Excercise 6

2. Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

I would personally consider my group's project 1(Prince Charming) to be a game, as that was our aim all along. However is it a game as defined by experts such as Zimmerman?
Zimmerman defines a game to be a voluntary interactive activity. In our project, there is no forcing of anyone to participate in our game. If the audience refuse to participate, he could choose to follow the pre-determined path of Prince Charming, and treat it as watching a movie.

We have pretty well defined boundaries in that the players cannnot do what we do not allow them to do. However, within this rigid boundaries we allow the players via the usage of noise to shift the Prince Charming onto another path during the decision making frame. As Prince Charming is shifted onto a different path, we will actually see a different ending to the story. We do not set specific rules saying what the player can do, however we have a few decision nodes in the game for them to show their preference to the actions of Prince Charming. We even have 1 decision node that was not obviously shown to the players, hoping that if they laugh, they will see a hidden scene that does not really change the ending, kind of an Easter egg.

The clearly defined objective of our project is to save the princess from being killed by the witch. A player's decision should be based on the fact that he wants to save the princess and every decision should be made towards this goal. While it is not specifically said that the ending where the Princess becomes a skeleton is bad, we could hear in class when we saw her becoming a skeleton, the collective gasps of the class. Many decisions in our game seems innocuous at first, however the simple act of deciding whether Prince Charming sees a straw house first or a candy house first is game breaking, as without the candy, one can never save the princess. This gives some uncertainty to our project, as you do not really know what kind of effect your decision will have on the ending.

Thus finally I conclude that our project can thus be considered to be a game, albeit a very simple one.