Couple of weeks ago, a Finnish game researcher, Mirva Peltoniemi defended her dissertation at Tampere University of Technology, Finland at the Department of Business Information management and Logistics.
There has been couple of very interesting Finnish game research dissertations coming out this spring, but this one is especially relevant from the perspective of GaIn.
Ian Fish has put up an article for Gamasutra about common pitfalls in game design processes.
These include:
1. Not Structuring Time For Game Playing
2. Placing Too Much Importance On Paper Designs
3. Peer Review Not Taken Seriously
4. Decision-Maker Picked For His Producer Skills
5. Not Taking Advantage Of Placeholders
6. Allowing The Story To Control The Game Design
7. Not Giving Designers Enough Tools
8. Entering Production Without Something Fun
9. Not Keeping Design Documentation Up-To-Date
10. Not Making Outside Playtests Part Of The Process
Even though this is only one opinion and we may not agree with all of these points, the summary is very interesting. Especially time allocation for gameplay, or more precisely idea research, and point 9 are worth to examine for.
We have started our first data collection in last month at Game Developers Conference 2009. The interview study that we ignited is about the views of acknowledged game professionals concerning games and innovation. We are inquiring the first impressions of the topic, future perspectives, trends and ideal tools. Data collection continues at Nordic Game 2009 and probably also at GDC Europe next autumn. Our goal is to map out the general view of our research topic to reiterate and support our more detailed research questions.
As a starter for our project, we have engaged ourselves into a concrete design activity. Our team has now turned into a small game design group with a goal of a small completed game for XNA.
The purpose of this side project is two-folded: first of all we are refining and testing our research questions and secondly we are getting deeper into the design thinking processes and getting personal understanding of the possible problems and needs for tools.
Game Innovation Database is a project, which objective is no more or less than to “classify and record every innovation in the history of computer and video games, while displaying their relationship to one another”. Currently the database includes 235 innovations.
gamesandinnovation.com 