Prototyping and Sketching Processes in Agile Game Development Practices

ABSTRACT

RESEARCH PROBLEM

Prototyping and sketching is an important and quite unexplored part of game design practice. When designing a game it is hard to foresee the effects of design choices. The goal with my research is to contribute to an improved prototyping process. To do so I will study what design problems that prototyping solves and explore the functions and the conceptions it represent. Data has been collected, and analyzed, from interviews with industry practitioners. So far, results show that a multitude of conceptions exists and that prototyping is an important part of the agile game design process. Based on data a definition and a model has been compiled. Further investigation stand a good chance to contribute valuable knowledge to the field.

The goal for my research is to study and develop the prototype practice used in game design. In front of all internal prototyping, targeting co-workers (including the designer herself). To improve something one need to know what the quality criterias are. A recent paper in the HCIfield has derived four conceptions of quality among designers. Two of them are closer to prototyping practice, dealing with users opportunities [2]. These will be taken into account in the research.

Author Keywords

Game, Design, Agile Development,Prototyping, Sketching ACM Classification Keywords

K.8.0 [Games], D.2.2 [Design Tools and Techniques] INTRODUCTION

HCI is important to software design in general, consuming more than 50% of the effort [8]. In game design this figure is evidently higher since a lot of the programming aims at a balanced play experience. Prototyping is important to game design activity since the effects of design choices made when designing games are particularly hard to foresee. The reason is that games are both interactive artifacts and rulebased systems. As interactive systems, your design will encounter unpredictable users. As a rule based system, even small changes can have significant impact on the overall result. When prototyping, you test the system towards people which makes it central to HCI and to game design. Game production use agile development to a high degree so how prototyping and agile development practice work together is interesting to focus on Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NordiCHI 2010, October 16–20, 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland. Copyright 2010 ACM ISBN: 978-1-60558-934-3...$5.00.

Data will be collected from practitioners and from work done in actual production settings in game production companies. The ambition is to provide •

a deeper understanding of how prototyping aids the game designer in her work

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which design problems prototyping solves

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how the prototyping practice can be improved in agile development.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The focus of most research done in the game studies field lies in the domains of humanities, social sciences and industry/engineering. Research on design activity is proportionally a small and unexplored part of the research so far. It can generally be found in the engineering domain. Mostly using data from own experiments rather than from the industry. Prototyping aspects of game design has been presented in various academic papers. They almost exclusively come either from the pervasive games or the serious game fields. In most cases they originate from the researchers own design experiments [15], [16], [17] or from game design made in settings were designing games normally isn't the core business [14], [9]. Possible exceptions exist, such as a paper by Fullerton et al. were the studied game is produced by an established game production company [11]. Another exception is a paper by Musil et al. were prototyping (and other) aspects of game jams are studied [18]. Augustin et al present a concept called Game Sketching in a paper from 2007 which is interesting but more of a conceptualization than a work based on actual practice [1]. When we asked the industry professionals about books on game design many have mentioned Jesse Schells The Art of

Game Design – A Book of Lenses. He is a game designer and his book is not an academic text. But he is also assistant professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Melon. The book holds interesting points and very insightful reflection on the topic of game design [22]. Salen and Zimmerman has in their Rules of Play made an exhaustive review of games and their design from a theoretical standpoint [21]. There are some good texts written from an industry perspective, dealing with how game designer work, such as some of the writings of Chris Crawford [6] [7], Rollins & Morris [19] and Rouse III [20]. Academics has also written about game design. Jesper Juul has provided fundamental thoughts on what a game is and has drawn some design parallels in that context [13]. Ian Bogost has presented design thoughts alongside his focus on the rhetoric of games and games functions in relation with society [3]. Academics focusing on game design education has also provided literature concerning game design work. Tracy Fullerton has written an educational book in which she also reflect upon game design practice in various aspects [10]. Common for these excellent books is that they address game design practice in general, including all aspects of it. This does not leave much space for each segment and prototyping is a segment that usually do not get much attention, (with the exceptions of Schell [22] and Fullerton [10] to some extent). None of the books bring much analysis to how and why prototyping works. The ambition combine studies of game design literature with literature from other design areas where prototyping have been more explored. The sources here may be many, such as Bill Buxtons work on sketching [5] and Buchenau & Suris paper on experience prototyping, [4]. The goal is to find general theoretical points of interest for game design prototyping, such as how choice of prototyping technique affect the people interacting with the prototype [12]. Literature on agile development will also be included. The knowledge found in these literature studies will be combined with the analysis of our interviews with game designers (see below). APPROACH CHOSEN

