Design Study 2 – Workshop A

Workshop A took place at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh during a school vacation period. Ten participants aged 12-14 (nine boys and one girl) attended the workshop over 4 days.

The workshop was advertised through posters in local school computing departments, and

places were allocated on a first come, first served basis. The workshop ran from 10am to 3pm each day with a 30 minute lunch break and two 15 minute juice breaks.

A suite of ten gaming laptops belonging to the Adventure Author (AA) project were used for the workshop, and the laptops were arranged so that participants sat together on one large rectangular table. Taking into account time spent away from the laptops watching

demonstrations and carrying out other related activities, participants spent approximately 10 hours working with the toolset.

The AA Principle Investigator ran the workshop, with support from me and a researcher on the AA project team. We each gave a number of demonstrations showing participants how to carry out the key tasks within the toolset and Adventure Author, and provided on demand support and answers to questions as participants worked on their games throughout the week. Again,

participants were free to choose which game making activity to focus on at any given time, although they were encouraged to use particular AA tools at the beginning and end of each day, and the demonstrations shaped activities to some extent. On the third day of the workshop, a professional games designer visited and spoke to participants about working in the games industry as well as giving them general advice on their games.

3.3.2.2 Data Collection

Whilst providing support to participants I was able to find out about the games they were creating, gain an understanding about what they were trying to achieve and spot difficulties they had in achieving their goals. I made observation notes over the course of the four days. As I was involved in running the workshop and help was in high demand, these notes were generally written up at the end of the day. All participants were interviewed about their games on the final day of the workshop, and subsequently tested a paper prototype of a tool, as described further in 3.4.5. The semi-structured interview guide can be found in Appendix A.4. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and a number of photographs were taken of the prototype interactions, these were combined with the transcriptions to provide a full account of the interactions.

3.3.2.3 Observations and Commentary

The young people attending the workshop all had an interest in games, and were keen on the idea of designing their own (having signed up to take part in the workshop during their school holidays). An initial discussion of which games were favourites of participants, led by the AA Principal Investigator, revealed that few of the participants rated games with strong narratives high on their list. The RPG genre was discussed as typically having more story elements than some other genres of games, and through our demonstrations we encouraged participants to consider how their game conveys narrative and how they could use story to give goals to the player.

On the first two days of the workshop, when most of the demonstrations took place, participants were focused on experimenting with the toolset’s capabilities, but by the third day their

attentions turned to creating a finished game. At this point attendees started to think more about the storyline of their games. These changes in focus coincided with three things. Firstly, they had learnt the basics of the toolset and there were no more demonstrations to watch. Secondly, we began talking about the peer play testing they would soon be carrying out, which seemed to motivate them to try to create something that would be well-received. Thirdly, the professional game designer visited in the afternoon of the second day and encouraged the young designers to think in more detail about how audiences would perceive their game. He encouraged them to have a strong idea of what their game should be like, and made particular reference to the importance of knowing what the different characters are like when writing conversations.

Participants seemed spurred on by his advice and appeared to take his expert status seriously.

One participant, who had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, was very quiet on the first day of the workshop and elected not to return for the rest of the week. A participant from the workshop waiting list joined the group in his place on the second day, and quickly caught up with the other workshop attendees.

There were some minor behavioural issues, with one participant going to lengths to annoy the participants around him, primarily by including mildly offensive jokes in his game

conversations and reading them out-loud. However, after a request to stop from the workshop helpers, he settled down and the atmosphere was generally good for the rest of the workshop.

Participants were generally quite able, and quickly picked up on how to carry out the basic tasks within the toolset. There were some interesting examples of participants showing each other how to achieve a certain effect or behaviour within the toolset, and there were some cases of a particular idea travelling quickly around the workshop room, the “brushfire effect” previously observed by Good and Robertson (2006b).

Participants seemed slightly reluctant to carry out some of the stand-alone Adventure Author activities which we asked them to do at the beginning and end of each day, namely, planning their workload and keeping track of their evolving ideas for the game. My sense was that some participants saw these tasks as disconnected from the main game creation activity, which they were enthused by, and felt that they were taking time away from work in the toolset. I noticed a tendency for some participants to skip over these tasks as quickly as possible without appearing to give them any thought or attention.

I interviewed each participant on the final day of the workshop as part of a design activity. The design element, in relation to an augmented map view, is discussed in section 3.4.5. I asked participants to explain their game storylines to me, and show me where different events took

place using the toolset map. The extent to which participants focused on narrative varied. Some were clearly less interested in this aspect than others, but all had included some narrative elements in their game.

All participants had made use of conversations to convey narrative elements. In some cases these were well integrated into other aspects of the game and visual elements such as area design were used to evoke the setting of the story and guide the player. A number of

participants had elements in their games about which they seemed unsure of the purpose. For example, after explaining his main story line one attendee showed me another area of which he was particularly proud of the design, but he was not sure how it fitted in with the other elements of the game. In other cases, participants had a very clear idea about how the overall narrative hung together, but when I asked how some of the ideas would be communicated to the player they had not thought about this. I got the impression that some of the designers were more focused on telling a story for themselves, and had not been keeping the perspective of the player in mind. However, there were also time limits in play, and most designers described tasks that were still ‘to do’ in the games.

To some extent, the experimental approach taken in the first two days meant that participants had started thinking about level design before they had thought about the setting and story of their game. This free-exploration approach is intended to encourage creativity and allows young designers to get a sense of what is possible in the toolset before getting their heart set on a character which has an appearance that it not possible using the available art resources.

However, this approach may also make it hard to integrate all the work that had been carried out in the toolset into a coherent world for the player to explore.

3.3.3 Design Study 3 – School B