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Game Design Tools: Can They Improve Game Design Practice? Game Design Tools : Can They Improve Game Design Practice? Katharine Neil To cite this version: Katharine Neil. Game Design Tools : Can They Improve Game Design Practice?. Signal and Image processing. Conservatoire national des arts et metiers - CNAM; Flinders university of South Australia, 2015. English. NNT : 2015CNAM1025. tel-01344638 HAL Id: tel-01344638 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01344638 Submitted on 12 Jul 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers Ecole Doctorale Informatique, Télécommunications et Electronique Groupe ILJ - Equipe MIM - Laboratoire CEDRIC THESE présentée par : Katharine NEIL soutenue le : 18 Décembre 2015 pour obtenir le grade de : Docteur du Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers Discipline/ Spécialité : Informatique / Multimédia Game Design Tools: Can They Improve Game Design Practice? These dirigee par: NATKIN Stéphane Professeur, CEDRIC, Cnam, Paris SWALWELL Melanie Professeur (Associate Professor), Flinders University, Australie DE VRIES Denise Maitre de conférences (Senior Lecturer), Flinders University, Australie Rapporteurs: ESTRAILLIER Pascal Professeur, Université de La Rochelle CHAMPION Erik Professeur, Curtin University, Australie Examinateur: LE PRADO Cécile Maitre de conférences, CEDRIC, Cnam, Paris ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Stephane Natkin, Dr Melanie Swalwell and Dr Denise De Vries for their guidance and support, as well as their patience in the face of the linguistic, geographical and administrative challenges posed by my cotutelle candidature. In addition, I am grateful for the comraderie of the students and staff of the ILJ team at the Cnam, who have been very welcoming to me and always forthcoming with stimulating discussions and advice. I am grateful to my friends Marion Tillous and Xavier Brisbois for correcting my terrible French, and to Christian McCrea for taking the time to read and give me feedback on my work. Finally, I would like to thank the creators of game design tools (particularly those of you who patiently responded to my questions, including Joris Dormans, Mark Nelson, Adam Smith and Antonios Liapis). I will not have understood your tools as well as you do yourselves, and despite my best efforts I can't guarantee that I've done your work justice. But please know that I believe in you and what you’re doing. You are the bold ones, taking on one of the most difficult and important, yet little known and frequently misunderstood, challenges in games research. Game designers need you, whether they know it yet or not. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... i Table of contents .................................................................................................................................. i List of figures ....................................................................................................................................... iii List of tables ........................................................................................................................................ vi Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. viii Résumé ................................................................................................................................................. x 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 2. The process and activities of game design ................................................................................... 5 3. Game design as a design practice ............................................................................................... 26 4. Game design tools ...................................................................................................................... 52 5. Research questions and method ................................................................................................ 84 6. Overview of case studies .......................................................................................................... 104 7. Observation & analysis part 1: The form of representation .................................................... 121 8. Observation & analysis part 2: The act of representing ........................................................... 145 9. Observation and analysis part 3: Integrating game design tools into practice ........................ 182 10. Progressimo: A progression design tool ............................................................................... 206 11. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 221 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 226 Ludography ...................................................................................................................................... 240 Appendix .......................................................................................................................................... 241 Résumé étendu en français ............................................................................................................. 259 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Newkirk's design process model showing a gradual shift from analysis to synthesis (Dubberly 2004) ................................................................................................................................. 31 Figure 2: Design morphology showing alternating periods of convergence and divergence, within a broader trend towards convergence (Dubberly 2004) ...................................................................... 32 Figure 3: Flow diagram showing relationships between analysis, synthesis, and divergence and convergence (Dubberly 2004) ............................................................................................................ 35 Figure 4: An example diagram built by Koster using his own notation ............................................. 62 Figure 5: A sub-system of a game modelled in Petri nets by Araújo and Roque (2009) ................... 64 Figure 6: Bura’s diagram of the card game Blackjack using his own diagramming method (Bura 2006) .................................................................................................................................................. 64 Figure 7: BIPED tool (A.M. Smith, M.J. Nelson, & M. Mateas, 2010) ................................................ 66 Figure 8: A Machinations diagram showing the trade and travel system from the game Elite. ....... 67 Figure 9: Tanagra a “reactive level editor”. ....................................................................................... 68 Figure 10: The Sentient Sketchbook ................................................................................................... 69 Figure 11: A Ludoscope mission diagram ........................................................................................... 70 Figure 12: Annotated screenshot of Articy:Draft .............................................................................. 72 Figure 13: The progression plan component of Refraction's tool’s progression planning interface 74 Figure 14: A screenshot from The Casimir Effect ............................................................................ 107 Figure 15: A screenshot from South Sea Trouble ............................................................................ 112 Figure 16: Screenshot from Loot the Room using placeholder art.................................................. 115 Figure 17: Screenshot of Ultraworm ................................................................................................ 117 Figure 18: Fragment from the narrative plan for The Particle Who Knew Too Much, using Articy:Draft ....................................................................................................................................... 123 Figure 19: Machinations diagram modelling relatively high level, abstract elements as resources .......................................................................................................................................................... 125 Figure 20: A Machinations diagram containing so much detail that readability becomes an issue .......................................................................................................................................................... 131 Figure 21: Model of Ultraworm made in Machinations for the purpose of game balancing ......... 132 Figure 22: A Machinations model of Ultraworm at a higher abstraction level than in Figure 21. .
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