Spectrum: Exploring the Effects of Player Experience on Game Design

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Portelli Jean-Luc Khaled Rilla
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Player Experience (PX) concerns how players think and feel when interacting with a game. Although it is intrinsic to all games, few design tools exist that enable designers to approach PX in a directed, intentional manner. Drawing on existing design tools and experience-related theory focused on emotions, we present our tool Spectrum. Spectrum facilitates a PX-directed approach to game design that foregrounds intended player experience. Spectrum can also be used to critically probe people’s conceptions of game experiences. In evaluations of Spectrum with designers, while all were committed to the notion of PX, not everyone was able to translate from emotions into playable scenarios, particularly when those emotions were either visceral in nature or unusual within existing games. In evaluations with players, participants sometimes struggled to fit emotionally-specific language around their game experiences, but also stated that such reflections added post-hoc value to their experiences.

 

Untangling Twine: A Platform Study

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Friedhoff Jane
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

As mainstream games require increasingly larger technical teams and more complex software, there has been a move in the opposite direction: that is, the development of game-making tools that “are being designed with people who aren't professional coders in mind.” While Twine is not the only platform designed to facilitate the creation of interactive stories, it has evolved into the primary hotbed for games exploring personal experiences, especially those dealing with issues like marginalization, queerness, and discrimination. This paper examines Twine from a platform studies perspective to understand how it supports and facilitates more experimental works. The platform's development history, documentation, UI, method of content generation, and distribution model combine to create a tool that facilitates these kinds of works. Twine’s reference materials (oriented not toward code and problem solving, but to affirmation of the individual experience as the basis of a game), user interface (analogous to common brainstorming/writing techniques), orientation toward vignette (with the genre's subversive potential) and open distribution model (free to download, free to share, and exported as HTML) make the platform a uniquely-accessible tool for creating highly personal games. Analyzing Twine in this way allows game researchers to understand the importance of Twine’s design to the creation of such works, in turn illustrating factors that platform developers may use to guide future software.

 

Game design tools: Time to evaluate

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Neil Katharine
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

The art form of the video game has a very idiosyncratic reliance on the process and practice of its designers. We work with creative and computational problems that form a web of deep complexity. And yet, as I have noticed in my professional practice as a game designer, we do not use tools to support our design process. For more than a decade, designers and researchers have argued for the development and use of both conceptual and concrete tools. To this end, formal and semi-formal game design models have been proposed and, more recently, experimental software-based tools have been developed by the research community. To date, however, none of these tools or models have been adopted into mainstream practice within the game design community. In this paper I argue that it is difficult, if not methodologically flawed, to assess the work in the field of game design support without more qualitative data on how such tools fare in actual game design practice. Evaluation research would be an essential contribution towards answering the question of whether – and if so, how - these experimental formal models and tools can support and improve the game design process.

 

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.