If you are not that keen on reading or just busy, check out the “comic book” version “Questions and Answers (on Game Innovation)”. It introduces the research questions and conclusions of our articles, each as a one-page comic.

There is also a limited edition of physical copies available at Granum virtual book store. Order your copy of “Questions and Answers (on Game Innovation)” or “Changing Faces of Game Innovation” before they run out! They ship internationally!

It’s been a great project! Big Thank You belongs to the people and the companies who have helped us during this journey! Hopefully we’ll get to elaborate these issues in the future as well, as the project has raised at least as many new questions as it has answered. We also encourage others to pick up from where we left off and continue the work. There is so much to do!

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.

First round was a blue-sky ideation workshop with 2 to 3 ideation methods per workshop. The methods included GameSpace methods such as VNA, GameSeekers, GameBoard and some other methods such as ThinkCube.

The other round included restriction-based ideation, where the companies could propose a restriction for their session. We developed new prototypes that try to facilitate more focused ideation sessions. The results have not yet been overly promising as this “idea game” design challenge is more demanding. The restrictions used in workshops varied from platform, theme and social aspects to old concepts.

In both rounds the ideas were documented, and the best ones were introduced and talked about. We also gathered the experiences by conducting a group interview about previous experiences, thoughts about the workshop, methods and ideas as well as what restrictions means in general level to the developers.

GameSpace project methods are available here:  http://gamelab.uta.fi/gamespacetool/

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.

As the abstract says, the focus of the paper is to have a critical look at the current game design literature through the analytical lenses of the current state of the art design research. The aim is not in creating a prescriptive framework for game design, but rather attempt to connect the game design studies to design studies in general.

The paper first discusses the notion of game design as an evolving design situation, which contrasts the narrow views of game design as problem-solving activity and instead acknowledges the complex network of issues that affect design at any given moment.

The central topic of the paper is in analysing a selected list of the current game design literature in light of the general design research theories. After presenting and discussing two models of design activity (one by Löwgren and Stolterman, and one by Bryan Lawson), we look deeper into the game design literature in light of these two models.

In conclusion, we note that in the game design literature the different forms of design activity are left to somewhat little attention and argue that game design research will benefit much from research that takes these into account.

Designer interviews

The main effort in studying the best practices of game designers in work package 1.1. has been conducting interviews among the game development personnel. We analysed interview data from earlier projects in the University of Tampere: GameSpace and MC2. The data dealt especially with how game designers generate ideas. The results of the analyses will be discussed in the forthcoming article: Kultima, A. (forthcoming) “How Game Designers Ideate?”.

The more current interviews conducted in GaIn have been aimed at charting how game development professionals view innovation in game development processes. The interviews have been carried out in the Game Developer Conference 2009 and in the Nordic Game 2009. One more round has been planned for the Game Developer Conference Europe in August 2009.

Design as activity

In work package 2.1. the main effort has been directed in understanding game design in connection to other disciplines of design such as architecture, product design, engineering and so on forth. By applying some notable theories from general design research, we have attempted to open the notion of design as activity taking into consideration the issues pertaining to the designer (the stakeholder’s involved in the process), the content (e.g. the design constraints, goals, solutions, etc.), the context (the studio culture and history, market situations, etc.)

Adopting a model of designing by Bryan Lawson (“How designers think”, 2004), we have come to believe that researching game design through the individual activities of the designer will provide some very interesting results. Lawson’s model consists of six groups of design activity: formulating, representing, moving, bringing problems and solutions together, evaluating and reflecting. The model will provide a powerful tool for analysing the data gathered during the project. The topics relating to work package 2.1. are discussed in more detail in the article Kuittinen, J., & Holopainen, J. (forthcoming 2009, September). “Some Notes on the Nature of Game Design”. Paper presentation at Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory, London, United Kingdom.

“Monster Confidence”

At the beginning of the project, we began an internal game development sub-project which covers the topics of the whole project quite extensively. Developing a game from scratch allows us to understand the process more profoundly and to identify new research topics. As researchers, it also allows us to bring theory into practice.

The game is a somewhat simple platformer called Monster Confidence (http://monsterconfidence.wordpress.com/). It is still in a design phase and our intention is to continue in a slow pace resulting in a functional version sometime at the end of the year 2010.

An important research tool we adopted right from the beginning have been designer diaries kept by each member of the team. Motivated by an article Capturing and analysing own design activity by Pedgley (2007), the idea has been to briefly document all activity (including thinking), experiences and emotions related to the design process. This has allowed us to get a handle on the members’ internal and external processes.

Initial observations from the diaries strengthened our view on the importance of a common vision to guide the process and the problems pertaining to understanding and communicating it. Similarly the diaries showed that group dynamics have a significant effect on the design process in whole.

This years Nordic Game Conference was filled with very inspiring and relevant topics (despite the slight down tempo of recession which meant, for example, drink tickets instead of open bar at the Nordic Party). Our team tried to spread out to as many possible interesting presentations. Some of the most relevant ones for GaIn included:

• “The Global Game Jam: Nordic Beginnings” (Led by Gorm Lai, Game Jam (DK))
• “Pitching the Game”, in Art of the Deal panel series (Led by Jason Della Rocca)
• “Innovation – Making the Leap of Faith” (Lars Gustavsson, DICE (SE))
• “The Birth of No More Heroes” (Suda 51, Grasshopper (JP))
• “Managing Multiple Development Teams” (Harald Riegler, Sproing (AT))
• “It’s a Small World” (Ian Bowden, Rockstar Leeds (UK))
• “Small Game – Big Challenge” (Per Juhlén & Simon Viklund, GRIN (SE))

This year Nordic Game Conference drew over 1100 participants from the nordic region and around the globe. Hopefully we will be able to return in 2010!

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

At the end of our trip, we spent the whole Thursday at sunny Malmö, including a visit to Toy Exhibition, which is the largest private collection of toys in Sweden. Even though we cannot say that we saw much of innovation there, it was a good place to get nostalgic. Most of the collection pieces were from 80’s and 90’s.