EDITOR Dennis Wixon [e-mail]

It’s my pleasure to introduce a guest columnist this month: Professor Tracy Fullerton of the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The program is one of the first game-design curriculums in the nation and is already producing promising designers and exciting innovations. —Dennis Wixon

Playcentric Design
Tracy Fullerton

USC School of Cinematic Arts | [e-mail]

“Play has a tendency to be beautiful.”

—Johann Huizinga

Game designers create systems that contain opportunities for play. As the quote from Johann Huizinga suggests, play is a beautiful and important part of human culture. Teaching the art of designing satisfying play is a challenging and new discipline. The study of game design is still evolving and as yet is unheralded among the more “serious” arts such as music, dance, literature, or theater. However, experimental programs in this field are being established in some of the most prestigious universities in the world, and these programs seek to produce a new breed of designers—not fans or hackers, engineers, or executives, but artists of play.

As a professor of game design, I take this challenge seriously. My goal is to prepare students not merely to work in the game industry of today, but also to be the voices of change and innovation. Whether it is subject-matter innovation, such as “serious games” or gameplay innovation, I encourage my students to ask provocative questions about the nature of games and to set difficult design challenges for themselves.

I teach a process of design that is adapted from best practices in usability and design research. Called “playcentric” design, it involves setting

interesting player-experience goals, building a rough paper or digital prototype that attempts to achieve those goals, testing the prototype with players, evaluating the results and integrating feedback, and then doing it again.

While iterative processes are widely used for productivity applications, conventional wisdom has been that game designers know good design when they play it and they don’t need anyone telling them how to design good games. That attitude is changing as the industry matures; today’s designers realize that they are expected to design for players within a broad range of ages, backgrounds, gender, and skill levels. To do so designers need to be adept at merging the science of usability with the art of play. This merger is the heart of playcentric design.

Back in 1995 I was designing a game for the launch of the Microsoft Network when I had an epiphany about user-centered design. I had come up with the idea for what was, at that time, an entirely new type of game: a casual online game. In the mid ’90s the Internet was still only for early adopters, but with the launch of Windows 95 and the promise of millions of new potential players coming online, the plan was to make a suite of easy-to-learn, fun-to-master, multiplayer games. To help us make the games accessible to the nascent Internet audience, Microsoft assigned a

March + April 2008

flOw is a uniquely beautiful PlayStation 3 game that began as a student research project at USC. The design goals were to create player-controlled difficulty adjustment in a relaxing, casual game style.