A History of Matching Tile Games. Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three. A History of Matching Tile Games Jesper Juulhttp: //www. Juul, Jesper. "Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games". Artifact journal.
Volume 2, 2. 00. 7. London: Routledge. Introduction This article aims to write the history of a video game genre. The genre is that of matching tile games, video games where the object of the player is to manipulate tiles on a grid in order to create matches. For a few years, the best known and best selling matching tile games have been the Bejeweled series from Pop. Cap games. Figure 1 shows Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (Pop. Cap games 2. 00. 5).
Figure 1. Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (Popcap Games 2. My interest here is in how matching tile games have developed during the past 2.
A tile-matching video game is a type of puzzle video game where the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. [1]. Official Learn4Good Site: Matching Games online, free match tile games, color matching pictures game for kids, preschoolers to play. Matching games with no download. Puzzle Games Ready for some brain training? It's always nice to challenge yourself. Check out our best free puzzle games and brain games. Whether it's an old card. Math explained in easy language, plus puzzles, games, quizzes, worksheets and a forum. For K-12 kids, teachers and parents. PUZZLE GAMES Play the web's most addicting free puzzle games at Candystand. Play Mah Jongg, Sudoku, word games, matching games, and trivia games.
Select a skill level by clicking 'For Kids' or 'Shanghai'. The goal of the game is to remove all tiles from the screen.
The history of a game genre is also a mapping of the issues that face game developers as well as players. Matching tile games are today mostly sold via the distribution channel of casual, downloadable games, a channel that puts conflicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game sufficiently like other games that players find it easy to pick up and play. When developers claim that their game is the original game that inspired other games (rather than the other way around), they are also writing their version of game history.
Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three A History of Matching Tile Games. Jesper Juul http:// Juul, Jesper. 'Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of.
When player picks up a game, they are also using their conception of video game history to understand the new game. Video game history is everywhere, in the development of games, in the selling of games, in the consumption of games. A popular genre with no vocal proponents Matching tile games are of interest because of their relative simplicity: As we shall see, a large number of games can be described with very few parameters, and a history of the genre can therefore serve as a model for understanding more complicated game genres. Additionally, matching tile games are interesting in that they may be the only genre with no vocal proponents, only critics.
Where playing an imported Japanese game can be construed as a sign of game competence, matching tile games are perhaps the lowest scale on the cultural ladder. Critics especially tend to complain of too many games in the sub- genre of match- three games (usually referring to derivatives of Bejeweled): On the big portals, at any hour, day or night, tens or hundreds of thousands of players gather to play Hearts, Spades, Canasta, chess, backgammon and a zillion shareware match- three games.(Varney 2. Pop. Cap, one of the leading developers and publishers of casual games, has this to say about matching tile games: Q. What kind of games is Pop. Cap interested in publishing? A. Not just match- 3 puzzle games! We’re interested in pushing the boundaries of the casual games market with a variety of different projects.(Pop.
Cap 2. 00. 6) Recently, some observers have expressed surprise at the fact that matching tile games are still popular. I used to preach that the world did not need another match three bubble popper [presumably Puzzle Bubble clones], Mahjong game, or card game, but all of those game types have continued to sell in the Casual game space, and are even beginning to be considered genres.(Tunnel 2. Matching tile games are very simple games with a very limited number of rules.
The rules of Bejeweled 2 can be described in very little space: In a grid of 8*8 tiles, you can swap two adjacent gems if the swapping will create a line of three identical gems, in which case the matching gems disappear. If you match four gems, you will be rewarded with a power gem. Five gems award a hyper cube. In fact, figure 2 shows the instructions of the game. Figure 2. Bejeweled 2 Deluxe instructions. The low status of matching tile games (as manifested in the quotes above) may be a result of their low barrier to entry: These games are designed to be accessible, and hence playing a matching tile game does not signal special knowledge of video games.
This does not mean that we can declare matching tile games to be "bad" games, but that they in several ways are at odds with more traditional video game ethics that demand games to be hard, challenging, and punishing. Matching tile games and casual games At the time of writing (2. While there is no commonly accepted definition of casual games, we can point to a few commonly named characteristics. Broader context Demographics : Compared to traditional video games, casual games are more oriented towards women and towards audiences over 3. IGDA 2. 00. 5, p.
