Please help our game design class!

[igd_da]

I am a student in a game design lab and we are trying to broaden the scope of games. Please help us by taking our quick survey.

There are two parts: a question/answer portion and a series of very short games.

Flash player is required and you must use Internet Explorer to play.

http://igd.cart.org/ridiculous

[Seedling]

Psst. . . you and your classmates might be interested in the games industry link in my sig.

I'll check out your site a bit later. . .

[Seedling]

Okay, I answered the questions and played the games. My impression is this: I suspect you got a lot more out of implementing the games then you will get out of any data that you might gather from players. It would be more accurate to call game designers “game implementers”, because most of game design is actually implementation.

I am impressed that the focus of your class is not just on making games, but on examining the field and seeing what new possibilities are out there. However, I think you are missing something rather fundamental: games must be fun. Understanding what makes a game fun for a player isn’t going to be solved by a questionnaire, unless that questionnaire is more in depth on games and less out in left field. For example, if you were to have your player try variants on one of your mini-games and then ask follow-up questions about what was fun in the experience and what wasn’t, that might yield data that could help you to refine that particular game. However, you could save yourself the time and effort of that study by examining your own gaming habits and finding the root of your enjoyment of particular games, and by repeatedly testing the game and tweaking it.

Looking at your questionnaire and mini-games as a complete game experience, I found the whole thing to be functional, easy to understand, easy to navigate, but lacking in fun. The whole thing seems to be the result of too much analysis, and not enough gut-feeling grasping of what is entertaining to an audience. You might have more success if you think of a game as more like putting on a performance. In general no playwright or musician or artist arrives at an entertaining product by surveying the audience before they begin.

[Duq]

Games arent always about entertainment. I dont know how the game development market looks in other countries but in the netherlands for example the serious gaming industry is alot bigger then the entertainment industry. Since the gameplay in serious games is often focussed on very specific target audiences these kind of experiments are very important to predict the behavior for future projects. One game that gives a clear example of how such research is used is the Brain Academy game on the nintendo DS.

Also I have been part of a similiar group from IGDA, the problem the group had was that they had to many coders, and math guys, so they asked me and some others from a theatre orientated course to join in. Wich resulted in some very cool projects. So it might be a cool idea to also get some people with other backgrounds in the team and get some new fresh ideas on gameplay.