Relating Cognitive Models of Computer Games to User Evaluations of Entertainment --Piselli, Claypool, Doyle

Relating Cognitive Models of Computer Games to User Evaluations of Entertainment By Paolo Piselli, Mark Claypool, and James Doyle I think I have convinced my poor teacher that I hate any papers that aren't conducted according to rigorous scientific measures. It's not true, I swear! I'm just reluctant to take anything at face value without well reasoned support.  Can you blame me?

When I was little, my relatives still weren't sure whether DnD was evil or not, and my mom instructed me not to tell any of them, I was interested in it. Also, computer games didn't even have the reasonable-entertainment-pastime status that they have now. I grew up to strongly dislike opinions that have no depth. That is, anything that must be taken as truth, without examination.

 I demand depth from writers. If you think your opinion is important enough that you are going to share it with me, then you better have thought about it and you better be able to talk about your thoughts. Why? Easy. If you can't talk about it, you didn't actually think. You just guessed.

I repeat. If you cannot talk to me about your thoughts, then clearly you must not have had any. You guessed. You made a quick decision, left or right, red or blue, tall or short, with a snap of your fingers. It doesn't even matter if you have been espousing your opinion for years, or even if you feel very strongly about your choice, that just means your stomach guessed for you and then you stuck to your guns.

Guesses are a necessary part of how we get through life, and even a well reasoned argument contains countless guesses and assumptions. But if your entire opinion is one big guess, and you are off sharing it with the world and trying to persuade others to agree with you, that means you randomly selected answer C on the test of life. You may be right. You may be wrong. But you are passing off a shot in the dark guess as Princeton Review studying material. Worse, you are telling me I'm wrong when I actually sat down and went through the hard work of studying for that test.

 I don't necessarily prefer dry scientific papers. They are usually very limited in what they can talk about, they can't address interesting issues like ethics or culture. The things they can actually research, observe, or prove is actually quite limited. But I appreciate the level of structure and detail with which they document the author's intellectual processes.

 As for the assigned reading, I agree with the authors conclusion and find it interesting. I think their reasoning process had massive holes in it and that it doesn't support their conclusion as well as they might like. But I love the fact that they talked about their thought process and reasoning in detail. Now I can replicate the same scenario in my head, and reach my own conclusions.

 The authors did an experiment to try and understand cognitive arousal in relation to perception of enjoyment, but I feel they approached the issue incorrectly, and I wonder if perhaps they changed their tinting a great deal after they found no correlation between their initial data sets. To me, the authors did not test cognitive arousal, they tested memory. And possibly proved Norman right about spatial mapping. From the start of the paper they said they expected an inverted U curve to describe the relationship between cognitive arousal and enjoyment...

But they only tested two levels of cognitive arousal. Suspicious. I don't think you can plot a curve with two points...

 Furthermore, the two levels required the recognition and recall of four and eight elements respectively. But if I remember my intro to design classes correctly, it's a rather well established fact that humans can really only recall five to seven pieces of information at a time. To me, the drop in performance they observed in the eight element level just proved that eight elements is indeed too many for the average human to recall. Maybe they initially set out knowing this? But the why only two levels?

The game they built was a boxing game. In the four element game, there were two punches, left and right, and two kicks, left and right. The buttons to control these were located in the corners of the num pad, meaning they spatially correlated with the four corners of the human body. Yet the eight element task could not benefit from this form of mapping. Is it any wonder performance decreased?

To me, cognitive complexity requires an understanding of a great many different mechanisms and rules, not the ability to remember what on screen animations require you to push which buttons. There is a reason we call these memory games, and not anything else. I had assumed cognitive complexity was controlling all of the widely disparate functional elements accessible from the drivers seat of a car, and required multi step problem solving. A mental model that is more than one step deep.

In any event, their data and conclusions were still relevant and interesting, provided you tint your lenses a bit to account for how you feel about their methods.  They found their U curve in the relationship between degree of success and enjoyment, and the sweet spot that they describe is wholly relevant and permits a great many extra-games theories to be applied to games.

I also observed that players who played the complex variant rated the game much higher when it was complete than they did while playing it, or than the simple variant players rated it at the end. Achievement and completion are very relevant to us! So there you have it. I felt the authors used some flawed mental steps, but since they described them with such care and detail, I was able to draw my own conclusions and ended up agreeing with their final outcome. I also understand now where the holes in their research might be, and where further research may be necessary. It was a good paper, for all that it was dry.

 Still I cannot help but reflect on the fact that it actually said very little that one could not guess, or that is not already reasonably well known by designers. This is a weakness of most areas of scientific research, which is of course why I stated earlier that I hardly confine my reading pleasure to research papers. Regardless it serves as proof of what we once could only claim to know, and I shall add it to my library of citations. B+

Towards a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture: Janet H. Murray

I originally read this paper last week, but no new readings were assigned this week yet, so I settled down to annotate the reading and then post on it.

I actually have comparatively little to say about the essay, except that I felt it had some valid points. The author primarily took the work of Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald (who wouldn't want a name like 'Merlin'?) and applied it to games.

Because I'm so used to the idea that games are valid, and that play is an integral part of human existence, It's hard for me to give a faithful and detailed account of all the points that Ms. Murray was mentioning.  It's sort of like writing an essay about rain forest conservation. YES it's important and valid, but you sort of already know it all- or enough of it- already.

She makes an argument that play is fundamental not only to the existence of all higher order animals, but that it is one of the primary mechanisms, coupled with humanoid evolution, that lead to a rapid boom in intelligence => which resulted in the quick evolution of modern day human intelligence. So, differences in human play that set it apart from animal play resulted in human intellect.

The primary idea she took from Tomasello has to do with Joint Attentional Scene, which I have heard before in other contexts. Basically, many animals understand cause and effect. They know that if you push something, it can fall down. If they pee on the floor, they get punished. They can also register properties of things they see. A cat sees a fish, and instincts tell the cat that the fish may be good to eat. Often they are also social, and can reason about social causes, states, and relationships. Cause: Human is the boss Effect: Must do what Human says. But only humans will attribute effects to unseen, uncertain causes. For example....

A dog knows it is not allowed to pee on the floor. It knows if it pees, I will shout at it. Cause: pee on floor, Effect: I yell. It may understand other things about this situation. It may think Cause: I'm mean, Effect: I yell. It may understand the property: Floors are not for peeing on. It may even comprehend the more complex idea that Cause: I dislike it when dogs pee on my floor Effect: I will yell if the dog pees on my floor. As a dog, it most certainly understands Cause: I (Alpha) am in charge, Effect: dog (Omega) must please and obey me.

But a human can comprehend the fact that I do not like the smell of urine, or the hassle of cleaning up a mess, or that I like keeping a clean house, or that the carpet the dog peed on is particularly absorbent and difficult to clean odors from, or that I've had a bad day, or that I just got divorced, or that I'm bringing over a friend today to see my home and now my house stinks, or that I'm particularly unhappy about the peeing because it means my dog has a bladder infection and I'm stressed about bringing it to the vet's- even though I love the dog I'm overwhelmed.

This means that the human is aware of other entities as distinct agents, with distinct motivational forces. Humans then pass a great deal of information culturally from one another by understanding eachother's motivations. For example, if a mother's attention is on something, a child's attention will be drawn to that same thing. With this shared focus, the mother can then pass information concerning an object to the child. The importance of this phenomena to human intellect is justified by the fact that apes, if left unexposed to humans, do not exhibit Joint Attention for learning purposes. They do not point to objects, or bring one another to witness items or scene.

In addition, play, she explains through use of various sources, in all animals is a means for expanding one's conceptual understanding of the world, and building a model for how things work. It allows a creature to form mental models for future life use. These mental models may be of social relationships or social forces, or an understanding of one's own physical capacities. But in humans, games exhibit all the traits of a Joint Attentional Scene, which allows extremely complex cultural information to pass from human to human, even among children who have yet to reach speaking age. Play and the Joint Attentional Scene human phenomena combine together into a powerful learning tool.

She also talks about Merlin Donald to address the relationships between play and narrative in games (to address that age old narratology/ludology debate). Donald theorized that culture (in terms of the evolution o f human cognition) had four components, which had evolved chronologically along with our social skills, culture, and capacity for intellect. These are episodic culture (which is the most similar to animal understanding), mimetic culture, mythic culture, and theoretical culture. Episodic and mimetic are largely pre-language. Mythic culture involves the development of language and media, in which everything is explained with a narrative. Theoretical culture involves the abstraction of these narrative into a more formal and logical understanding, and is related to the development of writing and 'education' (as a system).

