Engagement and Motivation in Game Development Processes A BECTA-Funded Research Project Andrew Williams

Agenda 1. The BECTA project 2. Project plan 3. Interview design 4. Interview results 5. Future work

The Project When kids are given educational games to play at school, they are happy to play. But they don’t play them outside the classroom. – Why not? – What do professional game developers do that educational game developers do not? “Spend £2million on developing each game” ?

Getting Started “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” – Paul Hollins got us the initial contact – We received a fairly open brief from BECTA – A very short-term project (too short?) – We submitted a bid for the money Too ambitious!? – We heard very quickly that we had won the contract

The Team Louise Blenkharn Phil Carlisle Dr John Charlton (PLS) Paul Hollins (CETIS) Prof. Rob Ranyard (PLS) Andrew Williams

Project Plan Project Start – January 25 th 2005 – Do a literature review – Design and distribute a questionnaire – Design an interview script and conduct six interviews – Produce an interim report – Produce a final report Project End – April 15 th 2005 (!!)

Project Plan Our project plan was crazy – Mea culpa! We weren’t helped by GDC, which took place in early March 2005 – Most of our interviewees decamped to California! In particular, we tried to do too much – Questionnaire suffered

Interview Design Lots of help from PLS team members – Rob Ranyard, John Charlton Our interview script was pretty good It’s easier to create a good interview than it is to create a good questionnaire – We think Our interview is very open-ended – Follow-up questions are critical – No opportunity for follow-ups in questionnaires

Interview Design – Terminology Terminology was problematic throughout the project EngagementFunMotivation

Interview Design Terminology solution: – We asked around the subject – We guided people to discuss the issues around motivation and engagement, without mentioning the terms themselves – We asked people for their definitions of motivation and engagement at the end of the interview – We tried to avoid using terms like “fun”

Interview Results Five companies were interviewed – Out of six companies who initially agreed to take part The other company was involved in some serious restructuring and we didn’t hear back from them Participants were very interested in our research In general, games developers are keen on engaging with academia – The interviews were a great deal of fun for us as researchers

Interview Results We divided our results into two categories: 1. Development process – What do game developers do to make sure that their games are engaging and motivating? 2. Game characteristics – What characteristics must a game have to be engaging and motivating?

Findings – Development Process Game development is far more professional than we expected – Canonical design documentation – The importance of milestones Which form the basis for the payment schedule – Sales and marketing are well understood by everyone we interviewed

Findings – Development Process The team is very important; the benefits of having 20 – 80 passionate gamers all working together – “Synergy” Intuition (sometimes team intuition) is very important  – Perhaps the biggest problem for educational game developers

Prototyping is very important, particularly in pre-production – Difficult to do properly, however, even for our biggest participant company Assessment of games during production can be rather ad hoc in places – Developers would like to do more Findings – Development Process

Findings - Game Characteristics Goals and rewards are still the major technique for designers – Early levels should be comparatively easy … and should feature spectacular rewards – Two designers talked about “meta-games” based on the goal/reward/feedback structure

Findings - Game Characteristics A new technique, mentioned by three participants: – Show everything at the start and then take it away again Give the player something to aim for – EA’s idea

Immersion – Audio is considered to be as important as visuals for increasing immersion Maybe superb visuals are just taken for granted? – Licensing (eg James Bond, FIFA etc) Makes it easier to get the player immersed in the game – Licence characteristics – Licence value system Findings - Game Characteristics

Future Work Re-do the questionnaire Write up the work for publication (assuming BECTA agrees) Two papers: 1. Summarising the work we have done here 2. Comparing our work with academic theories and discussing the terminology problem