Game design practice is normally conducted in relatively short and frequent iterations. Therefore, prototype practice will be studied as a process rather than a method. Since agile development almost always is practiced in game companies, this will be looked upon as an agile process. If the results indicate something else, this perspective will be shifted. Prototype practice, as seen here, refer to the entire work process around the prototype, not only the craft of prototype production or the prototype in itself. The basic underlying structure of my work is to study existing prototype practice, to analyze and draw conclusions from that data and to collaborate with game designers to develop existing prototype practice. Continuously the observed practices will be tested in order

to draw knowledge from experience. These practical testing sessions will be logged. So, data will be collected from interviews, in the beginning of the research project, literature studies in the middle and from participatory action research in the last stage of the project. The interviews will be analyzed and the results will be used together with different approaches, such as activity theory. Then, as mentioned, it will be combined with results presented in other texts on prototyping, including other fields than game design. Aspects of agile development will be taken in account too. Through this combination I will suggest improvements to the game design prototyping practice and relate it to agile development. After that the improvements will be tested in workshops together with game design professionals, preferably the ones interviewed earlier. The method here will be participatory action research. The workshops will be video logged and discussed with the participants. THE WORK SO FAR

I work in a research project. We investigate how creatives in digital media negotiate partly shared and partly opposing ways of judging and appreciating their own and others material. We plan to cover both laypersons and professionals with different backgrounds in training and traditions. Within this project we focus on different design fields, one of them is game design. So far we have conducted 27 interviews with game design professionals asking them how they work with prototyping. The ones interviewed have been game designers at different levels of expertise. Ten game design students, one game design teacher, eight game designers working at independent game companies and eight game designers working with AAA game titles. Most of the material has been analyzed. Some of it has been transcribed in full, some only where valuable information has been found. In the analysis activity theory has been combined with qualitative content analysis. The result has been formed into a manuscript. At the moment this manuscript is in preparation for submission. In this, based on ways of conceptualizing game design prototypes found in the data, an empirically grounded definition is suggested. The results so far show that game designers conceptualize game design prototypes in many different ways. They are conceived as sketches, visualizations, vehicles for communication of a function, tests of a function, design aids, specified parts of an intended outcome, and an experience of an idea. The interpretation of results using activity theory produced a model of game design prototyping with two dimensions: externalization (from externalization, through communication, prototype usage, and reflection, to internalization), and social order (from the artifact in itself, through the individual testing it, to a group level). The model can be used to characterize, contrast and categorize prototyping activities based on their position in the

externalization-internalization loop, and proximity to the game itself. CONCLUSION

Prototyping in game design is an area where not many (any?) solely focused academic works has been presented yet. Still it is evident, in our data, in literature and through reasoning that it is an important part of game design practice. Benefits in combination with agile work processes typical to game design is obvious. Further investigation have a good chance to leave an important contribution to the field. REFERENCES

1. Agustin, M. , Chuang, G. , Delgado, A. , Ortega A. , Seaver, J. & Buchanan, J. W. (2007) Game Sketching ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 274, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Digital interactive media in entertainment and arts, Perth, Australia. 2. Arvola, M. (2010). Interaction designers' conceptions of design quality for interactive artifacts. In Proceedings of Design Research Society (DRS) 2010, Montreal, July 7-9 2010. 3. Bogost, I (2007) Persuasive Games: Expressive Power of Videogames, MIT Press

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4. Buchenau, M. , Suri, J. F. (2000) Experience prototyping Designing Interactive Systems, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, New York. 5. Buxton, B. (2007) Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, Morgan Kaufmann 6. Crawford, C (1982). The Art of Computer Game Design, McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media 7. Crawford, C. (2004). Chris Crawford on Game Design, Peachpit 8. Douglas, S., Tremaine, M., Leventhal, L., Wills, C., & Manaris, B. (2002). Incorporating human computer interaction into the undergraduate computer science curriculum, Proceedings of the 33th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, 211-212. 9. Fabricant, R. (2005) Incorporating guidance and rewards into a handheld-device user experience. Designing For User Experiences; Vol. 135, Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Designing for User eXperience, San Francisco, California. 10. Fullerton, T. (2008) Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Morgan Kaufmann 11.

Fullerton, T. , Malamed, L. M. , Sharkasi, N. &

Vigil J. (2009) Designing history: the path to participation nation, ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium, Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games, New Orleans, Louisiana. 12. Johansson, M., & Arvola, M. (2007). A case study of how user interface sketches, scenarios and computer prototypes structure stakeholder meetings. In The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference, Volume 1. 13. Juul, J. (2005) Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT Press 14. Klann, M. (2007) Playing with fire: participatory design of wearable computing for fire fighters. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, CA, USA . 15. Koivisto, E.M.I. & Eladhari, M. (2006) Paper prototyping a pervasive game, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 266 Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, Hollywood, California. 16. Koivisto, E.M.I. & Suomela, R. (2007) Using prototypes in early pervasive game development, ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium, 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games, San Diego, California. 17. Linehan, C. , Lawson s. , Doughty, M. & Kirman B. (2009) Developing a serious game to evaluate and train group decision making skills, International MindTrek Conference, Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference, Tampere, Finland. 18. Musil, J. , Schweda, A. , Winkler, D. & Biffl, S (2009). Synthesized essence: what game jams teach about prototyping of new software products, ACM Siggraph Video Game Symposium, Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games, New Orleans, Louisiana. 19. Rollings, A. & Morris, D. (2000). Game architecture and design. Scottsdale, Arizona, Coriolis 20. Rouse III, R (2001). game Design, Theory & Practice, Jones&Bartlett Learning 21. Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play – Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press 22. Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design – A Book of Lenses, Morgan Kaufmann