Thursday, 4 July 2013

Semester 2


For my MA, I will be investigating how indirect control can be used to improve complex 3d games for people who have never played them before. This will have applications including serious games, but something I am interested in making games for the elderly. The elderly, as a demographic, are being missed out, and this gives an opportunity to make something that is unique, innovative, and could genuinely make people feel better.

However, if I am going to use this research in order to make a prototype for a product, I feel would need to do some further into making a suitable UI and controls, as well as looking into what kind of 3d environment game most elderly people are going to  like playing. If such a game exists.

I would like to do to start off with, having non-gamers to play through some of the experiments I did less semester, in order to see how they react to non-game 3d environments, and whether or not this relates to how they behave in real life.
However, soon I would like to move onto making actual games, with objectives, rewards and punishments, mainly for personal practice.

Something I have currently been looking at is the O.C.E.A.N. theory, a psychological model for how people are motivated.

Jason Vanderburg, a designer at Ubisoft, had a talk at GDC 2012 where he applies the theory to game design.


What he's doing is applying it to game design decisions on a macro scale, such as deciding on a game’s mechanics, aesthetics and context.

Something I would like to look into further is applying the same theory to level design on a micro scale, where instead of being able to predict what game’s people will buy, you could predict what moment to moment decisions they would make.

No comments:

Post a Comment