Calleja’s components in ‘Robot Unicorn Attack’

Thanks for the browser game shared by Kevin in the blog, ‘Robot Unicorn Attack’ and its derivative work ‘Robot Unicorn Attack Heavy Metal’ which made me fascinated and cost me at least 2 hours to play them. Until now, I still enjoy to challenge a higher rank which made by myself. Although the game will restart from the beginning while you failed, it won’t make player feel boring. Instead, player wants to challenge more, which could be seen as a kind of intra-diegetic immersion. For different individual, there are certain different elements make them immersion with in it. Here, I will use Calleja’s components to analysis this exciting game.

Tactical involvement
For this micro browser game, I would classify it as action category. Not like the strategy game, the action game not always has lots of tactical decision to make. But the ‘Robot Unicorn Attack’ is a different one which has amount of tactical decision in it. Accompany with the progress of game, the skill of player is getting proficiency and they can memory more and more barriers in the game, thus player would try more different tactical decision in it. Take this game as one example, the moment of jumping and dashing always need to be practiced, thus it creates different fun in different round.

Performative involvement

As one action game, the most existing element is in controlling. Although the ‘Robot Unicorn Attack’ only has two controlling ways (which are ‘z’ for jumping and ‘x’ for dashing), but the simplest controlling is the most important element to make the player easily immersion in the game experience. Compare with the other games with complex controlling, those always makes the player is busy in learning controlling but not enjoy it as an amusement.

Affective involvement

Another element made me immersion in this game is its ranking system. The ranking system allows the player submit their score to its online database, thus the game has double challenge. The first one is breaking player themselves’ ranking; the other one is the ranking competition between different players. Accompany with the raise of ranking position, the player could be satisfied by their achievement in ranking system.

Shared involvement

The ranking system also allows players sharing their final point within their friend circle. Thorough the social network sites like Facebook, this kind of micro browser game are easier to make a common game experience between friends in the real world, which will make the friend have more communication with each other.