Welcome! Today is the halfway mark in the on-going Design a Day experiment. 25 designs down, 25 to go. I have some changes in mind for the next half of the challenge, and if I can get all my ducks in a row, I’ll make announcement Monday.

Currently the ducks are all askew, so no promises.

So a few school-girls in Ohio got in hot water this week for some video-game inspired hijinks. Unless Osama Bin Laden has teamed up with the Riddler, I’m thinking that the talk of criminal charges may be a bit of an overreaction.

As a result, I created the PSA on the left. Just doing my bit to help.

As I was researching this story, I ran across an excellent article about risk , and how humans are terrible at assessing it. I borrowed their chart. Take a gander at it, and I’ll see you after the jump.

I’m more interested in picking this apart and seeing what it implies for gameplay than I am in sketching a design around it.

Inside of the game, gamers drive their experience forward by taking voluntary risks. If the designer has done their job correctly, they are of the self controlled (and occasionally diminished control) variety, and so the risks are very acceptable. This includes basic navigation and movement through the level. This is why good control and feel are important to gameplay, I think. If the control is poor, the risk of inadvertently harming the avatar is too great, and that’s not fun.

The player’s forward progress is often impeded by the impersonal risks; the falling rocks, the crumbling ledge, risk found in the nature economy. I would even go so far as to argue that most garden-variety enemies, in the context of the virtual environment constitute these nature economy risks, because like natural risks (again, in the context of the game), they can be learned and predicted (behaviorally).

It’s when we come to imposed risks that things become more interesting. Take two risks, a wandering thug that can be seen, avoided, or engaged, an encounter the player perceives as being under their control. Compare to a low level boss where the player suddenly finds themselves in the locked room, with minimal cover, an encounter that has been imposed on them. The boss and the thug may statistically be of similar risk to the player, but because the boss encounter is imposed on the player, the feeling of controlling the encounter is diminished, and the perceived risk of harm is amplified.

The flip side of this is that the player, upon defeating the boss, feels a much greater sense of accomplishment because they have defeated an enemy they perceive to have been a much greater risk.

That’s a pretty good go at deconstructing of some standard gameplay elements as seen through the lens of risk amplification. So what are the novel uses?

The greatest amplification comes from imposed, malign risks, and we also have the notion of decrease in control yielding an increased perception of risk.

So give the player one of these imposed, malign risks in the form of a boss. Then change the rules so their standard means of controlling their environment (the bullwhip, the rocket launcher) are denied them. The door closes, the boss appears, you go to draw your weapon confident that you can beat him, and then you see the small child you’ve been sent to rescue. Now you have a new objective, grab the child’s hand and get him to the door on the far side of the area. As soon as you release his hand, he begins to run around randomly. You can’t use your weapon and guide the child. Your actual risk has gone up (but not too much, if the game is properly balanced), your perceived risked has sky-rocketed.

It doesn’t need to be that dramatic. The burning tiles that appear at the top of the screen in Bookworm are an imposed malign risk.

I don’t know that this is a particular deep revelation, but that’s a risk I take every time I write one of these.

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.