Game Studies - Industry and Engineering Approach

Industry and Engineering Approach

The industry and engineering approach is perhaps the hardest of the three approaches to present. From an engineering perspective, videogames have been the context for a wide variety of technological innovations and advancements in areas such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and networking, among others. While the research pursued in these areas is mostly not about games, it is quite common for videogames to be used as a context in which to demonstrate the solutions and problems solved. A counter-example to the above is Mateas and Stern’s interactive drama Façade, a novel videogame whose design and development resulted in contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (Mateas, 2002; Mateas and Stern, 2004).

From an industry perspective, a lot of game studies research can be seen as the academic response to the videogame industry’s questions regarding the products it creates and sells. The main question this approach deals with can be summarized as “How can we create better games?” with the accompanying “What makes a game good?” “Good” can be taken to mean many different things. Does the game provide an entertaining and engaging experience to the player? Is the game easy to learn and easy to play? Is the game innovative or does it provide the player with an opportunity to have novel experiences? Different approaches to studying this problem have looked at describing how to design games (Crawford, 1984; Rollings and Morris, 2000; Rouse III, 2001), extracting guidelines and rules of thumb for making better games (Fabricatore et al., 2002; Falstein, 2004), abstracting commonalities from games and understanding how they relate to each other (Björk and Holopainen, 2005; Zagal et al., 2005), and studying the gameplaying experience from the point of view of the player (Pagulayan et al., 2003; Sykes and Brown, 2003; Koster, 2004). Much of this research is also dedicated to defining and constructing a vocabulary for describing games and thinking through the design of new ones (Church, 1999; Kreimeier, 2002).

The industrial approach can be characterized as “design” or “product” driven. Methodologically, a wide variety of approaches have been taken. Most often, they are attempts to re-imagine existing practices in other fields and industries to the videogame industry. Pagulayan and colleagues, for example, have worked on developing tools and practices for evaluating usability in games (Pagulayan et al., 2003) while Bjork and Holopainen, borrowing from the literature on software patterns in software engineering have worked towards creating patterns for gameplay (Björk and Holopainen, 2005). Also, Bateman and Boon, using Myer-Briggs typology, have conducted research to create tools to help guide the design of games for certain demographic groups by incorporating elements specifically designed to meet their needs.