Consumer Driven Computer Game Design

This study, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, proposes a methodology for consumer-driven computer game design that uses the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to ground game development in player experiences rather than designers' assumptions. Its central thesis is that games should be shaped by what players report as satisfying or dissatisfying, and the authors test this by collecting and analyzing player narratives that are then handed to creative designers as a reference for building new games.

The research drew on 61 active game players, roughly 70 percent male and 30 percent female, with about 70 percent identifying as students and ages ranging from 13 to 29 (average 22). Each respondent wrote two accounts, one describing their best and one their worst game experience. Two analysts coded the incidents after training, with a third analyst checking reliability; inter-judge agreement reached 88 percent for positive incidents and 86 percent for negative ones. Incidents were organized into two outlooks, "game" and "player," with themes such as art design, story, controllability, emotional reactions, and relationships with others.

The findings show that game-related elements dominate both positive and negative accounts, accounting for about 59 percent of best-experience incidents and roughly 79 percent of worst-experience incidents. Good art design, story, and game-playing mode drove positive recollections, while difficult controls, poor story, unbalanced difficulty, and bad art design drove negative ones. Player-focused themes, including emotional reactions and social play, carried a meaningful share of positive incidents.

The authors' conclusion is that the resulting consumer reports informed artist-designed concepts, which were to be evaluated through focus groups in Taiwan. The paper frames these tests as preliminary, and it does not yet report whether the approach succeeded in producing games that better satisfied players.