Welcome to my Domain
“Games are complex systems, in which players induce their agency. Because games are designed to be played by players it is important to understand who these players are and what they prefer. As a result user centered design, or even collaborative/participatory design has become the holy grail of contemporary game design practices.
In the ideation phase involvement of players is typically done by using collaborative tools or analogue games specifically designed to aid the conceptions of ideas in a social context. Such existing tools/games are all non digital, probably due to the constraining nature of digital systems, compared to the relatively free imagination of humans.
– The purpose of this thesis is to define and develop a framework for real-time collaborative game design within a digital environment, which would make ideation – prototyping – testing, available in one single session involving both players and designers.
The complete success of such a framework would ultimately render contemporary design practices obsolete and revolutionize the way we make games.”
The purpose of this project is to develop a framework for real-time collaborative game design in digital environments.
By collaborative game design it is meant as a design approach in where both the designer and the player is involved in the design process.
By real-time the process is of a continuously temporal nature, and that the player should be able to interact with the game-world while the designer defines and manipulates it. The framework is focused on digital environments.
While digital design tools inevitably will be constrained, thus limiting the design space, they also provide some functionalities that cannot be found in analog design tools.
The framework is to be seen as a design vision, and therefore no arguments will be presented to its efficiency or superiority compared to other methods.
The framework should function as an inspirational source that can be used when designing and developing real-time collaborative game design tools, and will be a collection of heuristics comprised from our research into existing design practises and our experience designing a realtime collaborative game design tool for touch devices.
The research for this project will be commenced on two levels, being literature research and knowledge acquisition through designing prototypes.
Demonstration video
UFO Demo game