Leveraging Role Play to Explore Software and Game Development Process Adrienne Decker, David Simkins School of Interactive Games and Media and RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC) Rochester Institute of Technology adrienne.decker@rit.edu, dwsigm@rit.edu

Game Development Processes “Software engineering for game developers” Emphasis on communication skills and pitch process [FIE 2014 and FIE 2015]

Fall 2015 Addition – Role Play Often used to simulate practices in the world in an environment where consequences can be mitigated (military, mock trials, business, psychology). Software engineering process and practice can take months or years We have 15 weeks Role play can allow us to create simulation of situations where consequences can be mitigated, or even forced.

Role Play in the Computing Classroom Engage the student as the user of a technology to understand requirements of the system or how the user would see it (HCI course) [15]. Role play and CRC cards to introduce object-oriented concepts to students [16]. Enterprise Resource Planning course using Second Life as mechanism for enabling the role play and interactions where students are employed by a fictional company [18]. Project management course uses online system for simulation of students acting as project manager and seeing consequences of their decisions [24, 25, 26, 27]. Requirements engineering course using students to play the roles of both the customer and developer to see the multiple perspectives of the process [28].

Semester Narrative The students are now employee-owners of an independent game studio. The original owners have left with products in production and the employees have now taken ownership of the company. The company has enough money to stay afloat until the end of the calendar year (the end of the semester), but must get products out the door before then to ensure financial viability into the new year.

Emerging Themes Before class: research trends in game industry In class: Identify trends applicable to company’s new products Constraints: Budget - no budget for the company to invest in new software or hardware Time – release by end of the year (3 months) Skill constraints of the personnel they had on hand – the skills of the students in the class

Business Issues Discussion around business law and business practices Incorporating a business Should we change the structure of our company Investors and raising capital Investor pitches

Marketing Products currently in production (former student projects) Before class: Familiarize themselves with the products In-class: Create a marketing campaign for the current products with the idea that a successful launch of these products sets up the launch of the new products in production and the success of the company. Where to market How to market

Software Development Methodologies Students presented on various software development methodologies (waterfall, scrum, agile) to try to convince the studio to adopt that methodology After all presentations, group discussion about which methodology would be adopted by the studio going forward

Legal Crisis In class students were presented a scenario about a legal concern for the company and needed to craft appropriate responses Intellectual Property issue with product currently in production and ready for release Contract and scope creep Possible security breach and a competitor is advertising release of a game very similar to one currently in production

Next Great Idea Ideation and pitches for the next products to go into production

Postmortems Postmortem presentation about the current products in the pipeline Engaged in a group discussion about which projects should move forward and which projects need to be pulled Risk/gap analysis on the company’s product base to help make the decisions Students determined how to move personnel from one project to another based on the cuts

Observations Students were positive in their opinion of the inclusion of the role play in the curriculum Open-ended nature of the role play Social interaction that came with working in teams No majority opinion on which interventions had been most effective Instructor’s level of engagement was a significant factor in success of intervention Reinforces Vold and Yayilgan’s work [17] Universally encouraged our inclusion of these exercises in future iterations of the course

Future Directions New exercises (more business and legal, more focused software methodology, more deliverables) Debriefs Information about what students learned from activities explicitly Video recording of in-class exercises Analysis of video recordings