Week 3

In our game Group Musical Chairs, I believe that both the players and the game objects are equally essential elements within the game. This is because, in this game, the players are treated as objects just as much as the chairs. This game has two very similar objectives. First of all, find a chair. The game would not be possible without the chairs. It is a challenge because there is always one fewer chair than there are people, so there is the potential to fail. Then there is the second objective, finding a group. Just like the first objective, there is a limited number of people in the play space, so if you are not fast enough, you might not find a group in time, which would lead to your elimination from the game. Macklin and Sharp said in Games, Design, and Play, “Objects are defined by a game’s rules and are necessary for the game to happen.” This is a speed-based game with the objects being the main objective. 

Like all folk games, this game is dependent on direct actions. As defined by Macklin and Sharp in Basic Game Design Tools, direct actions are “Actions that the player initiates and controls.” The players are the ones who scatter the chairs around the play space. Throughout the game, the players directly interact with the chairs by sitting on them and moving around, so no indirect actions are required for gameplay. 

Group Musical Chairs is a heavily goal-oriented game. Players are actively listening for a number to be called out and focused on finding both a chair and a group to sit in before anyone else. As Macklin and Sharp puts it in the chapter Basic Game Design Tools “the goal of a game gives shape and purpose to what the players are trying to achieve while playing.” The game even has a reward for winning, which is getting to be the person who is in charge of running the game (the person who plays music and calls out numbers) in the next round. As an involved version of musical chairs, there is plenty of time spent just walking around, waiting for the music to stop, but it’s the anticipation of the music stopping that makes the game so intense. Because only the person who is “it” knows how long the players must walk around, players must constantly be listening, as they may not get to a chair fast enough if they’re not paying close enough attention.