While I liked reading about Murray's theories and reasoning, and felt that they were very applicable and interesting to further our understanding of play, I usually refrain from permitting a one-dimensional definition of play. I do really like, however, that she explains play as a means by which creatures grow their own intellectual, cultural, and social abilities, not just their physical ones (as is often the case when play is linked to the development of survival skills). In Murray's estimation, play appears to be a medium for learning- and specifically, for learning abstract things (ie, even the dog's ability to understand social relationships, instead of just holding an internal list that looks something like: 1) 'you yelling => you spanking me' 2) 'me peeing=>you yelling'.

And that definition works well enough for her purposes. Productivity in experimental non-productivity, so to speak. But it does sort of violate the heart of play: which is activity for the sake of activity, and not for any external, meaningful reason. The distinction is what makes exercise 'work' and Dance Dance Revolution 'play.' Well, I reserve my judgement, and add her words to my repitoire of video-game-related-understandings.

I should note in one place she swapped definitions of 'myth' in her discussion of mythic culture, and started using it (and mythic culture) to mean real myths, superheroes, larger-than-life, exaggeration, etc; when previously it was defined as the explanation of everything using a story. However, this usage may be supported in Donald's writings, I'm not sure. For now I'll let it slide, as it was really minor and had no impact on her point.

Gender Inclusive Gaming: Expanding the Market - Sheri Grander Ray

Today, instead of doing a blog post on an assigned reading, I'm going to talk about some material I picked up awhile back, but keep referring to constantly because of its usefulness.

When I first picked up Gender Inclusive Game Design, it was with a sneer of contempt. The cover art was kinda lame. The text was printed big and friendly, a few point sizes too large. The publisher is Charles River Media which, when it comes to game design books, is hit and miss.

Let me digress for a moment. There are only a rare few companies that publish books that deal with game design. And they are ALL hit and miss. There are so few books in the industry that you can't really fault these companies, as they're the only ones- period- who are making this material available in book form. On the other hand, a lot of their stuff tends to be fluff.

My Expectations

So, I picked up this book because I'm making a game for women. But I sneered. I sneered because I'm a prideful woman, I'm an alpha, I'm a yang, I'm going to own your butt in Starcraft and then dance on your shattered remains, I'm some kind of Xena Warrior Princes Feminist (in mental personification only, of course, I'm very weak physically ;)) who thinks we all should learn swordfighting and study the hard maths and sciences. I sneered because the very existance of such a book suggested that women and men were different. I sneered because I care about gender equality. I sneered because I hate any any all gender/sex-based cultural dimorphism, and this book was one I had to read because such dimorphism still existed.

I hated the book long before ever opening it. I didn't want to hear about how women weren't gamers, or women didn't like action, or women were opposed to violence. I felt that anything with meat in this book would be all about how women can't handle first person shooters and need nice happy games like Bingo; And if THAT wasn't the topic of the book, then it would just be a bunch of fluff talking about how women are misunderstood and marketing firms need to research them better.


My Life's Mission

Let me be clear: I believe men and women can- statistically- be on equal footing when it comes to video games. That we can both like the same games, play the same games, get the same pleasure out of the games- that games are a battleground on which gender stereotypes need to be battered down so as to cause positive changes in our culture as a whole. So the very IDEA of picking up a book that was going to tell me about how women were different from men was.... painful. The fact that it was written by a woman, who would be perpetuating gender inequality by writing it, made me even angrier.

I Read The Wrong Chapter First

It told me women responded better to more visual and auditorial 'bling,' like sparkles, and weren't capable of managing much on screen at once

I Kept Reading

Let me get something out of the way:
I Love This Book, And Continue To Reference It For Everything I Do

Alright, now that that is over with... I stayed with the book and kept reading it, because it was the only resource I had available. My initial impressions and assumptions were all wrong. This book was great.

