Video Game Awesomeness Post 5

The game's name The World of Keflings seemed like it had the potential to be a fun and easy game to tackle and it was extremely easy, but fun is not a word I would use to describe the game. There was not a lot of autonomy in the game considering that you could only choose to build a house, a town hall, and a workshop. As you advance maybe that changes, but you don't even get to choose where to build it! A blue square lights up telling you where to place the item. The only thing you had to master was how to chop down wood, or breakdown rocks. Once you had enough wood and rocks the game built the actual item for you. The game's purpose is ultimately to build an entire town where these tiny Kefling people can live. As for a learning purpose, the only thing I can think of is that it teaches you patience, and gets you familiar with the Xbox controller. There wasn't even a leaderboard, or badges to intrinsically motivate me, which just made the game seem pointless and a waste of time.

Hexic on the other hand is a great puzzle game! It is a lot like Spirit Stones where you connect colored dots in order to destroy those dots. Each time the dots are destroyed others fall into the place the previous dots were located. The purpose is to destroy as many dots as possible until you move on to the next level without hitting a bomb. The game is definitely a problem solving game because unlike Spirit Stones you could only connect three dots at once, and the highlighted dots rotated clockwise or counter clockwise depending on which trigger was pressed. You where allowed to move the highlighter around to other sections of the grid, but the hard part of the problem to solve was how to destroy the dots. Not just one dot of the sam color could be touching other dots of the same color, they had to be touching in a triangle. Once I figured that out I was becoming a master of the game! Problem solving was not the only thing Hexic had going for it, but motivation as well. Sometimes when destroying dots, a bunch of other dots would fall into triangles and be destroyed. This made it exciting, fun, and caused me to want to keep going. Another way the game motivated me was that it didn't take long to level up, and once I got on the leaderboard I was emotionally invested and intrinsically motivated.

There was definitely discover learning going on in both of the games, but because I have been playing so many Xbox 360 games, I noticed that I started to have more control over the game controller. I could make assumptions about which button might rotate the triangle, or which button might chop the wood. The controller even felt like it had started to belong in my hand, which made me feel like I just might be starting to master the control buttons. Now that I feel more confident with the controller, my self esteem may have gone up just enough to try Call of Duty Again.