Engagement and Motivation in Game Development Processes A BECTA-Funded Research Project Andrew Williams.

Engagement and Motivation in Game Development Processes

A BECTA-Funded Research Project

Andrew Williams

Agenda

1. The BECTA project

2. Project plan

3. Interview design

4. Interview results

5. Future work

The Project

When kids are given educational games to play at school, they are happy to play. But they don’t play them outside the classroom.– Why not?– What do professional game developers do that

educational game developers do not? “Spend £2million on developing each game” ?

Getting Started

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”– Paul Hollins got us the initial contact– We received a fairly open brief from BECTA– A very short-term project (too short?)– We submitted a bid for the money

Too ambitious!?

– We heard very quickly that we had won the contract

The Team

Louise Blenkharn Phil Carlisle Dr John Charlton (PLS) Paul Hollins (CETIS) Prof. Rob Ranyard (PLS) Andrew Williams

Project Plan

Project Start – January 25th 2005– Do a literature review– Design and distribute a questionnaire– Design an interview script and conduct six

interviews– Produce an interim report– Produce a final report

Project End – April 15th 2005 (!!)

Project Plan

Our project plan was crazy– Mea culpa!

We weren’t helped by GDC, which took place in early March 2005– Most of our interviewees decamped to California!

In particular, we tried to do too much– Questionnaire suffered

Interview Design

Lots of help from PLS team members– Rob Ranyard, John Charlton

Our interview script was pretty good It’s easier to create a good interview than it is to

create a good questionnaire– We think

Our interview is very open-ended– Follow-up questions are critical– No opportunity for follow-ups in questionnaires

Interview Design – Terminology

Terminology was problematic throughout the project

Engagement FunMotivation

Interview Design

Terminology solution:– We asked around the subject– We guided people to discuss the issues around

motivation and engagement, without mentioning the terms themselves

– We asked people for their definitions of motivation and engagement at the end of the interview

– We tried to avoid using terms like “fun”

Interview Results

Five companies were interviewed– Out of six companies who initially agreed to take part

The other company was involved in some serious restructuring and we didn’t hear back from them

Participants were very interested in our research In general, games developers are keen on engaging

with academia– The interviews were a great deal of fun for us as

researchers

Interview Results

We divided our results into two categories:

1. Development process– What do game developers do to make sure that

their games are engaging and motivating?

2. Game characteristics– What characteristics must a game have to be

engaging and motivating?

Findings – Development Process

Game development is far more professional than we expected– Canonical design documentation– The importance of milestones

Which form the basis for the payment schedule

– Sales and marketing are well understood by everyone we interviewed

Findings – Development Process

The team is very important; the benefits of having 20 – 80 passionate gamers all working together– “Synergy”

Intuition (sometimes team intuition) is very important – Perhaps the biggest problem for educational

game developers

Prototyping is very important, particularly in pre-production– Difficult to do properly, however, even for our

biggest participant company

Assessment of games during production can be rather ad hoc in places– Developers would like to do more

Findings – Development Process

Findings - Game Characteristics

Goals and rewards are still the major technique for designers– Early levels should be comparatively easy

… and should feature spectacular rewards

– Two designers talked about “meta-games” based on the goal/reward/feedback structure

Findings - Game Characteristics

A new technique, mentioned by three participants:

– Show everything at the start and then take it away again

Give the player something to aim for

– EA’s idea

Immersion– Audio is considered to be as important as visuals

for increasing immersion Maybe superb visuals are just taken for granted?

– Licensing (eg James Bond, FIFA etc) Makes it easier to get the player immersed in the game

– Licence characteristics– Licence value system

Findings - Game Characteristics

Future Work

Re-do the questionnaire Write up the work for publication (assuming

BECTA agrees) Two papers:

1. Summarising the work we have done here

2. Comparing our work with academic theories and discussing the terminology problem