The most important thing I have to say about this book is this: For the majority of its chapters, it studied the way women have become due to cultural factors, not the ways in which women naturally are. For example, I was used to hearing people talk about how women just aren't as good as action games as men. The author touched lightly on the evidence that might support such a claim, but also presented an alternative that absolutely blew my mind:

Women aren't bad at games. Women have less exposure to games. Less exposure means less experience. Less experience means an underdevelopment of gaming skill. Statistically, women are going to be worse at video games not because it is inherent to their gender, but because they weren't as well trained in how to play them.

And that simple idea grew in my mind, and reached all over the place, it took up .root in countless crevices, and supplied meanings for questions I'd never even thought to ask.

Why Don't Women Play Games?

Before I read this book, I always assumed that I played video games because video games were fun. Why wouldn't I play them? Now I realize that while this is true, there is a much more important, dominating reason why I play video games: When I was little, my father and grandmother played video games with me. I play games because I was exposed to games. Because they were passed on to me by my relatives, and later they were shared with my peer groups. In fact, I later sought out peer groups that shared the same interests.

And the startlingly obvious realization hit me: Entertainment pastimes are shared as a result of social influences. We are introduced to 'fun' by the people in our lives. Women don't play games, because people do not play games with women.

And yet, we have all these women sitting around, right next door to the hardcore gamers, bored out of their minds. What do women do for fun? Buy shoes?  No, really, think about it.  Men go shopping at a hardware store, or buy themselves new exercise equipment; you can't say that somehow shopping is women's form of fun like sports and games are a man form of fun.

The truth is that both women and men can shop for pleasure (Hardware, sports, exercise, cars, household appliances), preen themselves or their home for pleasure (Axe Body Spray, Hair Gel, Mowing the Lawn on the Riding Law Mower(depends on the man), Taking Care of his Car) , but they have special dedicated activities for fun (Sports and Games) that women have no counterpart for. When's the last time all the women in your neighborhood gathered together in a room to watch women's basketball? If you're like most women, the answer is: never.  Why?

Did your dad play catch with you as a child? Mine did.

The first group of human beings to get video games? Engineers. Engineers are predominantly? Male. Engineers are peers with? Men. Engineers pass their luxury time activities down to? Sons. Sons are peers with? Boys.  Rinse, Repeat.

Women don't play games because men do not play games with women. Or at least not early enough in their lives for it to matter.

This Book Is Old

This book was printed in 2004, and that's why I love it. It was printed before the casual gaming boom, when there existed no games for anyone even remotely of the female gender except for games bathed in gratuitous amounts of pink, and aimed towards six year olds.  Now-a-days when people want to talk about female gamers, they jump immediately to casual gaming, and say that men are hardcore gamers and women are casual gamers, men like action and women like sparkles, or something of that nature.

But this book remembers what it was like before casual gaming. This book explains what the situation was, so that you can understand why casual gaming exploded: It was the first time anyone designed games specifically for non-gamers, and made them easily available to women who were only willing to give the games a few seconds to entertain them before throwing them away, due to lack of previous familiarity or trust in the medium.

And if you look at it that way, you can see that it won't be particularly difficult now for women to close the gap into mainstream gaming, if someone designs the proper games to lead them there, if proper games arise that are passed through their peer groups, and end up in their hands, and deliver entertainment fast enough for them to commit to sticking around for awhile.  You can also see that clearly women needed something fun to do just as much as men did, and it's hardly a stretch to say that they can enjoy heart-pumping thrills that action games deliver.

I mean, women go to theme parks the same as men, and ride on roller coasters the same as men, right? And watch the same horror movies as men, right? This book answers that question. YES, women can enjoy action games, because YES women like thrills, but to get them into gaming, you need to attend to their game-skill limitations in today's present culture, and reel them in them through ease-of-use and word-of-mouth.  You need to infiltrate their social circle. You need to let them know you're for them.

I Could Go On For Hours

This book is chalk full of interesting insights, and I'd be hard pressed to enumerate everything it said and everything I learned from it. I keep it checked out of the school library and reference it constantly. It's not a gender inclusive game design bible or anything, but it gets me thinking. It presents problems, to which I can dream up the solutions.

 It helps me understand my gender. Instead of me getting frustrated with other women and just trying to make the games I like out of spite for gender norms, instead I'm able to see where other women are coming from, understand what I need to provide them, comprehend what they enjoy and what they fear, and figure out how to help them find my product.

I'm no longer a designer legislating what I want on to my audience. I'm no longer a serious game designer, forcing my message on you. Instead I'm a designer who can figure out how to give women something fun, how to make games their go-to for entertainment, and whose message will emerge naturally from the resulting games instead of ruining them. This book made me a better designer. It's not just my idea. It's my idea on your terms, with your needs, with your wants, with your limitations, with your strengths, in the way you want it, in the way you'll be able to appreciate it/enjoy it best.

A Couple Things I Learned

I learned that games are subconsciously designed to appeal to men; that the predominant design paradigms are paradigms that ward off women and draw in men (most of which happen without the designer even realizing it). I learned exactly what hyper-sexualisation is, and what to do about it.

I learned some facets of women that are partially nature, partially nurture: women tend to be better at parsing large amounts of static visual information than parsing small amounts of mobile visual information. That women tend to seek out motivation, explanation, planning, and compromise when it comes to conflict resolution, and therefore cannot be motivated by the sheer testosterone/estrogen rush of pitched combat as easily as men. They don't hate action or violence: but they want to use their brains and social capacities in order to solve problems, and they want to be told their motivation for enacting violence.

Mostly I knew that most casual gamers were women, but it never occurred to me that I could apply that fact in reverse. I mean this: when you think of women, you skew their skillset away from hardcore gamer towards casual gamer. To me that was big. You could stop saying "Women like this and that and the other" and start saying "Casual gamers like this that and the other, and since women skew towards casual gaming, you can apply lots of casual gaming principals to games-for-women- as long as you realize what you're doing- and achieve good results." Framing things that way took away all the negativity I felt towards Gender Inclusive Gaming. I understood for the first time that I wasn't designing my game for a gender, but for a newbie. I was making a gateway drug game.

I learned that the reason women have trouble independently penetrating the games industry, without peer introduction, has to do with social power and conflict-resolution tendencies. In most cultures, men will use aggressive behaviors to establish social dominance in a setting or conversation (including sexually offensive jokes). Not only will women not use these techniques, but they will typically either stop talking so as to resolve the conflict, become upset and offended, be the 'adult' of the situation and refuse to argue, or simply remove themselves from the aggressive environment to get away from the negative stimulus. Furthermore, gender stereotypes being what they are, because women are expected to be softer (or perhaps more mature?) than men, they are looked down upon if they employ the same aggressive behaviors as men.

This causes a migration of women from male-dominated environments to ones with less men, or at least where social aggressiveness is lower. For example: Women like action-adventure, but they tend not to display it in the same way as men. Not only do they tend to migrate towards representatives of the genre with better story lines, but they tend to latch on to unique representatives of the genre, or express it in different forums. Fanfiction.net is over 80% female, and the vast majority of fanfictions submitted to the site are submitted to fantasy, sci-fi, action, horror, or adventure genres. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and World of Warcraft all have large fandoms. 50 First Dates- A romantic comedy in an area you'd expect women to be posting in- has almost none.  Fanfiction is an area where women found so few men, that they were able to step in and take it over as their own.

(This phenomena can be seen in other industries. For example, women latched on to Anime and Manga when they were introduced to American culture. Anime is a cartoon, and Manga is a comic book: but you still see that traditional cartoons and comic books tend to be for male dominated audiences. Women latched on to a new area, rather than trying to penetrate into the male-dominated one. Less women also tend to play first person shooters, which is a function not only of the lack of motivation for violence, but also possibly of the fact that shooters are often optimally played with headsets, where women might experience more sexual harassment as a result of revealing their genders, and furthermore the character avatars are almost always male))

I also learned that culturally, women are smaller risk takers. They prefer to know everything they need to know ahead of time. If they feel that they cannot obtain this knowledge, they are less likely to try in the first place. Women like to have a plan; men are happier to jump in head first.  Casual Games mitigate problems caused by this, first by placing games in a safe environment (out of the arcade and into either the personal low-end computer, or the mobile device) where they will receive less social criticism in the event of failure, and where expenditures are low; secondly by lowering the consequences of failure in game; and thirdly by ensuring the controls are so simple that the woman can understand them within a very short time span, and is therefore willing to fool around with them.

Lastly I learned that the computer has historically been viewed by women as a productivity tool, and that programs designed for productivity, non-gamers and casual gamers tend to require only one capability of their audience: the ability to left-click.

Playability in Action Videogames: A Qualitative Design Model - Carlo Fabricatore, Miguel Nussbaum, Ricardo Rosas

I liked this article. I liked this article so much that I actually don't even have much to say about it, that's just how much I liked it. It's like when an English teacher gives you back a paper; if it's covered in red ink you did a bad job, but if the page is blank and pristine you did a good job.

What Was It About?

Let's see, well, let me give you a basic synopsis of this article before I tell you why it was so awesome. It was published here as I believe part of a PHD Thesis, in 2002, in Human Computer Interaction (Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)

It's written by two computer scientists, one in Italy and on in Chile, and a psychologist in Chile. Most of the research appears to have been conducted in Chile. The authors explain in their abstract that the purpose of their work was to provide a game design reference. They wanted it to stick closely to real player preferences, and they used a qualitative but empirically rooted research process to find out what those preferences were. Since the scope was so broad, the article limited itself to studying the playability of a wide variety of action games; due to the dearth of female participants, their sample was entirely male.

Why Did I Love It?

It was well written. The writing was smooth, natural, and moved from point to point effortlessly. Each point was contained within a paragraph for easy reading. The paper was phenomenally structured. It was unambiguously clear. At no moment in time was I ever forced to reread a single sentence. A table of contents, an excellent abstract and conclusion, and various diagrams kept the scope, purpose, and point of each page, each paragraph, each sentence clear. This paper was a PHD research paper for goodness sake, and weighing in at a whopping 54 pages. Research papers can be some of the driest, most convoluted, jargon-filled, painful things in the world to read. This paper was smooth, pleasurable, and informative sailing.

One thing I hate about some academic papers is the way they meander around in a cesspool of opinions and implied subtitles. They're not clear. They feel like you just stepped into a room in the middle of a conversation. Without a full knowledge of their context, each text can deliver a multitude of widely divergent readings (Like, for example, did you realize I was using the art-historical definition of 'text' and 'reading' right there? No? Oh sorry then, you just walked in on the context of my life, but I'm writing an academic paper so I can be all coy and you can totally miss my point and that's your fault because you should be more informed on this subject before I'm willing to communicate ideas with you. ... Ya know or I could just briefly mention that Roland Barthes "From Work to Text" was required reading in my Art History Course and I thought his ideas were needlessly vague, in-the-clouds, and inapplicable, especially when read back-to-back with Foucault, who wrote pretty clearly and powerfully on power theory (which you may have seen referenced when discussing class, race, or feminism), but I digress!)

These kinds of papers are potentially useful (Oh my god I'm about to whip out HCI terminology) but they are very low in terms of usability, because they are not orchestrated/designed/written in such a way as to be easily used by the audience that wants to/needs to/could/should/would read them. They are more like fragments of an infinitely long Facebook conversation, and heaven forbid you not have access to the context ahead of time.

But Playability, the article I'm blogging on? Playability was clear as crystal. In the words of my English teacher (who was surely quoting someone else, and whom I regularly ignore), all papers should begin with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. In the introduction, you tell them what you're going to tell them. In the body, you tell them. In the conclusion, you tell them what you just told them. Playability followed this convention. It sat down and laid out all of its cards. It explained its purpose, its motivation, its layout, its limitations. It laid bare its entire internal structure. On thorough examination, I found that its internal structure was so thoroughly and beautifully logical, that it could have only come from the magnificent union of a computer guy, a psychologist, and a dedicated editor. I might as well have been reading the physical manifestation of Object Oriented Programming;  Each section, each paragraph, was beautifully concise, encapsulated, functional, easy.

The argument as a whole was sound. The paper outlined a problem, explained its purpose, justified its means, described its process, proffered its findings, and enumerated its own shortcomings. Few to no faults were to be found (and I scoured, I'm a perfectionist like that.)

Furthermore, the authors did something phenomenal. Every time they sought to bring in theories, frameworks, or other cite-able information to support their case, they provided a brief and concise explanation of where that information had come from (like importing in a .h file as an interface! Ho-ho my comp sci metaphors are all over the place today! I can't help it, my more artsy metaphors aren't as useful in such rigid and structured papers!). This immediately set it leagues above other papers in my estimation, as I was never forced to pause in my reading to research other people, or try to decide which of their multitudinous theories the author was referencing at any given point in time. I could always check them out later, if I were interested.

