Week 7 - Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design: A PopCap Case Study

What are the design components that Ventrulli believes are important for the creation of casual games and how they can work together to provide a space for great user experiences?

Pacing:

Ventrulli explains pacing in games desing to be indirectly influencing/crafting the players experience by using MDA to create "Relaxation, tension and repetition.", the designer 'paces' the game.

Tension:

Tension is explained as the fear that the player feels when he/she thinks they are going to become the weaker side of the conflict. Aesthetics like sound effects and good graphics can be used to increase the tension, but not the threat.

Movement Impotus:

This is how much time and effort the player is willing to put in to moving forward throughout the level. This is also how willing the player is to make enhancing decisions in the game.

eg. An example is Plants vs. Zombies, the impotus for the player to keep on planting plants to defend the base against zombies is the fact that there is only two outcomes, you either survive the attack or get destroyed, and the player feels there is no point quitting half way through out of frustration/boredom as there is something always going on.

Tempo:

Tempo in any game is how high the 'intensity' of the play is. It is how much time has passed between each big decision made/conflict seen by the player. He explains that the faster the tempo, it minimises how many different possibilities the player could have, where if the tempo is slow, there will be more possibilities as there is more time to do it.

Finally, in the article, Ventrulli believes that once a game is completed/finished by the player it becomes instantly boring. The novelty of not knowing what is going to happen has worn off and the player doesn't play it as that would be repetitive. He explains "re-play" value which is the extra time after the game is completed that the player feels it is still fun to play on.