7 Principles for sharing design therapy games for children

Thanks to my current job and the local service, I had a chance to see a variety of therapeutic games for children with neurological rehabilitation. Most games are equipped with specialized input devices.

Exactly, the input device should be a matching game. Because the manufacturer usually considers the game after the equipment is built. In addition, the design intentions of those games are good, but often do not show.

I decided to make a list of my own observations and suggest some improvements. The idea below is not to denigrate the work of other design programmers, but to explore the problems that you might encounter and address when designing a new game. Of course, the main is to remind me not to fall into these misunderstandings.

Therapy Game http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/29798.html ">design (from Xeophin.net)

Common Misconceptions and Solutions

First of all, you have to say that if you are going to develop a therapeutic game for children, you really have a big challenge. Children are one of the most demanding audiences, and if they like your game, they can easily pick up any little flaws in the game. If your game happens to show signs, they are more likely to do so. For example, you create an illogical world of games: let a running dog jump up and down to avoid exploding mushrooms, while lifting the bulletproof giant hand to his belly, while collecting diamonds floating in mid-air?

I'm not talking nonsense. The children are sure to ask why. If the dog is hungry, why doesn't he eat mushrooms? Why do mushrooms explode? Why do dogs want diamonds? Why does the diamond hang in the air? What's a giant hand doing on the floor? When therapists have to focus on actual treatment, they can't come up with a ready-made explanation? The child will keep asking why. Children stop doubting only when everything in the game is logical and relevant. So, design principle 1th: The game world must be logical and meaningful.

According to my observation, many games ' failure results are far more spectacular than success. Imagine, in a game, eggs and tomatoes must be floating, not landing, and finally safely put into the basket. When these things are successfully put into the collection basket, the player can hear a monotonous "ka-qi". If the player drops something on the ground, the tomato will splash into a beautiful flower, and the egg will pop out a chick and giggle and run away. I've seen more than one example. The result of failure is the fragmentation, splash, explosion, and vivid, but the successful response, even only the Windows system built-in reminders! The player is tangled: if I play too well, I won't have much fun, because all the interesting things happen only when I'm having a bad time. Is this really the goal of the game? I don't think so. So, design principle 2nd: To make successful feedback more satisfying than failure feedback.

I'm going to use repetitive training to create games to reduce costs. This evil idea is called Sisyphus. For example, a player must do something repeatedly, such as picking an apple and putting it in a basket. Once this simple task is completed, the game begins anew. Then the player starts picking apples again. The game starts again. Then the player starts picking apples again ... This is too boring! While reloading games and counter programs should be easy to write, this is depressing for players. No matter what you just finished, then you have to start again. The Apple kept disappearing in the basket and growing out of the tree. In addition to the abstract counters, players do not feel any progress, let alone "Wow, see I picked so much!" "Because the basket is empty. No matter what the player does, it is futile. It's not like Sisyphus (game State Note: In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by the gods, who kept pushing a boulder up the hill, and the stones rolled down the hill for their own weight, and the gods thought that there was no more severe punishment than the futile and hopeless labour, and that no progress was ever seen. The solution is simply to fill the basket with apples. Finally, the player is satisfied with seeing a full pile of apples and feels that they are hardworking. So, design principle 3rd: Use visual feedback to make players feel better.

The massive repetition of games, in addition to letting players see no progress, creates another problem: boredom. This is not a new problem, because even the mainstream game is there. Call it "mining", which essentially calls for the player to repeat the same thing constantly. Whether it's "Warcraft", "Diablo 2", "Heaven" or "Endless tasks," most MMORPG players are "mining". Why? Because these Games "mining" is like playing a slot machine: Most of the time, the player can get a little bit back (ore), but a careless, you dug into the treasure made a fortune. With this idea of digging into the treasure again, the player keeps mining. Adding "valuable" props to a therapeutic game may not be entirely the case, since such games have no or no economic model, but random events can effectively reduce the sense of routine. How often do apples turn into pears (up to one or two times during treatment)? Or suddenly fly out of a worm? In short, sometimes unexpected things happen, there are always something new to wait. This is the return of "mining". Design principle 4th: Add unexpected things to your routine.

