Thesis

The “Final” Thesis Statement

1. Applying “Exploration” as a Philosophy for Designing and Developing Video Games With Conceptual Coherence

3(+) Thesis Statement Ideas (all for this proposed topic)

1. Game Design Using Exploration as a Development Philosophy
2. Exploration as a Game Design Philosophy
3. Creating Video Games Using Exploration as a Design Philosophy
4. [Per Professor Fu - still needs work, but this is better... ] Applying “Exploration” as a Development Philosophy for ( Cohesive / Truth / Harmonious / Coherent / Some word I haven’t found ) Video Game Designs
5. Applying “Exploration” as a Development Philosophy for Designing Video Games With Conceptual Coherence
6. Applying “Exploration” as a Philosophy for Designing and Developing Video Games With Conceptual Coherence

Top 3 Topic Ideas (as proposed in this document)

1. Creating Games About Family, Legacy, and Heritage Creating Games That Are Not About Power / Games that instill family values / family roles
2. An Online Collaboration Space For Rapid Analog Game Prototyping
3. An Online System For Tracking What Games Are Teaching Us
4. Augmenting analog games digitally – The idea is to create an analog game with a digital supplement (soundtrack / came mechanics / etc) that enriches the analog game play (iPhone platform).
5. Creating Coherent Games Using Exploration as a Design Philosophy Exploration as a method of Game Development – Jon Blow talks about this in his MIGS 2007 Design Reboot talk. The idea is to iterate on the game mechanics, hold nothing sacred, and make the best game play possible / as opposed to top down architecture approach of come up with an idea then build it
6. Measuring the Effect of Reward Systems in Games – from Chris Hecker’s Achievements considered harmful?

 

Archived Ideas

Creating Games That are not About Power – Mr Koster says this is worth exploring

A direct response to Raph Koster – “Right now, most games are about violence.  They are about power.  They are about control…. We know how to create games where the formal mechanics are about climbing a ladder of status.  I don’t know how to make a game that is about the loneliness of being at the top, but I think I can see how we might get there… We begin to create mechanics that simulate not the projection of power, but lofty concepts like duty, love, honor, and responsibility, and evolutionary ones like ‘I want my children to have a better life than mine.’”

I like this idea because I like the idea of picking up where someone else left off – exploring something that someone respected in an industry says needs exploring.

This could be a game called “future generations” or “next generation” – I envision an analog board game where there are limited copies.  You play the game then pass it along to the next player.  Perhaps the person you just played with, plays with someone else and the game gets physically passed along.

The game could be about family building, could be about farming, you could have a number of choices for professions – but the overarching goal is to pass on the assets you accumulate (or life or something) to someone else.  Your game ends when you die, but the game (read metagame) does not end.  Your reward is not based solely on how you did in the game.  Perhaps you can choose to support the other player you are playing with.  Perhaps it is a 2 player game.  Perhaps you generate a family and the next person gets to chose the role (and gender) they carry on.  Perhaps each person starts with an “inheritance” from the previous player?  Can you marry from the other family (or tribe)?  Does the game setup get passed on, or just the statistical assets?  Do you get to name your family or are they anonymous?  Should the family outcomes be put into envelopes that give some context, but you pick a random envelope to begin with?  Is this a game that would still be “fun”?

An online collaboration space for rapid analog game prototyping

This is something I could use myself.  I have just begun to collaborate on the creation of board games with a good friend who lives 300 miles away.  As it stands we must email rules back and forth, set up independent boards, gather the pieces and other game mechanics required, then play on the phone.  Any changes we make to the game or the game dynamics must be made on both ends.  As the game is played, you have to be sure the boards are in sync with each other.

The vision would be to allow for rule & game mechanic creation using some of the design patterns prescribed by other industry professionals that would be recorded on a web site.  In theory the games could then be play tested online in that same collaborative space.  Notes could be taken and version histories recorded.

The process of prototyping and editing the game should be improved because you would not have to reprint the rules, resend the rules, track past played games, etc.

Promoting Fair Practices in Pricing Through Interactive Systems & Crowd Sourcing

I ran into an instance the other day:

For a large pack of paper towels, in Highland Village, Target’s price was $20.00 while Wal-Mart’s price was $13.50.

At some point drastic differences in pricing for the same product in the same area becomes oppressive – I believe many buying decisions are based on naivety.  The idea would be to create an application that allowed anyone to enter a price, location and product, then reference that price later on.  So I could enter in the products I use most often – then my shopping list could tell me how much I should be paying for each product.  That pricing information I entered would also be shared with my neighbors so they would not have to over-pay for goods or services.  This could be put into some sort of game form – some combination of saving money, points for contributing, points for telling friends, perhaps even points for trying products?

Doing Good with Interaction Design

This topic was suggested through a series of talks with Dr. Batchelder here in Dallas.  He suggested exploring the ways in which interaction design can do good in culture.  It might be through awareness (data visualization), through teaching skill, through free access, or something I haven’t thought of.  This could manifest in a small series of interactive projects exploring the issue.

Games as Art – Mr Koster says this is/has been answered to some degree

Answering Raph Koster’s question from page 148 of A Theory of Fun for Game Design: “…Since games are closed formal systems, that might mean that games can never be art in that sense.  But I don’t think so.  I think that means that we just need to decide what we want to say with a given game – something big, something complex, something open to interpretation, something where there is no single right answer – and then make sure that when the player interacts with it, they can come to it again and reveal whole new aspects to the challenge presented…”

I like this idea because I like the idea of picking up where someone else left off – exploring something that someone respected in an industry says needs exploring.

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Shotgun Ideas

The following information / Categories / Etc are in no particular order, but are organized roughly by category.

Altruism

• Doing good with interaction design
• How interactive data vis can enable better decision making in health care
• Democratic Web (as opposed to the new personalized web)
• Ethics of Web Design

Art

• Data driven
• Collaborative
• Generative
• Interactive
• Actually displayed live in person somewhere…

Business

• Displaying Data
• Online Applications
• Health / Education Records (data.gov)

Education

• Open/free “learners” institute?
• How can game design inform educational design?

Game Design

• Answering Raph Koster’s question from page 148 of A Theory of Fun for Game Design: “…Since games are closed formal systems, that might mean that games can never be art in that sense.  But I don’t think so.  I think that means that we just need to decide what we want to say with a given game – something big, something complex, something open to interpretation, something where there is no single right answer – and then make sure that when the player interacts with it, they can come to it again and reveal whole new aspects to the challenge presented…”
  OR
  “Right now, most games are about violence.  They are about power.  They are about control…. We know how to create games where the formal mechanics are about climbing a ladder of status.  I don’t know how to make a game that is about the loneliness of being at the top, but I think I can see how we might get there… We begin to create mechanics that simulate not the projection of power, but lofty concepts like duty, love, honor, and responsibility, and evolutionary ones like ‘I want my children to have a better life than mine.’”
• Doing good with game design – how do we teach gamers skills that apply in the “real” world (think Jane McGonigal)?
• Hybrid game/mobile app/democratizing food prices/price checker
• Leverage imagination of the player
• Montessori ideas into games?
• Curriculum around games?