Week 3

               The elements of design that was most important for our game was the rules. It is a challenging problem to solve to make the game fun while keeping it fair for all parties involved. It still isn’t perfect, but I believe that my team is working hard to make it work as best as we can. Honestly my best idea for the new ruleset would be to give the cop a patrol route to make it fair for the robbers to play but then it would have to be balanced by if the cop hears a loud noise or see’s something they can change their patrol route or deviate from it temporarily. The patrol route would have to be based on the environment given as the area for play, which honestly really limits this as a folk game because you kind of need to have obstacles to make the game fun and engaging for both parties. I’ve been trying to think of it as a machine and trying to see how it might be optimized like the systems dynamics approach shown in (Macklin and Sharp I don’t know how to get the page numbers in this one) it has helped to understand the mechanics of play such as if I was programing npc’s to do the roles how would the movement be conducive to a fun environment. It has proven to be a challenge in my understanding of the game I still have no idea how to tackle the problem with the cops field of view, since there isn’t a clear indicator as to when you can be seen it makes gameplay a lot harder for the robbers. It really hinders the gameplay experience I believe my group is going for. The real problem I am noticing is that in order to be conducive to a fun experience a few variables need to be met first. Like it would be more fun at night since you could use a flashlight as an artificial field of view that is visible to all players. The main problem in my opinion is the challenge part of the game like in (Macklin and Sharp chapter 2) while our challenge is definitely there it does have vague rules making it hard to execute. I feel the context of play (Macklin and Sharp chapter 2) will make it a bit better so we can plan around a certain conditions like instead of night time it might just be a game that is best played inside with the lights off so a flashlight can be used to mark field of vision. I would make it feel like the robbers are breaking into a building to steal the loot or something which might make it even more fun.