Games MDA

 Understanding Games

This weeks reading was on MDA which stands for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. These three components when combined together make up a great portion of a video game. A designer must be conscious of how the three work in tangent with one another and design the game on how they work off one another. 

The Mechanics are the base component, this involves what the player is able to do in terms of gameplay. The game might have multiple mechanics such as walking, running then sprinting to name a few, the mechanics have to make sense in order for the dynamics of the game to make sense. 

The Dynamics of the game are what the player is going to experience when playing, for example the PC game Escape from Tarkov is an open world survival shooting game, it involves the player having to battle it out with other players to attain resources in order to complete quest and earn money so they can purchase better equipment. Having this objective style gameplay makes sense with the mechanics such as shooting and running.

The Aesthetics are what is going to evoke an emotional response from the user, if it is a horror game it would make sense for it to not have a lot of bright colours but instead be very dark and give the user a sense of not knowing where they are going.

In my opinion, even though the Mechanics and the Dynamics have to have a close relationship to one another I can settle for a game giving me any sort of dynamics, Ultimately for me it comes down to the actual mechanics of a video game that entices me to buy it. I want to see games that have challenging mechanics and ones that a person has to put time into in order to get better at the game, but that's just me.

Here are some articles I have read to help get a better all round understanding of the subject.

This Article by Mike Stout talks about the problems that developers face when making a game and some of the ways he goes about improving them for the user. you can read the article HERE!   

This one by Marco give a more short and sweet version of what MDA is and what it entails. You can read it HERE!

This Article talks further and a little more in dept as to what MDA is. You can read it HERE!