Week 5 - Games MDA

(pickist.com)

In the first article I read, there was discussion about the 'MDA' framework, its' faults, and how it can be advanced. 

When I first read that MDA stood for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics, I thought about how so much is missing from that. Thinking about any games that I enjoy, there is more than how it works and it looking good. There's often a storyline, for starters. That's a huge part of the game. Actors or voice actors often come in and contribute to this. I feel like the categories aren't specific enough and there's not enough categories for them to be umbrella terms. 

It later talks about DDE which stands for Design, Dynamics and Experience. I think this makes much more sense because design covers aesthetics but also is more than what it looks like but other parts of it. Dynamics covers mechanics because it's all about how it works. Experience covers aesthetics and beyond that, like the storyline. 

I liked the way the article argued both sides.

The video explained how MDA actually works and how useful it is. The video was fine but because I'd questioned MDA above, I was still not sold on it. I understand the need to have a formula for these as big companies that put hours worth of gameplay into a game probably take years to create these games and everyone needs to work cohesively. However, when it comes to creativity it can be hard to pin something down and be specific because there's never one right answer. There's so many game types and genres that one formula will never work for all.