Managing Notes

Casual Game Design:Designing Play For The Gamer In All Of Us.

Gregory Trefry (p 139 - 154)

Fine line between work and play. Some games feature tasks we naturally enjoy but many games ask us to perform tasks that at first glance seem to be like playing with a excel spreadsheet.

Non digital games can only have a certain amount of things to manage at any given point as the players have a limit on how many they can manage. To many and the players will be become overwhelmed.

Video games have computers do a lot of the calculations for the player which opens up the opertunity for more variations of gameplay. RTS games ask the player to manage multiple variables at a time but are limited by how many the player can handle, where as turn based games can have many more as there is no thinking time.

Diner Dash - Timer management for each custormer, simple clicking input in the correct order to complete tasks.

Cake Mania - Timer based customers (same as Diner Dash) but adds in matching as you need to cook the correct food type for each customer then take it to them.

Managing Attention

Turn based and real time strategy games ask you to manage your own attention. They throw as many elements as they can at you and see at what point you simply cant keep up.

Insaniquarium - Players overwhelm themselves by the more fish they have, they are forced to manage each mechanic that the fish brings with it which means the player has control of how hard the game is to manage depending on how many fish they buy.