This class provided a context for everything else I've learned in the Computational Media program. It was the first time I've had the opportunity to make a game without considerations for how many copies it could sell or how much it would cost. My team found an idea we could be passionate about and ran with it. I found it to be a much less stressful environment to work in compared to professional game development, and as a result, I was able to give more thought to what I could learn from the experience each step of the way.
I approached our early brainstorming meetings with the goal of developing everyone's ideas into compelling game concepts. We started off with about ten mechanics and eventually cut down them down to two by combining ideas with each other or eliminating them altogether. We spent the next week developing those ideas and initially considered presenting both of them to the class, but we settled on the interface-manipulation concept over the other because we felt it better fit the project's criteria of breaking conventions. I gathered everyone's ideas from the brainstorming sessions and refined or combined them around a set of unifying concepts to produce the design document. Once we started development, I switched my focus to art and produced assets for the levels. When that was finished, I created the website we needed for the IGF submission.
I was skeptical about being assigned to write a design document because I was worried that it would restrict us from fixing bad design decisions once we actually started development. Eric Zimmerman says that the iterative process is "radically different" from typical game development, but every team I have worked with has used it. It shows how much the industry has changed since he wrote that article in 2003, because now the iterative process is commonplace. I instead used the design document as an opportunity to collect all of our ideas and clearly state the vision of the project while suggesting that we always consider it a work in progress. We started development by focusing on making one level that demonstrated each feature we wanted in the game. We polished it until we were happy with it, and then created all the other levels. One of the tips we received for the assignment was along the lines of "a game with one good level is better than a game with dozens of broken levels," and that philosophy holds true on every project that uses the iterative process.
Our game offered a particularly unique take on Don Norman's theory of affordances and design. On one hand, players needed to be familiar with the three interface elements because the way they needed to interact with them was related to their functions in other games. On the other hand, the actual interactions were different. For example, the stamina bar decreased as the player moved around, but it doubled as a moving platform. Of Norman's four principles for screen interfaces, we only failed with one: "follow conventional usage, both in the choice of images and the allowable interactions." (Norman 3) In each interface element, we attempted to follow conventional usage for interactivity and we used metaphor to determine the actual result of the interaction. Our failure was with the mini-map - convention would tell the player to interact with it using the mouse, but in the final version of our prototype we removed mouse interaction altogether.
I've aspired to be a game designer since elementary school because I find happiness in seeing other people enjoy things I've made - a magnification of the same sort of satisfaction I would get from bringing home a drawing from school to see it get pinned up on the refrigerator. This class helped me understand why people enjoy games, and more importantly, why different people enjoy different types of games. In her GDC presentation, Nicole Lazzaro says "People play games to change or structure their internal experiences." (Lazzaro 7) At first, I didn't understand how the game my group made could be capable of affecting anyone's "internal experience," but her "four keys of emotion" make it more clear. My team did not expect our game to appeal to casual gamers, but we never considered our audience in terms of which emotions we did or didn't evoke. The fun in Interfaced comes from its puzzle aspect of challenging players to figure out the abstract solution to each level and its shock-value of surprising players with new ways of interacting with common game interfaces. Lazzaro would describe those as "hard fun" and "serious fun." It's another way of evaluating ideas in the design process, and each new way I learn makes me a better designer.
As a freshman, I was impatient with Georgia Tech for not giving me an opportunity to get experience making games, so I made games with my friends outside of classes. During my sophomore year, I continued to make games independently and became increasingly cynical about media theory that was being taught in my Computational Media courses because I didn't understand how it applied to game development. This past summer, I worked as an intern for EA and felt like my experience making games on my own was more valuable in preparing me for the job than everything I've learned in my studies at Tech.
This was the first course that allowed me to make a game with a team in an academic environment, and it was an eye-opening experience. Zimmerman notes an important difference when he says "Design is a way to ask question. Design research...is a way to ask larger questions beyond the scope of a particular design problem."(Zimmerman 1) Although I have had a lot of design experience, this was the first time I have had any experience with design research. The only question I ever really asked in my previous design tasks with games was "where's the fun?," to which an answer isn't easily reached. This class gave me a number of other questions to ask and a much better understanding of the importance games have in our culture.
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Works Cited
Lazzaro, N. (2004-2005) "Why We Play Games: Four
Keys to More Emotion Without Story." Self-published white paper. www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html
Norman, D.A. (2004). "Affordances and
design." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html
Zimmerman, E. (2003). "Play as research: The
iterative design process." http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Iterative_Design.htm
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