Kultima, A. & Alha, K.. ““Hopefully everything I’m doing has to do with innovation” Games industry professionals on innovation in 2009″.

The paper presents the results of an interview study concerning innovation attitudes of game developers. The study indicates interesting division of opinions within the industry. Even though the industry is seemingly maturing, more systematic and instrumentalist views towards innovation are rising, at the same time artistic and pessimistic views are also present. As the games industry is evolving simultaneously into essentially different directions, the innovation perspectives seem to vary accordingly. In total, seven different attitude profiles arose: artists, universalists, followers, evangelists, nihilists, instrumentalists, and scarecrows.

The article will be cited in both IEEExplore and Engineering Index.

Kultima, A.  “The Organic Nature of Game Ideation:Game Ideas Arise from Solitude and Mature by Bouncing”

Kultima, A. & Stenros, J. “Designing Games for Everyone:The Expanded Game Experience Model”

First paper presents the results of interview study of idea generation habits of Finnish game developers. The main finding is that the process of coming up with ideas is mainly solo activity, but the maturing process of the ideas is more social. Game developers were talking about “bouncing the ideas”. The ways and tools vary among individuals, but even though it may seem that there is no method, individuals have developed intuitive ways to enhance their processes. The sources for new ideas lie also outside the digital entertainment realm, as many interviewees reported that they seek inspiration constantly from everyday activities. Paper also implies the need for educating game developers even more about ideation methods.

Second paper discusses the expanding nature of game experiences, not only because of the “casual turn” but also because of the rise of social games (Facebook and similar) and games turning into services. The paper presents theoretical model “Expanded Game Experience, EGE”, that we have been working on in several projects, including Gamespace and GaS research projects.

Here are the slides for both of the presentations. Papers will be available at ACM digital library later this year.

http://gamesandinnovation.com/survey/

Read more about the benefits of participating here.

More information and the link to the survey can be found at our Survey page (http://gamesandinnovation.com/survey/)

The survey will be closed on 14th of May 2010.

In order to grasp a better view on real-life game design our researchers will be spending a few weeks with some of our partners, actively participating in their daily work. The researchers will be reflecting and observing the game design processes of the companies and keeping a detailed diary during their stay.

In addition to understanding the daily life of a game designer, we are particularly looking at how the companies nurture and support creativity.

The panel was divided into two sections; first half was all about traditional questions and answers and the second part worked slightly in the same manner as GDC’s Design Challenges led by Eric Zimmerman. Serious topics were this way complemented with more concrete ideas of where to take the games industry.

The first and perhaps most important issue discussed in the panel was the team consistency and especially the versatility and differences between the members. The panelists encouraged game companies to hire outside their comfort zone. Even though this was implicitly referring to the lack of female designers, the notion was not explicitly only about the gender. “Industry doesn’t need another you” was one of the provocative expressions directed to the rather homogenous audience of GDCE.

After discussing the emerging issues of games industry maturing, these four panelists gave four different ideas for developing future games. Tracy started the presentations with forming an idea of a war game that is based on the mechanics of holding hands. Kellee took the same genre of games but applied the design philosophy of thatgamecompany and discussed an idea of a war game based on emotions, especially fear. Cynthia and Sheri presented slightly more open ideas, as Cynthia explored her experiences with observing girls and boys playing with Mattel toys and Sheri shared her expertise on learning models.

Over the years Cynthia has noticed that boys’ games are more straightforward and “fair” as girls’ games. Girls choose a different approach because their games usually involve three participants and have a more nuanced kind of competition.  As Cynthia concluded that girls and boys play differently, also Sheri took the same page – we also learn in different ways. As women are predominantly “modeling” learners, most of the games as being based on explorative learning model, exclude this group of people. Both women did also emphasize that this was statistically about gender – from the broader perspective it is all about taking different people into account when designing games.

In the end, the lesson of these designing women was definitely more wide-ranging than only applied while designing for women.

GaIn got to meet interesting game professionals again, as we landed to Cologne, Germany last week. At Cologne we got another glance of game industry approaches to innovation and game development this time @ Game Developers Conference Europe. At the conference site we continued our data collection and were able to record yet again interesting views on the subject matter. We now have a total of 25 interviews and more scheduled to be conducted by phone. Happily the data seems to saturate.

The themes of recession followed to the conference speeches again, especially on the first day of the conference. Examples of these were Bostjan Trohas speech “Surviving Project Cancellation in the Economic Downturn” and “Top Trends in Casual Games” panel led by Ariella Lehrer, which turned out to be about scenarios that casual game companies are facing these days.

Perhaps on Tuesday and Wednesday people were more relaxed due to nice parties on Monday (Gameforge) and Tuesday (Crytek). Interesting views on design, innovation and game developing processes were expressed on several speeches. We also got a glimpse on upcoming Remedy title Alan Wake, as Matias Myllyrinne was sharing his views on developing entertainment to gamers.

Couple of interesting GDCE09 speeches:

• Generally on design and development processes:
• “Design, Constraints and Integrity” by Dino Dini
• “Outsourcing & Distributed Development: Smarter, Better, Faster Way to Develop Games” panel led by Alexander Fernandez (panellists including Olya Nikitova, Rajesh Rao, Jason Manley and Charles Speyer)
• “Creating Visual Identity for Games” by Viktor Antonov
• About the changing audiences:
• “Designing for New Audiences” by Don Daglow
• “Writing Interactive Narrative for a Mature Audience” by David Cage
• “Designing Women” panel led by Margaret Wallace (panellists including: Tracy Fullerton, Sheri Graner Ray, Kellee Santiago and Cynthia Woll)
• Processes and philosophies of specific titles:
• “FLOWER: Design Postmortem” by Kellee Santiago
• “From Max Payne to Alan Wake: Creating Intellectual Properties the Remedy Way” by Matias Myllyrinne

We will be covering couple of these presentations in more details in the following posts.

Game Developers Conference Europe drew over 1500 participants this year. And the trade fair gamescom following the GDCE09 almost quarter of a million (245 000) visitors.

Yet again we also took a look at the broader spectrum of the city as we started our trip by visiting Cologne Museum of Applied Arts on Sunday. The exhibition “Design Meets Arts” presented nice collection of furniture and objects of different era of industrial design. Worth to mention is also the architecture of Cologne that manifested the obvious impact of the Bauhaus school. The strong and impressive form of modernism goes surprisingly well together with the famous Kölner Dom.