Trying Jeff Patton's Opportunity Canvas

Welcome to National Game Design Month! In this first related blog post, I'll share a few observations about my experience using Jeff Patton's Opportunity Canvas to frame a game design idea. I heard about this technique recently when watching Jamie Winsor's 2019 GDC talk on user story mapping. He includes the technique as something he has found valuable for game developers.

I have not fully committed to a NaGaDeMon project yet, but my inspiration to make a short-form RPG to teach about Mob Programming was recently reignited. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a two-part blog post (1, 2) about how I used Larson's Mob Programming RPG in my CS222 class last Spring. I recorded some ideas at the time about how I think Larson's approach falls short of my particular needs. I am at the point in the semester now where I have just introduced this game to my students, and the results were roughly similar. The differences comprise a story for another time. For now, I am considering whether making my own, similar RPG would be a good NaGaDeMon project, especially considering that this can clearly "count" as scholarly productivity as well.

I thought that Patton's Opportunity Canvas might be a good way to determine whether this direction would be fruitful or not. The short answer is that I don't think the Opportunity Canvas exercise gave me any insights I didn't have previously. It is very business-oriented. I was able to interpret things like "business impact" as something more like "departmental learning outcomes," but it still feels like a bit of a stretch. I completed this as a solo exercise, but it is clearly designed to be collaborative, so it's possible I am missing something there as well.

The part that most interested me, and the part that was rather useful, was the identification of both the problems being solved and the metrics for success. In my case, I know I can make my own Mob Programming RPG, but exactly what problems am I trying to solve? I came up with three: streamlining Larson's game into something more appropriate for my audience, students not having good models of collaboration, and faculty not having something they can easily incorporate into a course. For the metrics, local adoption is an easy measurement, but it also made me think through how I might design a study around this project and try to get it published. I also considered that I could use my YouTube channel to talk a little about it and track views, likes, and comments there. Of course, there's always Google Analytics, which can be tracked before or after, say, a conference presentation.

It strikes me that, for my purposes, all this tool is really pointing me toward is good design. In particular, it matches what I often tell my students: have goals, do something to meet those goals, and then see if those goals have been met. It seems obvious, but I see people at the university regularly missing the first and last steps. That is, it is much more common for people to propose solutions than to articulate what problems they are trying to solve, and despite the "culture of assessment" that we're supposed to be growing, it's rare to see useful metrics that haven't been fudged in some way. That also is a story for another day.

I have a little time this morning to think about my research, and this project idea fills the bill. If I don't end up going in this direction, I still have two other project ideas up my sleeve, both being tabletop games. I have a proverbial mountain of assets that I've acquired from Humble Bundle and Epic's giveaways that I would love to tinker with in UE5, but I don't think this November will be the time for that.