Review of LEGO: The Hobbit

Taking advantage of Steam's weekend deal, I bought LEGO: The Hobbit for less than EUR4 and gave it a test run. Having seen the trilogy, I wanted to see how it felt. The game begins telling the story of how the dwarfs lost the Mountain to Smaug the Fire Dragon, so it extends the story a bit by giving us an idea of what happened before. It is also a co-op play with two players, making use of the different characters' unique abilities and also co-operating in overcoming and solving puzzles together. But I got stuck at the first door. I am a first time LEGO player (video game, physical blocks I've played with aplenty) and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Smashing things up didn't seem a good idea (hey, the dwarfs live here, how can they be vandals in their own home??) although while testing out the controls (WASD and UHJK) I did accidentally smash some ornaments. My son was playing the other character and he was getting edgy not knowing what to do. I ended up looking for walkthroughs to get an idea of what I had to do: I DID have to SMASH things.. and then build them back up. I smashed some, but could not figure out how to build. That is until I restarted the game (this time with my daughter as my son went off to play something else), smashed the statues and got rewarded with a jumping ? tile that told me how to build. Eventually I finished the first chapter with my daughter but i have some feedback to share. The game sacrifices consistency with the story for the sake of the LEGO World game mechanics: having Thorin smashing up his kingdom felt really out of place and was afraid that the guards would get me. Indeed, the guards were so off-putting. I'm the King's son for Balin's sake, how dare you point those blades at me? Anyway, the LEGO feel is nice, it's a nice remediation of the real world feel of the trilogy, but the game mechanics... they're too Lego focused: you're smashing things up to gain LEGO pieces that you can rebuild and re-use to solve the puzzles. The mini-games bring the LEGO brick playing back into the game, but only to sacrifice consistency with the story... I look at this as another themed game that sticks to the gameplay while sacrificing narrative consistency.. watch this space for a paper about that :P

Journal Papers and Conferences galore!

This blog seems to be a hit and miss! It's been so long since I've posted here... I feel so bad :(

Anyway, I bring good news. Since my last post, I've graduated with Distinction from my MA in Games Design with UCLAN, publishing two papers in the process.

I've focused my MA on finding a cross-media User Experience (UX) tool that can be used to compare between video games and board games, and I was able to provide results that show that the Games Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) can be used to measure UX as a result of both game mechanics (see paper here) and social presence (see paper here).

Meanwhile, I've revived my work carried out on game level design described in my previous post and I am presenting it as a poster at the Second ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) being held in London this October (see link here).

Moreover, I wrote a position paper regarding the consistency aspect of UX when dealing with games as part of a transmedial production, and it was accepted for the Games User Research workshop being held on the eve of the above conference (paper available here).

Finally, I have another paper on the consistency aspect of game mechanics accepted for the ICIDS conference in Copenhagen this December (see link here).

As you can see, much has happened since the last post and there's more coming! Watch this space, I'll try not to keep you THAT long for the next post :P