What Was It's Structure?
The paper began with an abstract, a description of its authors, and a table of contents. The table of contents were organized down to three tiers. The upper most tier read: Introduction, Method, Results, Conclusions.

The Introduction was split into a description of the problem, preexisting information on the topic, and scoping the research that the paper was now offering.

The Method was split into a description of the framework, an explanation of data collection, and then a break down of the data analysis based on the framework (and it want point by point, in excruciatingly precise and elegant detail)

The Results were divided according to main and sub categories of findings. When I turned to look at the results, I found that the authors had organized their findings according to a categorical tree. For every given sub-category, the authors had supplied a diagram to illustratively describe the current page's place in the grand scheme of the research. It was a beautiful technique for helping the reader to visualize, track, remember, and parse their enormous quantity of data. Their entire paper could have been broken apart and accessed as part of a tree, with each section belonging to a node of that tree. T'was glorious.

The Conclusion was divided into the relevance of the work, and the boundaries of the research and perspectives for future studies. The paper made no bones about its own limitations, but offered itself as-nevertheless- one of the best and only tools available for its purpose.


What Was It's Content?
The authors briefly touched on existing design theories. Some of these theories had been offered forward by theorists working in edutainment (Malone was mentioned, I'm going to shelve his name for future reference since he appeared twice in such rapid succession :D), and others had been offered by entertainment industry professionals (They used Rouse- not because he was the most enlightening, but because he summarized everyone else the best ;) I always found Rouse a little dry).

The paper then suggested that the data in the first category was flawed due to it being too-specific and not representative of mainstream video games. The second category was flawed due to lack of empirical methodology. This is important! You could argue all day, either that industry professionals have a better sense of the truth than detached theorists due to personal experience, or that theorists have a better sense of the truth due to a better sense of perspective-> This paper resolves the conflict between the approaches by merging them. Walla. Lovely!

The authors described and justified their methodology in excruciating detail. They left nothing vague. They diagrammed samples of the exact and highly detailed and structural way they had broken down qualitative data, conducted their analysis, formed categories- even the way they broke down any given sentence or determined the relevance of each noun and verb to the overall game- was covered in thorough detail. They made sure that not only was their research repeatable, but that it could be used again in other contexts, or to extend the original research forward, with absolutely no ambiguity or confusion. Perfect. Perfectissimo.

Then the authors described their findings. Their findings seem absolutely obvious to a tried-and-true gamer (the author's concluding sentences even suggested that the work had more value in teaching design, academia, and communicating with non-game-professionals, than in boosting the performance of professionals) and yet at the same time seeing them laid out in detail provided structure to what game designers could always sense, but never before explicitly justify. The paper provided a list of prescriptions and recommendations for ensuring the play-ability of an action game, which could then be used by a designer as a mental checklist (not an exhaustive checklist, but more of a bare-bones, "Did I overlook anything really important and easy to miss?" sort of thing.), or to argue a case with non-gamers about why certain features were crucial to a game's success.

Their results, as a compilation, are an exhaustive resource on the narrow subject they cover. They could be used for an exhaustive playability analysis of almost any action game on the market- then or now- and be used as a reference point for understanding a game's successes and failures.

What I Got Out of It
The game I'm designing is a bit of a hybrid; It's not exactly an action game, but it should pave the way for casual gamers to migrate into the action genre. Reading these recommendations not only helped me think about what to do in my game, but also to think about my game in the context of the action genre. More importantly, as I'm going to be expected to carry out a lot of research in the near future, the paper was absolutely wonderful about taking a methodology framework and applying it to games for the purposes of research. I can use this paper as a reference, an inspiration- heck, even a guideline (if I wanted)- for how to conduct my own research. Previous to reading it, I was very hesitant about how to go about collecting my own qualitative data concerning video games. Now I have a much better idea of where to start, and where to go.

I Give This Paper an A++. Well done, Authors. Well Done.
(I could have given them an A#, but it wouldn't have been as trite/clever/whatever.) They are better writers than I have read in many a moon! They're certainly better at technical writing than I am- I wander all over the place! Good Job, Authors. I enjoyed this reading.

