One game I love is Mario Kart, and specifically playing on a Nintendo-64 that my family brought from Japan. The mechanics of Mario Kart on the N64 might include the controllers, mystery items, and different tracks. The controllers can lead to dynamics like steering with the joystick, timing the start perfectly to avoid a penalty while being as fast as possible, as well as pressing the right buttons to avoid getting stopped by a banana. The mystery items allow dynamics including targeting other players with squid ink, bananas, and shells (specifically the first-place player with the blue shell), as well as powering up/gaining an advantage with stars, mushrooms, and bullets. The different tracks can lead to dynamics of personal advantages where some players might be better at some tracks over others, but also allows for a constant state of learning and exploration.
Together, these mechanics create an overall dynamic that allows players to have friendly competition and constantly compete against each other, as knowing how to best use the controller can create an advantage, items can be integral in overtaking a current leader, and everything can be changed with the switch to a new track. This dynamic is fun because I can always learn new things as a result of it, whether I am exploring new ways to use the controller, how to best use mystery items, or the most strategic way to zoom around a track.
OPTIONAL
In Crawford’s taxonomy, I found it interesting that he uses the motivation of the creator to split entertainment from art; do the consumers’ opinions then not matter as much in this designation? I also noticed how there are many levels of distinction before we finally arrive at games from creative expression. Along the way, some examples including SimCity and The Sims are associated with “software toys,” even when they might traditionally be lumped into the category of a game. Perhaps this just indicates how our current definition of a game can be loose or specific depending on the context, as there are so many different types of games that might actually fall into a different type of creative expression based on Crawford’s taxonomy.
