Game Design Research-Lankoski
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : #thesisReading #research through design #killerPaper Authors: Lankoski Holopainen
Initial design research were ad-hoc post mortems
Designers shouldn't be seen as magic artists, but rather craftspeople with a trade
Is looking for fundamental game elements a sort of positivism?
The end of the chapter “design as an applied science” has interesting attempts to find the fundamental elements of games, e.g. MDA, Skill Atoms, Game Grammar,
Simon 1969 calls design an “ill structured problem”, see wicked problems one that is difficult to represent or define. This allows these to withstand scientific methods. Simon suggests ways of transforming these problems into well-formulated problems.
Theories of game design are probably useless, but what about books full of practical exercises? Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop or Brathwaite & Schreiber’s Challenges for game designers
does industry move too fast for academia?
Here’s an idea: study game jams, since they’re very very accelerated design schedules
Game aesthetic advancement is usually looked at in the context of hardware advancement, rather than advancement in artistic ideas. Why is it all about shaders, rather than art?
Chapter 3 brings up approaches from architecture, like diagramming and sketching that may be a unique way of looking at a game.
- design documents
- MDA
- play centric design
- game ontologies
- game ontologies
- game design patterns
- game diagrams
- machinations
Talks a bit about research about design and research for design, though I don’t really get how the latter is different from simple RtD
RtD suffers from the biases of the lead designer
Game conferences ought to accept things that are not papers.
craft as opposed to design
talks a bit about speculative design
The conclusion of chapter 5 is an excellent, excellent summary of what an RTD researcher needs to do.
Chapter 6 talks about a game JEU SERAI, a game built to replace psychological profiling exams.
frameworks ought to include uncertainty.
Chapter 7 (the section titled “current serious game design frameworks”) has some fantastic examples of transformational game design frameworks
Chapter 9 talks about some issues with controlled design experiments, specifically the generalizability and small sample sizes. Do the factors you are varying affect how players play other aspects of the game?
Chapter 10 involves interviewing critical game developers in an attempt to elucidate how they created their games.
They initially asked them to do a design challenge, but the developers found that rather artificial. The intervention changed the context of design, and thus altered the process.
