Prayas Abhinav's experience in game design
Ten years experience in designing and testing games for a range of scenarios.
Interests & Context of Efforts
Engaging Fun
I am interested in connecting games to our everyday life in a more fluid way. The genre of games called ‘Serious Games’ is already trying to solve problems but we find the approach of these games to be too serious. We want to practice the idea of ‘engaged fun’ to make ‘serious games’ less serious and more fun & effective.
Participation
Our interests range from board games to Live Action Role Play (LARP) games, card games and simulation games. We aim to motivate the largest possible cross-section of people in the games we help design and enact.
Easy interpretation
We see our ability to interpret to make meaning and capacity to enjoy as something that all of us need. Meaning is too often wrapped up in seriousness and is not engaging enough and fun is too often absolutely mindless!
Formats of Contribution
Consulting
Modding your existing games or working with your team to make sense of how games can be used effectively.
Design & Testing
We can design and test games as an end-to-end process for your organization working as implementation partners.
Strategy
How and Why are bog questions in the context of gaming. We help you answer these questions effectively.
Completed and in-progress games
The Decay of Meaning
A game-world in which the instrumental analysis of meaning and value in vocabulary becomes an obsession. You can jump and eat words, depending on which word you eat, you speed becomes faster or slower. When the player collides with its other avatar, one of them dies (who is faster?). But then there are three lives. If you eat a lot of words, sometimes there are side-effects.
Even War Has Limits
A modified version of the Space Invaders game (a classic arcade game) in which the confrontational process part of our social situation plays out and becomes a linguistic conflict in which accusations and cross-accusations are made easily using different constructs and arrangements of words. The game can be played with a joystick. Additional cross-accusations can be typed with a keyboard.
A set of texts narrated the story of social give and take, aggression and control.
Distortion Field
A warped car-racing game which mimics the act of “dropping out”. It modifies the 2d-arcade car-racing tradition to a situation where the objective is not to win but is to get out of the race. There are detours to go turn away, but the complexities are many – if one slows down, one risks accidents.
UniteD
A game (designed for Prof. Navdeep Mathur at IIMA) to promote the idea that unity in diversity is a more workable ethic than segregation.
All or Nothing
Each player tries to complete a 12-slice pizza by adding or removing slices. In this simple arithmetic game, all age-groups can have quick fun.
Adding or subtracting pizza slices feels like the tussle for resources that we face in life. This tussle can be won by individuals who wait and watch — with alertness, foresight and luck.
Winning too early, gives less points (as the number of cards in the play space decide the points).
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