Distribution : Casual games are primarily downloaded by users, generally at download sizes under 1. MB. Hardware : By convention, casual games target low- end and old machines. At the time of writing, new casual games still support Windows 9.
Economic model : Casual games are primarily downloadable of a try- before- you- by model, where the player can typically play the full game for 6. Game design Allow short playing sessions : Most casual games can be played in very short sessions; it takes a very short time to start a game, and it is often easy to interrupt a playing session. This does notmean that players in actuality always play short sessions: In a survey on the Trymedia web site, 6.
Macrovision 2. 00. The key is that casual games allow short play sessions, hence making it easier for players to commit to playing a game. Auto- save : Most casual games tend to auto- save, even if the player closes the game window, so a player can easily put down and resume a game at a later time. Auto- save presumably makes it easier for players to play the games in many situations where more traditional gaming would not be possible - in the workplace, for example.
Mouse control : Casual games are almost exclusively controlled by mouse. Though little hard data exists, anecdotal evidence indicates that casual gamers find it very hard to control a game using the keyboard. Very simple rules : Steve Meretzky says that it should be possible to state the rules of a casual game in three sentences. Barwood & Falstein 2. Moderate innovation : It must be very easy to learn to play casual games.
This tends to mean that casual games are near clones of an existing game with new graphics, or that innovation happens in small incremental steps. Multiple levels of success: Most casual games generally reward the player for completing a subtask in more challenging ways. In matching tile games, there are typically rewards for making combos (several matches at the same time) and for matching more tiles than is needed. Much positive feedback : Casual games tend to be designed to provide players with the experience of success very early on.
Barwood & Falstein 2. Little negative feedback: Casual games are often very easy compared to other game types, and avoid punishing the player for mistakes. A history of Matching Tile Games Can we write the history of a game genre? Some anthropological work has been done on game history: Stewart Culin's 1. Mancala, the National Game of Africa (Culin 1.
Mancala games geographically and historically, noting differences in rules and materials used to play. Writing the history of matching tiles games is slightly different in that the time span is much shorter (2. Mancala). Matching tile games are arguably a less clearly delimited field than Mancala games, and where the development of Mancala is an integral part of the way the game is distributed, by passing on between people who innovate or misremember the rules of the game, video games are software products that can be distributed globally without being changed, but only used differently. It is not uncommon to see mostly journalistic histories of video game genres such as real- time strategy games (Geryk 2. I have limited myself to looking at matching tile games as: Video games where the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. This delineation is artificial, but necessary to limit the scope of this paper.
In addition, it is not possible to include all matching tile games in this space, so the focus is on games that have provided some type of innovation, as well as on some popular games, even those who provided little innovation. The goal has been to trace the genre's development during the past twenty years, and to use developer and player perspectives to focus on how innovations have been introduced and been picked up by other games. The history was developed by examining as many games as was possible, by reading developer interviews, and by soliciting comments for progressive versions of the history from developers and players. The arrows in the family tree mean two things: possible inspiration, and probable player perception. For all connections illustrated in the tree, it is not improbable that game developers were inspired by previous games.
Except for a few cases, I have not verified this. From a game player's perspective, it may not matter whether actual inspiration took place: the player or developer may identify a game as being derived from another game, regardless of whether there is any truth to this.
In other words, the history is a snapshot of a perception of the history of matching tile games. Dotted lines indicate an uncertain relation. Figure 3 presents a family tree of matching tile games. Figure 3. A family tree of matching tile games. Click for high resolution illustration.) From the top of the diagram, there are two progenitors of matching tile games, Chain Shot (figure 4, Moribe, 1. Same Game) and the better known Tetris (figure 5, Pajitnov and Gerasimov, 1. We cannot rule out the existence of earlier little known matching tile video games, but we know that Tetris was an extremely successful game that spawned a number of imitators, and we can see the influence of Chain Shot at various points in the tree.
Both of these games were originally non- commercial. Figure 4. Same GNOME (Gnome project, 2. Chain Shot]. Figure 5. Tetris (Pajitnov and Gerasimov, 1.