We began our ethnographic research phase with our industry partners at the end of the last year and will continue it during the winter.

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.

During last autumn, GaIn has been busy on running two sets of workshops with our industry partners.

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 team has enjoyed Christmas holidays and is ready for the second year of our project. The year 2010 brings more workshops, participatory observation periods, surveys, writing loads of articles and travelling once more! On the behalf of the whole team, Happy New Year 2010, Have fun!