Week 1: reading response
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Week 3: reading response
Week 4: reading response
Week 5: reading response
Week 6: reading response
Week 7: reading response
Week 8: reading response
Week 9: reading response
For this week's reading response, I would like to reflect on several design principles from the book:

Principle 6.5 Reflection: Games as a Mirror of Our Humanness
Games are often designed to allow players to use certain strategies to reach a defined or undefined goal. Thus, the selection of the strategy and the goal actually reflects how the user wants to interact with the system developed by the developer. For example, in the game "Civilization VI," there are different ways to achieve victory: Science, Culture, Domination, Religion, and Score victories. These goals are often associated with their own unique philosophical strategies, which can often be applied to real-life personal beliefs. For example, a Science victory is related to rationalism and technocracy, a Cultural victory to cultural relativism and neo-liberalism, a Dominance victory to fascism or militarism, a Religion victory to theocracy, and a Score victory to pragmatism. You can also apply these different strategies to a sandbox game like Minecraft or Roblox. In the end, "humanness" is the political orientation towards problem definition and problem-solving, and it can actually be reflected in the way you approach the game.

Principle 6.6 Elegance is Simple Mechanics Giving Rise to Complex Dynamics
One of the most elegant things in the world is recursion. Recursion always uses a simple element as a starting point and recurs the same pattern in the same way to reach a complex pattern. It is similar to what we call emergence in a large language model. From another aspect, we can also comprehend simple mechanics with the famous .io game series, such as slither.io and agar.io, which use a minimalist type of form and rule to present complex multiplayer dynamics.

Principle 6.22 Create Satisfying Expressive Core Mechanics Aimed at Inducing a Sense of Flow
I am a huge fan of music rhythm games like Cytus, Deemo, and sometimes Konami arcades like Maimai, SDVX, IIDX, and Beatmania. I feel that the state of flow is actually when you are entrained with certain rhythmic patterns occurring in the game. This experience is not only found in music rhythm games but also in many other games like Super Mario Smash Bros or the Tekken series, where the combo requires pressing a combination of buttons in a rhythmic manner. Flow is the entraining experience of a game mechanism.

Principle 6.23 Motivate Longer-Term Engagement Through Social and Peripheral Gamification
I will use Pokemon Go as an example. Pokemon Go is one of the XR games that maps the in-game mechanism with real-world coordinates. This type of game design usually makes people play online but gather offline for a unique Pokémon. This type of in-person social gathering is actually a catalyst to make players, who are usually anonymous online, see each other face to face and naturally form a community. There have been many cases where couples have formed because they both played Pokemon and gathered in the same on-site place. So, I think this might be a great example of the social and peripheral gamification of a game.