Engagement and Motivation in Game Development Processes

1
Engagement and Motivation in Game Development
Processes

• A BECTA-Funded Research Project
• Andrew Williams

2
Agenda

• The BECTA project
• Project plan
• Interview design
• Interview results
• Future work

3
The Project

• When kids are given educational games to play at
  school, they are happy to play. But they dont
  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 ?

4
Getting Started

• Its not what you know, its 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

5
The Team

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

6
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 (!!)

7
Project Plan

• Our project plan was crazy
• Mea culpa!
• We werent 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

8
Interview Design

• Lots of help from PLS team members
• Rob Ranyard, John Charlton
• Our interview script was pretty good
• Its 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

9
Interview Design Terminology

• Terminology was problematic throughout the
  project

Engagement
Fun
Motivation
?


NO!!
10
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

11
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 didnt 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

12
Interview Results

• We divided our results into two categories
• Development process
• What do game developers do to make sure that
  their games are engaging and motivating?
• Game characteristics
• What characteristics must a game have to be
  engaging and motivating?

13
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

14
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

15
Findings Development Process

• 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

16
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

17
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
• EAs idea

18
Findings - Game Characteristics

• 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

19
Future Work

• Re-do the questionnaire
• Write up the work for publication (assuming BECTA
  agrees)
• Two papers
• Summarising the work we have done here
• Comparing our work with academic theories and
  discussing the terminology problem