Player participation in video game development

The trend of involving players in early game development has increased considerably during recent years. As an alternative for the traditional game creation methods, in player participation, players get to play the game and influence its development direction before the game is finished and published. Similar development methods have been employed already for long in the information systems development context, but in the early game development context, the participation of players is still a relatively unexplored area. This research attempts to fill that gap and provide a more comprehensive understanding of player participation as well as investigate its usefulness in game development. A qualitative case study approach was adopted in this study. Four Finnish game studios were invited for semi-structured interviews to share their knowledge of involving players in their projects, and 21 players responded to a questionnaire about their experiences with game development projects. Interviews were transcribed and coded along with players’ responses. Player participation is best described as a collaborative game development method characterised by voluntariness, and emphasizing communication and interaction between the player community and the game studio for creating a gameplay experience according to the emerging discourse between game studio’s development vision and players’ desires. In it, a game studio and its player community engage in various community management, communication and testing activities to create a mutually satisfying product. The participation process itself is characterised by voluntariness of participation as well as varying degrees of participation thresholds and levels of commitment towards the project among players. The benefits of player participation are found in the availability of additional resources and more cost-efficient development, validating game design choices with and targeting the gameplay experience for the player community, and developing technically a more robust game as well as the potential for better reception when the game is finished. However, the game studio has to face the challenges in managing the increased workload, potential changes in various work practices, and creating and maintaining the player community, which consists of diverse individuals with each of their varying interests and desires towards the game development project.Pelaajien osallistaminen aikaisessa pelinkehityksessä on lisääntynyt viime vuosina huomattavasti. Vaihtoehtona perinteisille pelinkehitysmenetelmille pelaajien osallistamisessa pelaajat pääsevät pelaamaan ja vaikuttamaan pelin kehityssuuntaan ennen pelin valmistumista ja julkaisua. Vastaavan kaltaisia kehitysmenetelmiä on jo pitkään käytetty tietojärjestelmien kehityksessä, mutta aikaisessa pelinkehityskontekstissa tämä on vielä varsin tutkimatonta aluetta. Tämä tutkimus pyrkii täyttämään tuota tyhjyyttä kirjallisuudessa ja tarjoamaan kokonaisvaltaisempaa ymmärrystä pelaajien osallistamisesta sekä tutkimaan sen hyödyllisyyttä pelinkehityskontekstissa. Tämä tutkimus suoritettiin laadullisena tapaustutkimuksena. Neljä suomalaista pelistudiota kutsuttiin puolistrukturoituihin haastatteluihin jakamaan heidän tietämyksensä pelaajien osallistamisesta heidän projekteissaan, ja 21 pelaajaa vastasi kyselyyn omista kokemuksistaan pelinkehitysprojekteissa. Haastattelut litteroitiin ja koodattiin pelaajien vastausten ohella. Pelaajien osallistamista voi parhaiten kuvata yhteistyökeskeisenä pelienkehitysmetodina, jossa painottuvat vapaaehtoisuus sekä kommunikointi ja vuorovaikutus pelaajayhteisön ja pelistudion välillä, ja jossa pelielämys rakentuu pelistudion vision ja pelaajayhteisön toiveiden välisen vuoropuhelun mukaisesti. Siinä pelistudio ja pelaajayhteisö osallistuvat erilaisiin yhteisönhallinta-, kommunikointi- ja testausaktiviteetteihin luodakseen molempia osapuolia tyydyttävän tuotteen. Osallistumisprosessia luonnehtivat vapaaehtoisuus, sekä pelaajien vaihtelevat osallistumiskynnyksen ja sitoutumisen tasot peliprojektia kohtaan. Pelaajien osallistamisen hyödyt tulevat lisääntyneiden resurssien saatavuudesta ja kustannustehokkaammasta kehityksestä, pelisuunnitteluun liittyvien päätösten hyväksyttämisestä pelaajien kanssa sekä pelikokemuksen kohdentamisesta pelaajille, ja teknisesti toimivamman pelin kehittämisestä sekä mahdollisuudesta parempaan vastaanottoon pelin valmistuttua. Kuitenkin pelistudion täytyy myös kohdata pelaajien osallistamisesta juontavat haasteet, kuten lisääntyneen työmäärän hallitseminen, mahdolliset muutokset eri työkäytännöissä, ja pelaajayhteisön, joka koostuu erilaisista yksilöistä, joista jokaisella on omat eriävät intressit ja toiveet peliprojektia kohtaan, rakentaminen sekä ylläpito

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

An Introduction to Experience Requirements

We consider the application of requirements engineering principles and techniques to the elicitation, capture, and representation of the output of the user experience design process. A stimulus-perception-response model is used to motivate experience requirements, defined as descriptions of user experiences that must be met (functional experiences) or are satisfaction goals (non-functional experiences). We identify potential benefits and look at experience requirements in video games.Ye