Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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76 E. Brown 5.2.3 How We Work Together Game development is a team affair. Team sizes range from four or five people to a hundred plus. Producers, creative directors, programmers, artists, and designers make up these teams. These roles are not always singularly defined; artists can work on concepts, characters, or environments. Programmers can work on platforms, audio, and user interfaces. Designers are no different; there are technical designers who have coding ability, level designers who work with 3D modeling tools, and those focused on user interface design. There are designers who focus on details and others who sculpt the broad scope of the project and its ambitions. Whatever the type of designer, it is their responsibility to think about experience. It is down to them to ensure all implementations have been considered from the user perspective. It’s up to them to define fun, throughout the project. It is important here to emphasize that it is not only designers who do this – everyone on the project is committed to creating the best experience possible. However, this exploration is going to focus on designers, because defining the user experience is their core role and part of this role is evaluating whether the desired experience is being achieved. This is our starting point, a brief outline of the industry, its landscape, and the people who work in it. All of this affects experience from the beginning before anyone has written a concept or drawn a sketch. From here, we can start to look at the detail and how products are evaluated at each stage in the development process. 5.3 Development The distinct phases of development are concept, pre-production, production, and launch. Throughout these processes, ideas, prototypes, and builds of the product are being generated and evaluated. This section looks at each stage of development and the methods, both formal and informal, that are used by designers to evaluate their product. As important as it is to know what methods are used, it is just as essential to note what methods are not being used. 5.3.1 Concept This is where it all starts. A team has just completed a project or is getting together for the first time, either way it is officially time to start generating ideas. Of course idea generation is happening throughout development, but for the purposes of this chapter we will look at it as a distinct phase. The key goal of this stage is to compose a pitch for the concept that will allow the team to gain further resources and eventually see their game released. At this point, everyone is exploring potential directions for the game. Artists are sketching out
5 The Life and Tools of a Games Designer 77 characters, designers are researching other game experiences and the current state of the industry and where there may be space for a novel concept to fit in. Coders are exploring the technology and tools available. Depending on the scale of the team and the time available, the final pitch may be a one-page PowerPoint with an image and key bullet points. Or it may be a prototype of game play. Throughout this early stage in development, ideas are being evaluated. Key questions being asked are not just about the potential for fun but also whether there is a workable game mechanic that will provide a developing challenge for the player. How does the product fit with the company’s ambitions and their customer base? Can it make a profit, is it a novel proposition? Many of these questions can be answered fairly well. Companies know the market and what has sold before. The team know whether the idea is a new proposition and what the company ambition is. The fun aspect is somewhat harder to pin down. So everyone is asking will this be fun? Designers are trying to answer how the concept will be fun. What is the essence of the experience they want players to have? What is the landscape for this experience and how does it compare to existing experiences? Often concepts are defined in terms of their reference experiences, being described as a combination between one game and another. They are also asking how the game provides challenge, how long could the experience last, and is there enough to keep people interested? If not, how could it develop and become more complex as the player interacts? While looking to answer these questions, designers are also starting to think about how best to prototype this experience to find out if there is something that can be built on. Concepts at this stage can be shot down merely because they are not pitched in the right way, or to the right people, and maybe not at the right time. If the idea passes the interrogation of all the questions above, and someone still believes it can be fun, then it gets a bit more time and opportunity to really evaluate whether it works. At this stage, you want to get things up and running as quickly as possible. The sooner designers can play with their concept, the sooner they will be better able to evaluate experience. Either you have existing tools from previous products that allow you to get things moving quickly or you have a tech research team that have been playing with things and have some working prototypes to start from. Or sometimes, it’s just one person and he/she has to rely on his/her own skills and wits to try and make something. So with this in mind, the two methods that will be discussed here are paper prototyping (which can be used to great effect when there are few resources) and the tech demo (which some games rely upon heavily at this very early stage). 5.3.1.1 Paper Prototyping Like paper prototyping in other software design fields, the idea is simple – make your product in paper to see how it works (Snyder 2003). What is slightly different in games development is that you are not mocking up screens and flows – you are creating your core game mechanic in paper form. It is possible that all video games
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Human-Computer Interaction Series E
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Regina Bernhaupt Editor Evaluating
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For Philippe
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viii Foreword Chapter 3, Presence I
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x Foreword personality which evolve
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Contents Part I Introduction to Eva
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Contributors Regina Bernhaupt IRIT,
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Contributors xvii Manfred Tscheligi
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xx About the Authors Emily Brown is
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xxii About the Authors a post-docto
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xxiv About the Authors Christina Ko
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xxvi About the Authors MIT Media La
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xxviii About the Authors Theft Auto
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Chapter 1 User Experience Evaluatio
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1 User Experience Evaluation in Ent
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1 User Experience Evaluation in Ent
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Chapter 2 Enabling Social Play: A F
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2 Enabling Social Play 13 It is als
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2 Enabling Social Play 17 for playe
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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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Chapter 10 Evaluating User Experien
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Index A Advanced interaction games,
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