic. Yet there’s something really liberating about having to navigate a world by your wits, actually remember how many arrows you have left in your quiver, or manage a headshot without a targeting reticule.
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That’s all I had to share with you today! Hope you enjoyed this post, even if it was more about sharing gaming experiences. I'm still playing around with the idea of doing a post on visual priority next, but we’ll see how it goes! Thanks again for reading!