Students Blog

After reading the piece by Taylor, I came away with some important facts and situations of the roles of designer values in game design. The most important and profound statement made in Taylor’s piece was that there is “a fundamental way in which initial world designers and the architectures they implement will always have a deep, implicit connection to the artifacts that make up the environment.” Even if the initial designer values are miniscule to a certain extent, ultimately it is these values that have the final say in what can or cannot happen in the game we, the players, will play. Taylor points out that “code, graphics, systems architecture all arise from somewhere, from human agents.” The complexity and craziness of a game can only go so far before it reaches a limit of basic rules, regulations and constraints based on the values of the premier designers of the game. Worlds and environments in games are always designed with a structured goal in mind. As Taylor points out, the user only has so much control with what to do within the game environment. This s why the designer values are so important in game design because they shape what the players have control over as Taylor makes very clear in the reading.
If we go back to Halo and its online system specifically, Bungie had a clear goal and value in their overall design of the system. That is, they wanted a fair rank system of battles ranging from beginner, to mediocre, to expert. Within the game design, Bungie used the three prominent themes that Taylor discusses to base their online world in and make it as effective as possible for the players. Those themes are immersion, identity and social responsibility, and legitimacy. These themes had the aspects of their designer values and allowed the players to only do so much under their control and design. But as time went on, players found ways to manipulate these themes under the designer values. Through modding and cheating and various ways of tweaking their systems, many players found ways to disrupt the online community under the goals of the design by Bungie. The players were still under the environments that Bungie created, but ways were found how to alter the immersion, identity and social responsibility, and the legitimacy of the gaming experience. This type of experience under designer values can be found in many games where players find ways to implement “netsex”, alter egos, and more levels of freedom under the scheme of the designers (i.e. The Sims, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, etc). Designers must always prepare for instances where players will manipulate their values to suit a different need other than simply doing well in the game. For example, as Taylor points out, in one game where players can change their identities very easily, designers can adjust their values to make the price of changing identity raise exponentially each time. This will slow the frequency of identify changing under the overall design and environment of the creators.
In Second Life, we too will look for ways to make our designer values important and functional in the overall system of our game. We will need to anticipate cheating, etc., and find ways to make sure our designer values stand tall among the freedom of our players. We want to give our players freedom, but ultimately, we will need to have design values that systematically give some structure to structure to the immersion, identity and social responsibility, and legitimacy of our Cultural Exchange game. In the end, design values are so important because they give the players the underlying structure of the virtual world. If in any case we notice something with our design values, we will need to revamp our values and environments to further apply to our original goals.