Game Analysis
Hi!
I have chosen to analyze the board game Alias this week.
The main purpose of the game is that you are supposed to explain a word, or preferably multiple words, without using that specific word for your team mate. The more words you can explain for your team mate before the time runs out, the more points you get.
This is a two sided team competition game, for 3-8 players according to the game box, but you can of course play with more players, you just have to play with bigger teams.
Each round one team member explains the words, and the other one guesses. To do so they pick up a card and reads one of the seven words written on the card. Which word they are reading depends on where the teams game piece is placed. Each square on the game board is numbered. This is how you you which word you are supposed to read. It’s the same difficulty level on every word, so what number you get does not really matter. I guess purpose of this is to know how many words you’ve guessed correctly by counting the cards later, and also to be able to use the same card again and again if you have played the game many times.
When one have collected “word explaining points”, the team moves their game piece the same amount of steps as the number of words they have guessed correctly. If you have guessed right on five different words, you move the piece five steps and so on. The first team to the goal wins.
MDA - Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics
Mechanics – As Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek writes in their article about MDA the mechanics in a game is the various actions, behaviors and control mechanisms that support the dynamics of the game. In the game of Alias the mechanics are moving your game piece, picking up cards, reading the right word, turning the hour glass and so forth.
Dynamics – The dynamics describes the behavior the mechanics give the players. How the players chose to act. In Alias the hour glass will change the dynamics. The players will get stressed, talk faster in order to get as many words right as possible. They can try to explain the words with internal stories in order for the team mate to guess it faster. If they accidentally should say a word or a part of a word that is not allowed according to the rules, they have to take another card and get a minus point, which will further add to the time pressure. The players will often speak loud and fast because of this.
Aesthetics – The aesthetics of games describes the feeling. Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubeck mentions a few words to categorize different feelings depending on what type of game you’re playing. Such as Fantasy, Narrative and Fellowship. I would say that the aesthetics for the Alias game could absolutely be described Fellowship. Also feelings like challenge, expression, pressure, stress, hopelessness (when you get a word you don’t even know what it means) and frustration (when your team mate doesn’t understand what you mean).
Fullerton mentions in her book Game design workshop (2008) that a game needs objectives. Objectives tells the players what to strive for in the game. She gives some examples of game goals such as Rescue (as in Super Mario where the goal always is to save the Princess) or Alignment (like Candy Crush or Tetris). The purpose of Alias is simply to reach the goal first and your team wins the game. That is why the objective for Alias is Race. The same objective that for example racing games have.
Some of the underlying rules of this game is that you shouldn’t move more steps than you have correctly guessed words, you are supposed to stop the explanation when the time runs out, even if no one tells you it’s over and you aren’t supposed to choose which word on the card you think is the easiest. You need to stick to the number you’ve gotten.
References
Hunicke, Robin, LeBlanc, Marc & Zubeck, Robert (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.
Fullerton, Tracy, Swain, Christopher & Hoffman, Steven (2008). Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. 2. ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann