[ 10] Read the rest in S. Lundgren, “Teaching Gameplay Design is teaching Interaction Design,” working paper, HCIEd 2008, Rome, Italy, 2008. <http:// www.cs.chalmers. se/~lundsus/publica-tions.htm>

November + December 2008

bags or bizarre hats or water guns—perhaps some maps, and last but not least, a means of communication like PDAs or mobile phones. In order to get computer-game prototypes, you really need to have skilled programmers in the group, and preferably someone good at graphics as well. Then you must provide hardware, software, an image-, texture-, and sound library and anything else that may get them going. If you want more unpredictable outcomes, you can provide things like cameras (always tempting), LEGO Mindstorm, perhaps an AIBO robot dog, and other intriguing things… like whatever is in your bottom kitchen drawer right now. And always provide paper of different sizes (and cardboard if you have some) and pencils of different colors!

“But,” you may be wondering, “doesn’t it require a certain amount of game knowledge to do all this?” Well, as with anything else, experience helps when designing a game. However, this experience can come from different sources—for example, from playing games of any kind. Or it can come from that instinct we designers work so hard to achieve, the gut feeling telling us when something actually is interesting, entertaining, or “working,” and why. As a matter of fact, if everyone is inexperienced in game design, it’s often the interaction designer who carries forth the strongest ideas, simply because of this valuable and carefully trained ability. This may come from having user tested one’s designs every so often, which may not be the case for everyone. Actually, designing a game (or the embryo of a

game) and then letting others test it is not at all different from running some other kind of user test, like, for instance, thinking aloud. And we all know how to do that!

Still, the methods mentioned above will not work for everyone, every time. But if a method doesn’t work for you, try another. Or, if you like the method, try it out with others. Since a method takes a maximum of eight hours (but typically four) to carry through (although, admittedly it may take longer if prototyping requires a lot of time), it is not time-consuming to try out two or three.

If you use any of these methods to teach, make sure to divide any gamers among the rest so that each group can benefit from having an experienced gamer. Also, make sure to point out to your students how much a small change of a rule can change the entire experience of a game; imagine, for instance, a game of chess where the goal is not to strike the opponent’s king but all of her or his pawns. This small change has a huge effect on how the game is played. (Try if you don’t believe me!)

Wishing all of you the best in your gameplay design endeavors, I’d like to end with a tip I’ve gotten more than once when interviewing game designers of different kinds: Start with only a few components and rules, make a very simple game, and add complexity with care. And, as they always say on the telly: Have fun with it!

voice-based interaction is not allowed), here goes: (1a) You can assign each of the negotiating players an area and let everyone drag and drop the jewels to and from these areas, (1b) and you can also turn this into a kind of turn-based distribution. ( 2) Or, you can let all the jewels lie still and let each player mark their interest in a particular jewel instead. Each of these three solutions requires ways for the players to agree or disagree with what is going on. ( 3) Or, you can let all players get their own subset of the jewels, each suggesting how they think the entire division should turn out. Here, players need to be able to agree with one or several of the other’s suggestion.

Regardless of the solution, players also need a means of showing that they want a particular jewel particularly, or if there is someone to whom they won’t give a certain jewel. Also, regarding color-blindness issues, it is not a good idea to keep all the nine colors as is; working with shapes is necessary to facilitate jewel recognition for everyone [ 10]. Oh, and by the way, that’s another method of exploring unusual interaction design problems: Take a board game and make an online version of it.

P.S.

Oh, about the three and a half solutions to the negotiation problem (and note that using

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sus Lundgren is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in interaction design at Chalmers University of Technology,

Gothenburg, Sweden. She has a background in game design research, and has worked with Web design and GUI design for several years. She also owns some 400 games.

DOI: 10.1145/1409040.1409042
© 2008 ACM 1072-5220/08/1100 $5.00