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