Wednesday 7 November, 2018

Today I played through, "Mortician's Tale again". This time I wanted to push the boundaries and see what I could do. I looked at the steam achievements, and realized there were 2 out of the 3 I hadn't gotten. I decided I would get those, because the game is so short. I didn't talk to everyone the last time I played through, with the second option. One achievement was to talk to everyone, so I did this on my 3rd play through. I noticed at the end of the second time playing that the computer had different tabs. This 3rd time I read through all of those as well. I read every email. I noticed there was a mini game which is just a more difficult mine sweeper. It randomizes/cycles through different symbols to mark the amount of ghosts, (mines) are near, so you have to figure it out each time you start it. I spent about 30 minutes trying to beat it, and I finally did! I got the last achievement for the game, which made me happy. I also tried to explore and disobey the prompts. I found out that the game doesn't allow you to mess up. You can't disrespect the bodies if you wanted to. Which was actually a good thing, in my opinion. This helped the message of the game be the most important focus.

Great job! It sounds like on your third playthrough you were definitely playing more like a designer than a typical gamer - a distinction that can often be marked by trying to push the game’s limits and interact with it in ways that it may not have intended in order to see how it will respond. If you plan on going into the games industry (no matter what part) being able to play as a designer can be a valuable skill to have. It’s important to not just play games, but to understand what specific design decisions make the game good or bad. As far as your OPA goes, you could try to tackle some of those design decisions, or dig into some of the themes or ethical elements the game presented. You describe the game as educational, was it an effective tool from a teaching perspective? You also say the game was about being against corporate mortuaries, were there elements in the earlier gameplay that help support this? If that was the message it was sending, did it do so effectively? Why or why not?