Alan Cooper and the Goal Directed Design Process - Hugh Dubberly

This paper was written as Hugh Dubberly's explanation of Alan Cooper and Alan Cooper's Goal Directed Design Process.  It receives a Gaming Imperatrix Thumbs Up.

Style and Contents

This paper was written in an instructive/explanatory/educational format. It was smooth reading even though it contained a great deal of useful insights, and was generally a pleasurable paper to read. The paper is structured with a page of introductory material.

It introduces the reader to Alan Cooper, who he is, what he cares about, what his goals are, what is background was, and what his driving forces were, which let's the reader get a good sense of where the paper is going to go.

After this, it highlights in bold the five steps of his goal-directed design process. In each section, it writes in italics the old methodology, that this bold step replaces. Then it explains the reasoning for the approach in plain text.

After this phase, he goes into a further study of the goal-directed design process, homing in on useful details. For example, the Designer + Design Communicator core that Alan Cooper advocated building teams around, the evolution of the design process and the necessity of putting design before programming, the different dimensions of design, an input/output table for the software development process concerning persons on the team, and then a final overview of Goal Directed Design and a methodology for how to build a successful product by using GDD. The paper is covered in graphics, tables, and charts, all of which are fairly easy to synthesize.

Interesting Observations
I liked this paper, and learned a bunch of interesting little tidbits from it. Although I knew that software development had gone from lone-wolf programmers up to an elaborate design process, I hadn't thought of it in discrete steps before, or realized that the step we are currently unseating (or have just recently unseated) was a phase of doing design and code work at the same time.

I noted with interest that Alan cooper (or Hugh Dubberly, I'm not sure which) considered Art and Design to be more-or-less the same thing! This was a useful insight for me, because I am interested in being a game designer, not a game artist. In the movie industry, movies usually always have distinct producer, director, art, and technical roles. In an analogy, I want to be the director for a video game. I've been coming to the realization over the years that this role is still working to manifest itself clearly in the industry. One would hardly think of shooting a movie without a director, but for some reason it seems okay to build a game without one? Nonsense!

I have also been listening to how gaming companies are structured, and have noticed that the role of director/designer frequently gets mistaken for or folded in to other roles. Sometimes it is the lead programmer, other times it is the 'Creative Lead.' Now I understand why anyone would fold 'Designer' into 'Creative Lead,' as there is a theoretical precedent for it!

Hugh explains- and I think his phrasing/Alan's idea is superb- that there is a conflict of interest between Programmers and Designers. Programmers want something to be easy to program, and Designers want it to be easy to use. If you use that means of thinking, then obviously there must also be a conflict of interest between Designers and Artists. But the conflict of interest is deeper than just how much work a person has to do.

A Programmer has a conflict of interest with a Designer because the Programmer wants something to have good, functional code that he/she is proud of. He wants to show off his programming. His programming becomes his center of focus, instead of design. Likewise, the artist's art becomes the center of focus for them, instead of design. Design- the composition of all of the game's various interrelated elements, from the data gathered by market researchers for use in HCI, to programming, to art, to user requirements, to producer requirements- that composition job is a job all in its own, and should be kept free from any other job that might try to claim it.

I love the idea of pairing a Designer- or really any job- with a dedicated communicator. Usually the people who have technical skills are not necessarily the best communicators!

I enjoyed looking at how the individual rules on the software development process interrelate based on the input/output chart, but some of my favorite graphics were about Cooper's People/Technology/Buisness model. At my old school, Architecture and Design were of course grouped together, and our Games students presented their final projects with Archtiecture students.

I agree that they share many attributes- although I feel Architecture is more closely related to Level Design and Installation Art than to Game Design as a whole. In the end, Architecture is about designing spaces, and the usability of spaces; but Game Design also requires Interior Decorators to make the art, Physicists to make gravity work, and a Director to make sure they're all working on the same project.

I also like how the paper compared Cooper's specific software-design model to the original model and derivations thereof. He showed us the abstract version (Desirability/Capability/Visibility) with its abstract-y words next to a more functional and applicable version, to show how the abstract version could be instanced into a functional model.  Cooper's explanation of Apple, Microsoft, and Novell using this system extended its ease-of-use even further.

All in all a pleasurable read. A+