The puzzle game I played was factory balls and it was developed by Bart Bonte, a Belgian game designer. The target audience is anyone ages 4+ and can also have an international audience since language is non-essential to the game mechanics. Factory Balls is available on many operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows, and MacOS, and can alternatively be played on a web browser.
The mechanics of Factory Balls influence the experience of the game by lowering the barrier to start playing and adapting the instructions given on each level with intention. This creates an experience of fun that can appeal to a broad audience.
[Pictorial instructions with minimal text]
The very simple instructions and limited interactions that the user can use to complete the puzzles lowers the barrier to start playing Factory Balls. The game’s interaction only involves clicking/tapping, and in comparison to other games that involve keyboard inputs or dragging, this is a very straightforward interaction. The mechanic created from this interaction is tapping on the various colored buckets or wearables to control the game. By limiting the types of interactions the user can use to communicate with the system, the game creates a greater emphasis on the dynamic focusing on the ordering of interactions. I think the aesthetic/type of fun this creates is abnegation. By not overcomplicating the interactions and relying on simple mechanics with straightforward instructions in the beginning, the user is able to disengage from the real world for a bit and just focus on clicking around colors in the game.
While not everyone enjoys the abnegation type of fun, Factory Balls appeals to a broader audience by crafting more difficult levels through specifically chosen alternative mechanics. One such mechanic is through intentionally varying the instruction or interactions provided at each level. For example, as the goal ball that the user is trying to achieve grows more and more challenging, the game begins to provide a recycle bin option for the user to restart. While the user could restart by going to the main menu and returning back to the level, this might cause user frustration, especially if they are continuously running into mistakes and needing to restart frequently. The designer of Factory Balls anticipated this, therefore on some levels they included an optional recycle bin. This creates a smoother dynamic in the flow of the game by not interrupting novice users if they need to restart but also affords more advanced users the option to complete the puzzle without it. This follows Scott Kim’s discussion in his What is a Puzzle? article where he says “What may be fun for one person may be torture for another … Puzzles that are too easy for one person may be too hard for another” (Kim 2). This is just the nature of puzzles, but by varying the optional interactions provided to the player, the designer is able to appeal to a broader audience’s sense of challenge and evoke this type of fun amongst many people. I think this is important because challenge is the type of fun most puzzle games aim for, as the goal of these games are less focused on competition and more on the user vs. the system.
In response to the ethical question for this game, I wonder how accessible a puzzle game based largely on visual color patterns can be? The American Foundation for the Blind discusses the affordances of some games that make it accessible to those with vision impairments, and specifically discusses how games with black text on white background can enhance the experience of low-vision individuals. However, I was thinking about how those with color deficiencies may interact with Factory Balls since it does not rely heavily on text. I think providing the user with the option to customize the color palette of the factory balls could make the game more accessible, especially since the variety of color is mainly for aesthetic purposes (e.g. a normal-sighted individual may get bored if the game was in black and white). Factory Balls has the unique affordance that it normally relies on a couple colors at a time, therefore as long as it varies the values of the color rather than the hue/saturation, it could be played in black and white. As a designer, a small adjustment to the customization settings could go a long way for users with various vision impairments and thus the ethics of not including this feature is a critique I have of Factory Balls.
