Designing for Player Experience: How Professional Game Developers Communicate Design Visions

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Hagen Ulf
2010 DiGRA Nordic '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International DiGRA Nordic Conference: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players

This paper investigates the prevalence of deliberate design for player experience in big game studios, and how potential visions of intended player experience are articulated and communicated to the team in the course of the development process. The primary data consist of interviews with six Swedish game developers. The study shows that the practice of designing for player experience is indeed in use by many game developers, and that a wide variety of tools are employed to articulate and communicate their visions. The main purpose of this communication is to allow everyone in the development team to make design choices that are in line with the commonly shared design vision.

 

Where Do Game Design Ideas Come From? Invention and Recycling in Games Developed in Sweden

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Hagen Ulf
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The game industry is often accused for not being original and inventive enough, making sequels and transmediations instead of creating new game concepts and genres. Idea creation in game development has not been studied much by scholars. This paper explores the origin of game design ideas, with the purpose of creating a classification of the domains the ideas are drawn from. Design ideas in 25 games, developed by the four main game developers in Sweden, have been collected mainly through interviews with the designers and through artifact analyses of the games. A grounded theory approach was then used to develop categories “bottom-up” from the collected data. This resulted in four main categories and a number of sub categories, describing different domains that game design ideas are drawn from. The analysis of the game design ideas also showed that all games consist of a recycled part and an inventive part, and that the ideas in the recycled part mainly come from domains that are closely related to games. This indicates that games perhaps would be more inventive if design ideas were drawn from more distant domains.