Sound Research WIKINDX
Sound Research WIKINDX |
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Canossa, A. (2009). Play-persona: Modeling player behaviour in computer games. Unpublished thesis PhD, Danish Design School of Copenhagen, Denmark. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (11/12/2009, 08:50) |
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| Resource type: Thesis/Dissertation BibTeX citation key: Canossa2009 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: Game Design Keywords: Flow Creators: Canossa Publisher: Danish Design School of Copenhagen (Denmark) |
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| Abstract |
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"This thesis proposes a framework to sharpen the focus on player experience when designing and evaluating levels for single player action games. From a developer’s point of view, game levels are the confluence of art, code and gameplay. From a player’s point of view, levels are a succession of spaces that contain events. Due to its intrinsic multidisciplinary nature, level design has been historically difficult to define both in terms of scope of the discipline (what is the result of the process) and the skill set required from the level designers. In different game studios it is possible to see how the role of level designer can be covered by artists with a good understanding of space, architects unbound from gravity and materials and even the specific subcategory of programmers called scripters1. The core focus of designing game spaces is also often disputed exactly because of the heterogeneous composition of its ranks. Some teams see gameplay as king, and every other decision is secondary; in other contexts it is the story that rules and at times even the code, under the appearance of outstanding technical achievements, can become the compass that orients the design process. Another problem often encountered in level design is the lack of an irrefutable, quantifiable assessment of quality and success ratio. QA departments in leading developer’s studios around the world are starting to devote enormous resources to track players’ metric data and provide unquestionable answers to issues such as “is this level good enough?” In this setting, the main concern seems to deal with which parameters are necessary to monitor in order to insure a proper feedback on questions regarding the success rate of game levels and how to relate the analysis carried out on the raw data. This project intends to look for an element that can be the pivot, flexible and solid at the same time, around which all the other fields and disciplines will harmonically dance, structuring the game space and providing it with consistency, focus and variety. The result is not a cumbersome normative procedure, nor a merely descriptive framework, but instead it provides mental and practical tools for level designers. That central pivot is the play-persona concept, initially inspired from the field of Human Computer Interaction as a mean to imply players during the design phase of games." Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard |