The game I chose to play was Monument Valley. The target audience is everyone who has a phone, whether that is iOS, Android, or Windows, and wants to play a puzzle game. The developer is Ustwo games. The director is Neil McFarland, producer is Dan Gray, designer is Ken Wong, programmers are Peter Pashley, Manesh Mistry, and Van Le, and the artists are Ken Wong and David Fernández Huerta. The platform of the game is iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows.
The main plot of the game revolves around Princess Ida, who the player is embodying as they play the game. Princess Ida needs to move and pass through successive levels of optical illusion architectures that are reminiscent of MC Escher’s works (such as the always increasing staircase) and it’s the player’s job to solve puzzles to help Ida traverse each level. The player taps on the path to help Ida move forward. There are elements such as spinners that spin a section of the path to connect to other sections of the path so that Ida can walk forward to reach the end of each level. The player can also move different sections of the path to different places (back and forth), and there are also places that move up or rotate when tapped. It is with mechanics like these that the player helps Ida move to her goals.
This shows that the puzzles are all quite simple: not in difficulty, but in atmosphere. The aesthetic of the game is quite minimalist and pastel, and the mood of the puzzles reflects that. The player does not have to contemplate each action so deeply, and instead can join the quiet flow of the game and enter a more meditative mood.
Another reason why the puzzles’ mechanics instill into the player a pensive, quiet mood is that it is quite peaceful. There are no mechanisms that could be violent or harm Ida’s physical wellbeing, which means the player can remove that kind of on-guard-ness from their experience of the game and just let the peaceful atmosphere wash over them.
This shows that while the kind of fun present in this game is Hard Fun, because the player is triumphing over the adversity of the puzzles, this game is different from other games that include Hard Fun such as Call of Duty because there is no violence in the mood or atmosphere.
To answer the ethics question, the designers of the game assume players have knowledge of specific languages that the game is available in. If the player does not speak any of the languages that Monument Valley is available in, it might be harder for them to gain context around Ida’s journey. However, they would still be able to play the game because it is not text based and instead it is based on visuals. Additionally, the designers of the game are also assuming players have a certain level of vision because the game requires players to have visual capacity in order to navigate each puzzle, which excludes blind and low vision people.
