For my critical play, I played the game Factory Balls by Bart Bonte. This was originally a Flash game but is now just hosted on the website bartbonte.com as well as sites like CoolMathGames. The target audience is pretty much anyone who likes puzzles, although as the game gets more complex it might be too hard for younger kids to play.
The mechanics of the game are very simple.
First, the user is presented with a blank ball and a colored ball with some kind of design. The user has access to a limited number of buckets of paint and various props, and then has to use the paint and various props in order to match the design of the colored ball onto the blank ball. Here are some puzzle mechanics I found super interesting:
- The game doesn’t give any instructions. When I entered and played the first level, I had to figure out what the objective was and how to get there. There was a certain level of discovery to this process I hadn’t seen in many puzzle games.
- The game is very simple, and so it felt like it was all about the puzzle the whole time and not some other narrative. This was engaging, although I personally find it harder to engage with a game like this for an extended period of time (it gets too same-y after a while).
- The game introduces paint and props gradually, and thus there is a good pace to figuring out how to use each item. Even though it’s very much a self-learning process, it was guided and paced well by the game.
This game lines up very well with the MDA framework of mechanics creating a dynamic which then leads to some kind of aesthetic pleasure. The game is very clearly being powered by its mechanics and not any kind of external narrative. In this case, basic puzzle mechanics lead to a dynamic of exploration, discovery, and a satisfying trial and error process (which I think is hard to develop!) that provided pleasure when I finally figured out what to do.
Thinking about this game critically, I think one thing that I didn’t like is that as the game became more and more complicated the simple mechanics and lack of instructions made it really hard to know if I was on the right track. When the game became more complicated and the processes took longer (i.e., you had to click more times and more different things in order to get to the right answer), I wish there had been more feedback or some kind of indication of how many steps were left. However, I do think that the lack of instructions leads to a really good vibe of discovery and exploration.
From an ethical standpoint, I think the biggest issue is that this game is very much based on color. Therefore, it can be really hard for someone who’s colorblind to deal with the game. Additionally, the lack of instructions can make it really hard, and so certain people who might love puzzles but have more trouble understanding even if they are good at puzzles might struggle.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed playing this game and ended up spending way too much time on it when I had other assignments to do. I think it’s really fun to try to figure out what does what and the cause-and-effect process that goes on in this game. I think I found myself going from a stage of just messing around and seeing what works to actually looking at the colored ball and trying to think of what the order might be and try to plan out an order before I started doing things.
