Role of Game Designers
In all the games I played, the designers played an important role in all of the games. Designers are the ones that control the organizational factors and are basically the advocates for the player. The game designer’s role is to have a vision for the game and to have engaging game play. The game designer must also consider the technical limitations as well as the different consequences of their game whether it is intended or unintended.
In Puzzle Pirates, the designer needed to consider their target age group and how they wanted to organize the game. The overall design can be seen in the game as focusing the game on puzzles and a more social aspect. The prominent themes of immersion, identity, social responsibility, and legitimacy start to become evident in this game. The player can customize their avatars to a certain extent and they have a sense of social responsibility in that they cannot just change their names unless they delete their limited number of accounts and this would cause the player to lose all that they have.
In Counter Strike, the designers were the basis behind the unintended popularity of the original modification from Half Life. The premise and storyline behind Counter Strike is what made the game so popular because it had good flow. There was also a sense of social responsibility because you could get banned if you chose to hack and cheat. There would be no way of getting back in to the server once banned.
In World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, designers spent a considerable amount of time trying to get players to feel immersed and to make the game balanced. Players are also socially responsible as people are able to gain reputation through their different actions that they can have. There are also a lot of technical limitations in the hardware as there are large varieties of computers. While designers want to make the game look nice for those who have higher end computers, they also had to consider the people with older computers.
In this sense, the designers have a very important role overall in the game world. Second Life illustrates this as the game world is based directly on game designers creating their own games and designs. There is also a sense of responsibility as players can get banned from certain areas or kicked out if they do not follow the different roles.