HTI 2 Final Blog Summary

As mentioned before, HTI2 semester 1 proved to be a more valuable lesson than semester 2, mainly because we were exposed to talks by people from the outside world, and that they have deeply researched about their ideas before they decided to present it.

An issue that did not work in semester 2 was the presentation by the students, it was probably because of the whole mood of the lesson, the students think that they could do a lousy job with the presentation and not fail, hence the information they produce during the presentation was clearly insufficient, or just knowledge that we already know of.

During the first semester, we were tasked to create a game for brainstorming purposes, and exposed to many other methods that can expand/explore our ideas further, however in semester 2, apparently many students did not make use of this methods to speculate interesting and out-of-the-world ideas from their individual presentation topics, perhaps they did not make much of an effort to even try.

HTI 2 was however, meaningful and interesting to me, as i somehow discovered the purpose of learning all the methods to think and explore my ideas, and i come to know that many ideas are actually inter-connected with each other even if they appear not to. After connecting those ideas together as one whole system, we are able to see more ideas that are spawned from the influences of the system, from there onwards we can slowly create a world of different systems, each governing a whole bunch of ideas, and each system linked with the other.

From learning all this, what was ultimately beneficial to me is this knowledge that allows me to create more ideas, and simply connecting them to make sense, as a game designer, what is useful was learning about the reasons behind how fantasy worlds and games attract players, how the alternate worlds created by game designers and story tellers alike capture the minds of its audience, and this is learned through understanding and connecting the various lecture topics, such as the Tokatsu World, Human Behaviourism and Chaos Theories.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Horror, and The Chaos Theory

Basically, the lectures on artificial intelligence and the machine horrors are somewhat discussions about the same topics, a world where robots have minds of their own and live among humans. This might not be an impossible idea in the near future, and technology are advancing at a rate which would speed up this possible outcome.

The topic on machine horror talks about how humans fear the artificial intelligence which they create, that have minds of their own just like humans, would one day surpass humans in intelligence and take over them. Whether robots should have the same rights as humans, when they become as intelligent and more aware of their own existence.

From the influences of the machine horror, a most common scenario would be having a cyber-world earth, where only robots remain and humans are completely wiped out by their own creation.

The Chaos theory actually happens everywhere, around every idea that is thinkable, it talks about how everything is connected with each other, and how one idea can lead to many different ideas. In my opinion, people have always been using an idea that originated from the Chaos Theory, which is called the butterfly effect.

The idea of the butterfly effect is that a small change can lead to drastic or many changes in the end, and people have been using this theory to speculate what the future might become, one good example would be of the Machine Horror. Thinking that humans would eventually create robots with minds that rival humans, and this would lead to the destruction of the human race as robots began to take over earth. Such ideas about the future can only manifest when applying the butterfly effect theory.

Therefore in my opinion, whenever we want to expand ideas, we would have to use the butterfly effect theory to think of all the small influences by our ideas, and think of how these small influences affect other things.

Tokatsu and Alternate Worlds Theory

Firstly, i find that the two topics are closely related to each other and hence they are reflected on as the same topic in the blog reflections.

The Tokatsu World, is basically a fantasy world created by the japanese authors, it features superheroes that makes use of special skills and effects to fight against evil. There are even famous evil characters in the Tokatsu World such as demons, spirits and monsters.

What makes the Tokatsu World interesting is that the storyline commonly revolves around the fight between good and evil, which in my opinion, is one of the easiest mediums in telling a story, placing in characters for the story is easy for the author as he just have to choose a side for the character to be, good or evil. The characteristic of the character is then determined from the side.

By inter connecting the topic Parallel Worlds, i find that the Tokatsu World is but a parallel world created by the authors to attract the teenagers in the present time, this world they have created is an alternate world where it has limitless possibilities. However it must also relate to real life in order to attract audiences.

For example, humans that can transform into a big avatar(as tall as buildings) and defeat huge monsters and defend earth as their job(Ultraman), versus the real life where humans have normal jobs and everyone are almost of the same size. What is learnt from combining the two was that the authors are thinking out of the box, in search of different possibilities that could happen within the same world, the Tokatsu World attracts people mainly because they believe that they are still within the same world, and as such it relates to them as human beings.

An alternate history is created in the Tokatsu World, this allows a whole new law of nature, and magic can be used in the Tokatsu World. Magic might take the form of tricks in the real world, hwoever it is transformed into devastating and cool magical spells which either damage the opponent or heal an individual. This shows the effect when we change real life events, and expand it to limitless possibilities, giving it a new world and a new set of rules.

