Request for help with PhD research survey for NWU
Hi All,
Jacques Barnard is a PhD candidate at the North West University (Potchefstroom Campus), South Africa. His research is on location based games and the their development. He needs game developers, game designers and game researchers to aid in a quick assessment to help verify characteristics of location based games that he has identified.
Could you please complete the assessment and ask other game developers, game designers and game researchers to aid in completing the online survey?
It should not take longer than 2 minutes.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S-0XcYJqJbUwgsdR-5fcEpQZrzFzQqDey3H-uaeRMl0/viewform
We can contact him at jacques.barnard@nwu.ac.za with comments and questions.
best
hanli
Jacques Barnard is a PhD candidate at the North West University (Potchefstroom Campus), South Africa. His research is on location based games and the their development. He needs game developers, game designers and game researchers to aid in a quick assessment to help verify characteristics of location based games that he has identified.
Could you please complete the assessment and ask other game developers, game designers and game researchers to aid in completing the online survey?
It should not take longer than 2 minutes.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1S-0XcYJqJbUwgsdR-5fcEpQZrzFzQqDey3H-uaeRMl0/viewform
We can contact him at jacques.barnard@nwu.ac.za with comments and questions.
best
hanli
Comments
A bit of a usability miss here :/
I had the same issues with the survey and have given him feedback on it. It identifies the things that are important in ALL good game design, and the set up of the form isn't going to give feedback in terms of ranking - also had mostly 10s.
@dammit
I have invited him to the forums. Hopefully he'll join and share more with us.
Thank you for all your interest in my research. I do apologise if the survey is not clear nought. I will try to elaborate on the research study and hope it will be more clear.
The study will endeavour to develop a SDM (systems development methodology) for mobile games more specifically mobile location based games. The items that is on the survey are characteristics that I identified via different sources that is important in developing and designing a location based games. These characteristics will be used and to develop the SDM to fit the development of location based games rather than to modify a exiting SDM. Because of the nature of this study and the fact that no body has ever made a list of characters it is important that developers, designers and researches verify that these are indeed important characteristics.
The purpose of the survey is to determine weather not the industry agree with my selection and whether or not I forgot any important characteristics . Furthermore The idea of the survey is to judge each characteristics individually on how important the specific characteristic is in the development and design process of a location based game with a score out of 10.
I hope that I could give more clarity on my study.
Once more thank you for your help.
Regards
Welcome!
I have completed the survey and left detailed comments at the bottom. Some questions for you here:
You say that no one has made a list of characteristics important in location based games. What have you been looking at? I think I'm unclear as to what you are looking for specifically?
Could you elaborate on a few things for me - I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just trying to get to a point where I can be as helpful as possible.
What do you mean by location based games?
What do you mean by characteristics?
(for both of these I'm just trying to get a sense of how you are using the terms)
I'm well stuck in PhD mode at the moment as well, so if you'd like I'd love to take a look at your abstract and references and see if I can point you to 'moar stuffs'.
best
No problem I will try to elaborate.
A SDM is the totality of a system development approach ans usually consists of a set of recommended rules, processes and or steps that need to be followed for the development of a project. Example of SDMs are: the waterfall model or traditional system development life cycle (SDLC), Extreme programming (XP), Agile development, Information Engineering (IE) and Rational unified process (RUP).
I hope this helps.
Regards
Location based gamed incorporates the position of the player as part of the game play example are: Map Attack, Turf wars, Geo wars. There are many more example with different game plays.
The characteristics determine the success of the development of the game. The newly developed SDM should be able to incorporate and address these characteristics to allow the best possible development and design process of the game.
Regards
The only answer to that list is that everything is important and you want to spend as much time on everything as you can afford. Spending less time on a specific thing does not say anything about it's importance. It only says most projects have a limited time frame and that you should work to your strengths instead of your weaknesses.
You are correct the list is characteristics that describe successful game. I am going to uses these in the developing a the SDM. The SDM will specifically targets the development of these characteristics or ensure that these characteristics are pressing in the game as a mean to try and ease the development of location based games.
The reason I need the survey is that I need a quantifiable way to prove that I did not just make up the characteristics but that developers and designers do agree with me. The higher the score for the each characteristic the better indicator it is that I did my research properly.
Regards
I think the biggest problem is that even though you've picked a particular type of game, it really still comes down to the game itself. Some games are fun because of their UI, which would make it make sense to then focus more energy and focus on this aspect. Some games are fun, despite their UI, which then means that a little work here would be all that is necessary.
I think you're picked an incredibly complex task and I'm not sure what information you might end up with at the end :P
It would be easier to answer something like the following:
For each of the following state how strongly you agree or disagree:
a) Player experience is important to a well designed game.
(add some description on what player experience means)
1. Strongly Disagree - 10. Strongly agree
In that way it makes sense to put down 10 for more than one characteristic. I would also suggest that you add some items that you expect the answers to be strongly disagree(but are still related) in order to reassure you that you didn't miss anything that you thought were unimportant.
I hope that this is making sense and is helpful.
What I'm not linking is how you tie the questions on game design for location based games to this. Are you looking at game design as equivalent to the system architecture? Many of your questions seem game design specific, and separating design from architecture is surely essential? A good game (playable, accessible, engaging etc) may be very badly architected and visa versa.
How are you specifying it to something as specific as a kind of game? What do you feel makes this type of game unique in the methodologies required?
Also, in the list of SDM's you've given you have design methodologies, programming practices and philosophies all together. Are you looking at a SDM as incorporating all of these?
You should probably chat to @angrymoose and @mattbenic about this. They may be able to help you more than I can.
... What's the point of a software development methodology that's more interested in bullet-point headings (several of which are the exact same thing re-stated in different ways) than in learning from the developers it's trying to ask about their methods?
Want an SDM that works for games? Pick anything that lets you constantly have something playable that you can test with new users. Scrum is pretty good at this.
Want an SDM that doesn't work? Focus more on theoretical design and never put anything playable in front of users until right at the end. Waterfall hahahahaha.
@SeraphimSpawn: I realise you're trying to do your PhD here, but you're waving a questionnaire with several systemic problems through several different levels of intersection at a bunch of systems people and not seeing why they're pointing out that them thar system be broke. We're game designers, so we're going to ask questions until we understand what it is you're trying to do and what assumptions you've made towards that point so far, then we'll take everything apart and keep handing bits of it back to you to see what you do with them, until eventually all the bits are sort of lined up but not quite and oh hey when did this get fun?