Of course, repetition is not the only reason why a therapeutic game becomes tedious in a short time. The other is that the general content is inadequate. After playing a game for five minutes, the player sees through the whole game. After five minutes, nothing will change. The difficulty no longer increases, the player also no longer progresses. If there's nothing to explore, then I take the time to play the game as a player-unless there are other elements that are always changing to attract me. For those games that play for a while every day, most of the treatment games I see don't have the value of playing it back. Design principle 5th: Improve the value of play.

Another problem has nothing to do with people who play games and who develop games. Especially when targeting children as a target audience, developers must be clear that the children's game-remembering experiences may be richer than they are. This is a difficult problem because the treatment game will be compared to the mainstream games produced by Sony, EA or Nintendo by the children. As developers, there is no reason to imitate the visual style of these games. Still, developers use the visual templates, vocabulary, and some better and more appropriate game mechanisms of these mainstream games to quickly set up scenes and achieve goals that are close to children's gaming experience. However, these visual templates must be used wisely: children will soon be aware of the role's behavior as "no body". A therapeutic game is not necessarily the first game a child plays. and often not. If the game allows the child to devote more than five minutes, the design must consider the game ecosystem in the child's mind. Design principle 6th: Pay attention to the game-remembering experience of the target audience-as close as possible if necessary.

I am fully aware that the three principles imply that more content and code are produced and the cost increases. But if this can increase the effectiveness of the game, why not follow it?

I think the reason developers skip these three is that they may think that the treatment games that are just for kids can be perfunctory, and that kids never know. The question is, do you remember what you did with your hands when you were a child? Try everything boldly? That's how kids treat games. In order to figure out what's going on, they're going to poke everything out. Similarly, children will find every possible way to explore and exploit the game. More serious: This could completely disrupt the real treatment process. Yes, as a developer, you don't have to convince the player to continue playing your game because the player is usually forced. But if you recognize the need to improve the game and create a world where players are happy to play time, that's fine. Design principle 7th: Modify and improve the therapeutic game as much as you want to put it on the Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation receptacle, steam, or the Apple App Store.

I know these principles are not new. It should be common sense for people who have been engaged in game development for some time.

But when it comes to treatment games, developers are often no longer game designers but engineers, and input devices are the focus of attention, and the game is a minor consideration, and its role is only to show the performance of the device. I still hope that this situation will improve. But before that, the attitude of developing therapeutic games really had to change.

Correct attitude

From the research literature, we can see the developer's attitude towards the treatment game. Few documents describe how the game works, how it stimulates, rewards or punishes players. Even the basic game mechanism is not mentioned. On the contrary, the hardware setup is a lot of talk. But what about a game that's installed on a Dell computer and displayed on a 21-inch LCD display? Most game systems have certain system requirements, which are irrelevant to the hardware-after all, the island crisis and the FarmVille can run on the same hardware, but I don't think anyone really thinks, because of that, the game is playing the same thing.

It is time to develop a rational and normative way to describe those games, so that comparisons can be made and it is best to evaluate quality. What is the main game mechanism? How does the game loop work? How to keep player games? What is the result of a player failure? Is there a winning condition? If so, what is it, how is it achieved? How to reward the winning player? Are the failed players punished? If yes, how to punish? What other feedback can players get? How do players fit into the game world--in third-person roles or first-person perspectives, to manipulate roles or simply move the mouse cursor? How big is the game size? Game screen, visual effects, themes, scenes? How fine is the environment? Is it similar to the mainstream game?

The research literature should be able to answer some of these questions in order to have a profound understanding of therapeutic games-except for high-resolution images (which are rarely mentioned in today's literature), and, of course, video showing games and players ' reactions to the game.

Developers need to learn how to design such a game on a large scale, and making good games can be time-consuming (natural and expensive), but the treatment game has more than just a demonstration tool for new devices, which itself should be given considerable attention.

After all, the patient's attention is ultimately on the screen and on the game, with no notice of what device is running the game. If the game is interesting and appealing, the player will naturally use that device again. Otherwise, no matter how good the device itself, the player will no longer use.

Source: gamerboom.com Game State