task 5 reflection

I never play a game of virtual reality. Therefore, at the beginning, I am excited about playing Second life. I create an avatar who is a woman and to my surprise I can change the gender of my player anytime anywhere. When I log in this game I realize that it is indeed the virtual reality. Everything here looks like true things in our daily life. And then, we have to design a role-play gaming for international students. We choose “Romance of Three Kingdoms” as our topic. It is a story of Chinese history and we have to present a brand new feeling by Second life.

I am responsible for the task 5, at the first time the game is "Supporting the front" which is a easy game that asks international students to collects the Chinese items. Although the game run smoothly, teacher advises me to change the game. After the discussions with teacher, I change the game into “Jumping over the peg.” It is a chess game which is interesting and has relationship with my character. My character is KM who shows all his loyalty to his master in his life. Therefore, his personality is loyal and dedicated. Besides, he is a planer full of wisdom. As a result, his appearance is simple and pure and so does his house. He spends much of his time playing the chess game in order to training himself thinking and having different strategies. Therefore, the goal is to remove pegs from the board by jumping over each peg with another peg; this removes the "jumped" peg. The game is over when no more jumps are possible. You win the game by removing all the pegs except one from the board. A perfect game would leave one peg in the center position. However, the process of playing this game is not really smoothly because the rule is too complex. In fact, although I explain the rule a lot of times, they still feel a little confused. And it also makes me feel frustrated. It is a pity that there is no chance for me to improve the game. But they think this game is interesting so it makes me feel better.  

After playing this game with international students, I learned not only about the functions and skills of Second Life, but also the skills to design a good game. As the designer of the game, we often have difficulty in explaining the game clearly. Besides, when the players don’t follow the instruction and rules and behave active interacting with us, the game will have some problems. Therefore, we can learn a lot from this project just like the ability to solve problems and how to make the participant have interest in our game. For me, it is a special and interesting experience to visualize our dramatic spirit through this game and also a rare chance to interact with foreign students