sis is made and so on.
There are two benefits with this method. First, one does not have to come up with anything from scratch. Second, being a game design newbie is fine; anyone can improve a broken game, which can be good for one’s self esteem. However, some may feel that it is “cheating” to take someone else’s idea (even if it is a public-domain idea, like card games). Whether this is a problem or not depends on the aim of the exercise; if it is to come up with an original game to publish, this may not be the way to go. If, on the other hand, it is the first in a series of exercises aiming to teach game design, this is not a problem at all.
“broken” game that one has to fix and make more playable by changing or removing parts of it.
By designing for an emotion (especially a not-so-pleasant one!) one opens up the design space for unusual ideas. This is very useful, but one must be aware that the most extreme variants are seldom “playable” in a wider context. They may not even be possible to redesign, but one may still find useful ideas in them that may otherwise not have been found. It’s a bit like using extreme characters [ 5] instead of personas as a design tool.
Designing for Emotions This is a variant of “redo it right,” wherein the participants make the initial analysis the same way but then decide to design for one of the emotions that the game evokes. Trying to design for a feeling, rather than a theme, will result in rather different design choices! One can stretch the design process in absurdum toward the chosen emotion and then “bounce back,” using this extreme variant of the game as a new
D6—Killing Someone Else’s Darlings Originally, this was an exercise for designing board games (hence the name; a D6 is a six-sided dice), but it can just as well be used to come up with ideas for any kind of game (if so, the time may have to be extended). The idea is that each group of participants starts with one game component (a six-sided dice, or a card, or a score track, an item or a graphic image). A participant may add a rule to the game, and thereafter the next participant may add or remove rules or components.
Every once in a while the game is play tested. This carries on for about an hour, and the aim is explicitly to not “finish” the game but to deliver a “baby” game in need of further development. Then two groups meet and present their respective games to each other, after which point they spend another two hours refining the design of the other group’s game. They meet again, demonstrate what they have done, and get their own game back with a final hour to refine it.
This method is very effective, since the ideas undergo a constant testing and questioning due to the rotation of design ideas. Interestingly, the fact that the games will not be fully described during demonstration (and there is rarely a comprehensive written description) often leads to new ideas or other manners of play based on misinterpretations of the rules, widening the design space. Also, the games benefit from being played by different groups of players since different groups may have very different player styles (aggressive, helpful etc.), which also highlights different strengths and weaknesses of gameplay. These two effects
[ 5] Extreme characters is a design method where one creates very odd characters to design for, i.e. red-haired, shy, left-handed terrorists. The aim is to let darker emotions and desires influence the design for once. See Djajadiningrat et al “Interaction Relabelling and Extreme Characters: Methods for exploring aesthetic interactions,” working paper, DIS 2000, New York, N. Y.,2000.
November + December 2008
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