Week 8 Post of my Royal Game of Ur Iterations

In this week’s lesson we pared up to play The Royal Game of Ur. Or task was to play through it first and then to come up with our iterations to the post them up on our blogs.

With my first iterations the first one that I had come up with that I thought would work well was name the “death square”. This “death square” was situated on the square directly after the second rosette the 9^th square on the board. What this meant was I was changing the mechanics of the game because if a players piece had landed on the “death square” which is situated the square after the second rosette the player in whom the piece belongs to would have to take that piece off the board and start over again with that piece.

The second iteration made in the game was one of at a single point on either side of the players board was a “dual square”. The dual points on the board are situated in the safe zones 3 squares into the board just before the rosette. The dual would only be activated if both players had a piece on the dual square at the same time that is when a dual would commence. The way in which it worked was each player would have a dice that they would roll at the same time and the player with the high number from rolling the d4 would win which allowed the player to jump into the middle row in between the dual zone, it also meant for the loosing player that piece that lost the dual they would then have to miss the next two goes and the winner of the dual would then have the opportunity to make progress without being caught up.

My final iteration was the easiest to come up, the reason for this was the fact that from just playing the game, it felt that the game dragged on too long and after a while got slightly boring until the time that the victor came about. The iteration was instead of the players starting off with 7 pieces each to start off with 5 each instead. This meant that the game consisted of the same amount of dice but had 10 playable pieces instead of the 14.

Week 8 Readings Players Who Suit MUDs

There are 4 approaches to playing MUDs. The 4 approaches arise from the inter relationship of 2 dimensions of a certain playing style: World Oriented versus Player Oriented.

Achievers:

Achievers are players that focus on completing a game as quickly and efficiently as possible. Achievers think of getting points and going up in levels as their main goal. The look to improve their character and look to complete personal task/goals they set themselves. Achievers are very competitive so the way in which they play their games is what they think that is the correct way in playing the game. Achievers are compared to Diamonds.

Explorers:

Explores tend to want to find out as much of the game they are playing as possible. Explores like to push games to their limits by finding things that are wrong with it like bugs and glitches and making use of the space that is available. Explorers are Spades.

Socialising:

Socialisers care more about communicating with other players then playing the game itself. They use the games communicative facilities as there way of talking with other playing playing the game. For socialisers killing is something that is only ever to be excused if it’s futile, it’s normally done as an act of revenge, or even for pain caused to a friend. Socialisers are Hearts.

Imposition:

There are players that use the games assets to cause a nuisance to other players. There player do their best to cause distress to all the other players playing the game by either killing them or just annoying them in general. The more of an annoyance that they are the more joy they get. These players are Clubs

Achievers: Acting on the world, point of playing is to master the game. Make it do what you want it to do.

Explorers: Interacting with the world, sense of wonder of the virtual world.

Socialisers: Interacting with other players involves talking but could also lead to exotic behaviour. Understanding other players

Killers: What else but kill other players?

From covering this reading, it shows that there are 4 strong types of player characters in the gaming world, yet game are NOT limited to only these 4 types of players. 

Week 7 British Museum Trip

In this week we were to go to the British Museum as a class to help out with our work looking at Ancient Games that are on view at the Museum, but at the time I was very low on funding and couldn't afford to attend the trip. But hopefully there will be the same trip going along and I will definitely attend.