Humans would believe in something that closely relates to themselves, hence as absurd an idea as it is, as long as it still belongs to an idea branched off from a possibility of the current world, it is still possible to assume that other people would understand the idea. If the idea created does not have any influences or relationship to any other idea in the world, it would become an idea other people would not find feasible.

Human Behaviourism and Games

Human behaviourism is simply about the different reactions that people would give in different or specific situations, and what would cause these different reactions are the situations which they face during that time. There are many factors which come together to cause different behaviours of humans, and i have grouped them into six factors.

Environment Factor, which deals with the environment surrounding the individual.

Emotion Factor, which is the emotion of the individual at that point of time.

Control Factor, which is how much control the individual feels he/she has over himself or another object at that point of time.

Perception Factor, which is the pre-instilled ideas that an individual has over an object.

Motivational Factor, this is the amount of motivation a player gets which makes him/her wants to continue doing whatever task they are doing.

Genetic Factor. Factors such as the fear of the unknown, fear of projectiles flying towards you, genetic factors that are born with the person.

Each of these factors have a relationship with each other and works together to create the behaviours of human. The idea of human behaviourism is actually pretty much just common sense, and hence it is simple to understand.

From studying the topic, we can understand how different factors like motivating people, and common human perception can cause different behaviours for people. What i feel most beneficial to us as game designers is that after learning this, we are able to use the factors to control how we want the players to feel, as well as how we want them to react to the different situations in the game.

In my opinion, this is the most relevant topic to us game designers, because it tells us the method to control the players in our "world", it shows us the reason why games are successful, and of course the methods to make a game attractive to the player as one who designs the game.

Hti2 Semester 1 Summary

Basically, what i see in semester 1 was an attempt to prepare us for semester2. The lectures in semester 1 was more on psychology, exploring the ideas in our mind, and thinking in-depth into some of the ideas that other philosophers pose, such as the temes and memes, as well as analyzing pictures to understand the message it conveys, it helped us to think more about different aspects of ideas, the origin of idea, the consequences and influences of such ideas, and how it can be applied to use in real life to humans.

Having learnt how to explore the ideas in our mind by continuously asking questions related to the idea, as well as using interesting methods like the Techrad to get interesting results from our ideas, we can then proceed to create a world of our own and ideas of our own, and allow us to question our own ideas itself, exploring and expanding it in the process, in the end we can create a whole new system of ideas that are somehow inter-connected with each other.

This would hence aid us in the second semester where we are required to generate new and whacky ideas from already existing ideas that influence us, which is required from us for the presentation and novums submission.

This idea to apply what we have learnt in semester 1 to generate ideas in semester 2 sort of worked as i have realized the connection between the two, however what did not work was that some of the students, inclusive of me was unable to fully grasp the methods taught in semester 1 to explore our ideas, or that we have forgotten the method and its usage.

In my point of view, the lectures in semester 1 provided more information and knowledge than in semester 2, this was because we were exposed to many talks by philosophers about their ideas in semester 1, and they were good at explaining their ideas, making it interesting for others to listen.

Journal Entry 6 Speculation of strategies

Some ways in which games can appear more appealing to people, is through infusing daily activities into the game, so that the player's feel that they can relate to the game. By reversing the statement "infusing play into daily lives" we can actually infuse our daily lives into play, which would work the same way, yet benefit game designers as well. Since people are designed to play through their lives, infusing their daily lives into game actually allows people to "play through their lives" and hence achieve the ultimate goal of what humans were made for.

Journal Entry 6 To maximise fun and enjoyment in the game

Firstly, the design has to be pleasant, it has to appear appealing to the players by containing amazing graphical animations and appealing characters that they would be controlling. Colours should be used according to whichever emotion the game wants the players to feel.

Secondly, having simple control keys would aid in letting players feel the emotion of having control,they would not be confused over which keys to press because they are fully aware of the function whichever keys does. Having a simple and straightforward game mechanic would also help in letting the players understand the game easily, hence again they would feel that they are in full control of the game. Only then would they desire to explore further into the game and try to achieve more out of the game. Hence involving them deeper.

Finally, equipments and items that the characters use have to contain a certain special name, there has to be different grades of items and weapons, so that the players feel proud or happy, when they are using a weapon/item of a higher grade, or an item that is more rare to find than the others.