Aspects of Replayability

Aspects of Replayability and Software Engineering

By:

Intro to Management Information Systems

Software engineering is without a doubt one of the most crucial elements that make up the video game and entertainment industry. This draft is a brief summary of the journal entry, “Aspects of Replayability and Software Engineering: Towards a Methodology of Developing Games” by Joseph Krall and Tim Menzies; in it they discuss a viewpoint on studying games from a software engineering perspective. With the industry booming over $25 billion in annual revenue per year back in 2011 (Krall, 2012), the demand for software engineers is also on the rise. As a software engineer, you are challenged with creating a game that will have a lasting impression on the intended audience. Without considering the number of projects that fail before ever hitting the shelves, only 20% of released video games are successful in the sense of turning a profit (Krall, 2011). In an attempt to increase this number, Krall and Menzies focus their attention on building a video game model for success taking into consideration three major factors; playability, advertising and marketing, and replayability. With these three factors being their main focus, they formulated a systematic way of collecting data, classifying it, and finding differences between data and classes.

During the exploration of what makes games attractive, particularly in the playability department, the two discovered that there are five stages of game play. Stage one relies heavily on marketing and advertising and stage two occurs after purchase, when you first start playing the game. This is the most critical stage because the user either becomes immersed in the game and loves it, or experiences distractions in the game, which can lead to an overall dissatisfaction. The other stages include playability, replayability, and endgame. These are the basic courses that successful games take before phasing out or before in game additions...