Notes from the inaugural Game Preproduction class: How Do I? vs. Should I?

As I mentioned back in January, I am teaching our CS390 Game Preproduction class for the first time this semester. I have a small class of students who already know me, and so it's been a real pleasure to teach. It has not been without some hiccups, though, and I need to start capturing some of them here on my blog. This will help me to understand and contextualize what happened and also give me an archive of observations for future improvement.

From February 7 through February 14 was set aside for the goal of making as many prototypes as possible so that the students could form teams and focus in on goals by February 16. That date marks 15% of the project time, which Lemarchand recommends as the extent of the ideation phase. On February 2, I gave the students the option of how they wanted to be held accountable to this goal. Together, we agreed that each student should present one prototype on each of the three upcoming classes (Feb 7, 9, and 14), and that at least one of these must be a paper prototype and one of these must be a digital prototype. One of the reasons for the latter constraint is that our previous presentations of paper prototypes showed that many students did not understand how best to use this medium. 

Upon returning to the reference text, I also realized that the students did not seem to understand the distinction between a playful prototype and a paper prototype, and this gives me something specific to improve next time. Students brought in playful physical artifacts and experiences that were enjoyable in various ways, but they did answer any design questions about video games. For example, it is fun to move a ship around and make shooting noises, but this doesn't tell us anything about a particular design for a shmup, or it is fun to run across the room and try not to be caught by classmates, but this doesn't tell us anything particular about a stealth or action game. The distinction between playful prototypes and paper prototypes is clear in the reading but was not evident from my students' presentations.

While watching students present their digital prototypes, I realized that there was another important distinction to make: the difference between How do I? and Should I? A lot of the students who showed digital work were really asking the question of whether they could accomplish some design goal, but this question is not fruitful for making decisions about video game direction. It should be a given that anything one has seen in a videogame before is something that they can make, given enough time. And yet, even I fell victim to this during our in-class digital prototyping workshop, when I tried to see if I could make a weapon-switching shmup in an hour. The real question to answer with a prototype at this stage is, "Should I pursue this idea?" Would a shmup where you can swap weapons be fun? Yes, of course it will. That is well trod design territory. Sketch the weapons and Bob's your uncle. (Well, he's my uncle, anyway.)

On one hand, it's easy to say that I should simply push students toward the question of whether a design is worth pursuing rather than whether they can engineer it. On the other hand, Lemarchand makes it clear that one of the first steps in the process is to learn your tools... but my students, by and large, are not very good at their tools yet. Some have been gamedev hobbyists, others have taken an elective in game programming, and others have no experience making videogames at all. When facing your own ignorance about how such things are done, it is natural to be slow and to need to tinker. It is not clear how to resolve this conflict. Next year, as our curriculum matures, more of my CS majors will have game programming experience; however, then we will also have students from other production majors coming in, and I suspect we will run into the same kind of second-order ignorance.

Rereading the text, I was reminded that Lemarchand provides a set of questions that a prototype should answer. His list comes right before the aforementioned playful-physical-digital distinction. Having the students frame their work within these questions may be another important step to improving the process. Adding a reporting layer may look like it is making them do more work, but I think, if it is done right, that the questions will help the students do less and better work. For reference, Lemarchand's questions (from page 23) are:

• What player activity am I prototyping?
• What game verbs am I investigating?
• What kind of experience does this player activity produce?
• What tone or mood does the player activity have?
• What interesting gameplay and story things can I do with this player activity right now?
• How much could I do with this player activity if I had the time to devise different situations and scenarios in which to use it?
• What question am I trying to answer with this prototype? (Emphasis in original.)