Games MDA

 Games MDA



MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design

The first article was an Academic paper by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, named, "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research". It was a very easy paper to read compared to the ones I've previously read and I think that's due to the topic being discussed. From this paper I have learned a few things about Game Design, Research and MDA, a framework to help guide Game Developers, Game Designers and Scholars. Basically, MDA stands for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics and is a formal approach to understanding games and bridges the gap of game design and game development, game criticism and technical game research.

Mechanics is the particular components of the game, at the level of data representations and algorithms.
Dynamics is the run-time behaviour of the mechanics working on the player inputs and each others outputs overtime. 
Aesthetics refers to the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player when he/she interacts with the game system.


 The take away from this paper is that all game designers and developers need overall understanding of the workings of a game to make overall important decisions which trickle upward throughout the build of the game. 

DDE: Design, Dynamics, Experience

The second article detailing DDE is written by Wolfgang Walk, Daniel Görlich and Mark Barrett. DDE exists to improve the weaknesses of MDA. DDE, designed by Robin Et al. (Hunicke, Leblanc and Zubek, 2004) was a counter proposal to the MDA framework after articles by Lana Polansky and Frank Lantz were published in 2015. These articles go on to mention that MDA neglects many design aspects of games and focuses primarily on the mechanics. This isn't suitable for all types of games including particularly gamified content or any type of experience-oriented design (as opposed to functionality-oriented design). 

The new revised Framework is based on the three new pillars: Design, Dynamics, Experience.
This revised system allows a closer look at the players experience which is referenced to as a Journey. This helps give game designers and developers better understanding of roles in the narrative of games. Something interesting which is added in here is Sicarts concept of Player-Subject which when applied helps give better overall understanding. One of the key improvements that DDE offers is that this new framework allows designers to reassess the value of the story with the overall frame-work of game development. This allows a highly iterative process.



















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