Encouraging the Acquistion of Drawing Skills in Game Design: a Case Study

Undergraduate, Interactive Games Design (IGD) courses offered by technical universities in the UK recruit students who are not required to have art or design backgrounds. However, they need to be able to represent their creative ideas. Observations at the University of Gloucestershire have shown that many students find difficulties in expressing their ideas in a visual manner as they do not have adequate drawing skills and eventually some focus on coding and some withdraw. This thesis investigates the links between game design and drawing skills, examining concepts of creativity, learning, design communication and education. To establish the basis of this problem, it was necessary to gain an insight into students‘ and tutors‘ viewpoints and interpretation of this course. Using an interpretive philosophical framework, a mixed method approach was chosen to allow for greater opportunity to understand the phenomenon. Within an action research paradigm, the research was carried out in an evolutionary manner. The extent of the problem was established by eliciting tutors‘ insight from other institutions both arts and technical based. A case study was set out to study two cohorts of students. This identified the problems reported by students and the impact of these on students‘ attitude and motivation. The nature and necessity of drawing skills for sketching storyboards were explored by gaining views of students, tutors and industry professionals. The effect of the tutor-led Art interventions at UoG was investigated. The research identified criteria to assess the quality of storyboard communications and finally a framework for an e-learning object to develop storyboard communication skills was specified. This study revealed that obtaining visual skills is fundamental in order to be able to draw or use rapid prototyping techniques for storyboarding. This needs to be addressed in a specified module or several sessions. It appeared that the design of an art intervention (tutor-based or e-learning object) for IGD students, needs to address the issues of confidence and teamwork alongside with the learning materials in a constructive and gamified style and as interactive as possible in a structured goal-based manner. It would also benefit from Active learning teaching style

SUPPORTING THERAPY-CENTERED GAME DESIGN FOR BRAIN INJURY REHABILITATION

Brain injuries (BI) are a major public health issue. Many therapists who work with patients who have had a BI include games to ameliorate boredom associated with repetitive rehabilitation. However, designing effective, appropriate, and engaging games for BI therapy is challenging. The challenge is especially manifested when considering how to consolidate the different mindsets and motivations among key stakeholders; i.e., game designers and therapists. In this dissertation, I investigated the ideation, creation, and evaluation of game design patterns and a design tool, GaPBIT (Game Design Patterns for BI Therapy) that leveraged patterns to support ideation of BI therapy game concepts and facilitate communication among designers and therapists. Design patterns, originated from the work of Christopher Alexander, provide a common design language in a specific field by documenting reusable design concepts that have successfully solved recurring problems. This investigation involved four overlapping phases. In Phase One, I interviewed 11 professional game designers focused on games for health (serious games embedded with health-related goals) to explore how they perceived and approached their work. In Phase Two, I identified 25 therapy-centered game design patterns through analyzing data about game use in BI therapy. Based on those patterns, in Phase Three I created and iterated the GaPBIT prototype through user studies. In Phase Four, I conducted quasi-experimental case studies to establish the efficacy and user experience of GaPBIT in game design workshops that involved both game designers and therapists. During the design workshops, the design patterns and GaPBIT supported exploration of game design ideas and effectively facilitated discussion among designers and therapists. The results also indicated that these tools were especially beneficial for novice game designers. This work significantly promotes game design for BI rehabilitation by providing designers and therapists with easier access to the information about requirements in rehabilitation games. Additionally, this work modeled a novel research methodology for investigating domains where balancing the role of designers and other stakeholders is particularly important. Through a “practitioner-centered” process, this work also provides an exemplar of investigating technologies that directly address the information needs of professional practitioners

Interactive Digital Support for Concept Design Teams

This thesis develops a design method, the ICR (Inform, Create, Reflect) Grid, for improved utilisation of information during concept design. Although concept design is information intensive and critical to project direction, the effective management and use of digital information has not been adequately addressed. The ICR Grid is a prescriptive method which requires design teams to find and build information resources in parallel with creating solutions. As a solution-based approach it allows designers to freely explore ideas, while encouraging flexible thinking by using different modes of conceptual working (analysis, synthesis and evaluation). The output of the method is a linked grid of concepts and information sources. The exploratory phase of the research examined current design process models and concept design methods, with team information use patterns explored through protocol analyses of a design task. This was followed by an examination of literature relating to digital information and a class study on technological support for student designers. The outcome of these explorations was an understanding that to enhance digital information use in concept design, a new approach was necessary. Development began by correlating characteristics of computer games to concept design, with a view to applying new techniques to the structure and management of information. A number of scenarios were subsequently outlined, with one selected and developed using paper-based prototyping. This was eventually formalised as the ICR Grid. Initial evaluation of the new method was carried out through a comparative study with the 6-3-5 Method, which revealed that although fewer concepts were produced with the ICR Grid, they were of a higher quality, variety and detail. Three different companies then used the ICR Grid to address relevant industrial problems, with generally positive feedback obtained on its performance. Several areas are identified for future work and the further enhancement of information use

Intensity and Compositional Prompts in Videogame Soundtracks

Videogames are structured by a series of events that articulate various kinds of intensity arcs. These arcs can play a key role in scaffolding music composition and sound design for games, informing the ways sound designers and composers create content in response to pre-planned gameplay events. This thesis proposes two novel analysis techniques for capturing intensity shifts during gameplay – a Pixel Change Ratio (PCR) analysis that measures the rate of visual changes during gameplay, and an Actions-Per-Minute (APM) analysis that measures the rate of user generated input during gameplay. The Gameplay Intensity Framework developed in Chapter Four combines these new analyses with common videogame scoring practices. In Chapter Five, I discuss how this framework was used to compose the soundtrack for the challenge-based videogame Unsteady VR, submitted as the major creative work for this Master of Music (Composition) degree. This discussion highlights the compositional challenges and opportunities that emerge when composing against a range of prompts tied to intensity arcs

Experience requirements

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain. Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During preproduction, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort. During production, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates. We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of: a model for the elements that compose experience requirements, a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements. Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

Open Communitition

The recent enthusiasm in popular culture for massively multiplayer online environments has proven that eclectic online communities have the potential to develop powerful problem solving capacities through the enactment of a collective intelligence. In collaborative design, this calls for the implementation of a shared environment leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities through open competition. The goal is to spur innovation through a public process where the emerging design ideas are available to all competitors. Foreseeing a radical change in the identity of the architect, becoming but the designer of these emergent communal design environments, this paper aims at making the case for this alternate CAAD model through the execution of a pilot study. This study, based on the Serpentine Pavilion procedural framework, sends a sample group of designers to a shared videogame environment, where they are asked to create their own pavilion using a kit of parts drawn from the reverse engineering of Frank Gehry’s 2008 pavilion. These iterations are scored in real time against a set of quantitative programmatic requirements, but they are also assessed qualitatively through more subjective criteria by the community of competitors, enriched by the immersive virtual experience of each other’s designs. Observation and analysis of participants has been undertaken through the recording of design sessions and online survey. This pilot study is currently being undertaken, yet the initial results hint at displaying much potential for a participative, intuitive and instantaneous form of collaborative CAAD based on communal competition