Ancient Game Tweaking

Sometimes it is good to improve existing games instead of creating a brand new game from scratch. During lectures we have looked at a variety of ancient board games and played most of them. Whilst playing these games, we thought about what made those games enjoyable to play and what we didn’t like about the game.

I mainly looked at Tablut and came to the conclusion that the game seemed unfair and the defending player won most of the games played. As a result, I went through an iterative process of making a single change and then testing it to come up with improvements to the game that made it more balanced and as a result more enjoyable to play. 

The changes I made are:

•         The defending is not allowed to enter any of the attacker’s starting squares, this also means that the king cannot escape on any of these squares

•         The king can be captured by being sandwiched on two sides like any other piece when outside of the throne square

•         The king cannot move back on to the throne square once he has left it

With these changes, I found that the game involved much more strategy and planning from each player and the win ratio was much more balanced.

New Games Journalism & Old Games Journalism

When reviewing or reporting about games, journalists can use New Games Journalism (NGJ), Old Games Journalism (OGJ) or usually a combination of both. Old Games Journalism will often focus on a specific aspect of the game and will provide you with an analysis of that aspect. This will provide you with much more technical information about a game, which I often find, isn’t enough to allow me to make a decision on whether I want to buy that game.

New Games Journalism are not what you would normally expect from a review of a game. This is because these articles often include the author’s response to their own experience of the game. The author will often play the game and experience it for themselves and then share their thoughts and feelings on what they experienced. Anecdotes will often be included in NGJ as the author shares stories of what happened although different players may experience different things in the game.

I personally prefer NGJ as it gives me a more realistic image of what it would be like to play the game and allows me to decide much more easily whether it is something I would enjoy. However, I feel like there should be some OGJ involved in all reviews as it is important to know how well often regarding the controls, graphics and options as if a game is very weak in one of those regards I often find it can spoil the whole game.

Remediation

Remediation is when something on one type of media is re-created to but used on another type of media. For example, the news has been found on newspapers for a long time. However, when the internet gained popularity, the news was also posted on the web to make the information more available for readers. This also allowed the news companies to enhance their contact by adding much more interactivity and allows them to include more types of content and use links to redirect the reader.

Remediation may take place for a variety of reasons, as mentioned above, one reason is to take advantage of new developments to allow the author to present their content in a much more efficient or interesting way. Alternatively, it could be used as a way to create new content for new forms of media which don’t yet have much content. Alternatively, a company may choose to use a successful title and convert it to another media to provide a whole new experience which users will still find some familiarity with.