Analysing Board Games During Nightmare Week.

So this week has been tough, mainly because of the three analyses of board games that was due for today in my Advanced Game Design class, but also because Serious Games, the other class I’m reading is unexpectedly ramping up with assignments.

On top of this I got to know earlier this week that Almedalsbiblioteket wanted to exhibit our game Alienation through an arcade machine they are putting up. The installation will be this Saturday, tomorrow at 18:00. This is great news of course. Absolutely fantastic! And if only it had been for another week…

Alienation is not an arcade game. It may fit very well for an arcade, but it is not built for it. This means I will have to remap much of the controls for the game, and also change how the game handles restarts and shutdown. The information the game itself provides about the controls should also be updated. Alienation isn’t a big game, and this isn’t a major task. I’m sure we’ll manage it before the installation is due. The only reason this has felt stressful for me is basically that I react poorly to new tasks when I already am under pressure. It just turns into something that keeps eating at me during the night, and then I can’t sleep.

Anyway, back to the analysis of board game. I’m done now, and have sent them in. Are they any good? I don’t know. I feel the preparation I did for the analysis was good. My group played the board games several times and took time to discuss themes and aesthetics we found. When I started writing the analysis I felt I got off to a good start where things appeared clear to me, and the ideas I formulated in my head I was able to put down in print. The further I got into this week though the more my writing began to feel like a monotonous stream of words I was just spouting out to get it all done. Analysis work especially, really suffer from this I’ve found. So were the analysis any good? I don’t know.

(By the way: If you want to try Alienation, the game can be downloaded from this beautifully handled website: http://rheb.mauft.com/. Alienation is a short and simple atmospheric game about bullying.)