The last week of this course was very enjoyable; I loved seeing the incredibly diverse projects of my classmates and the possibility to give my presentation to a group and receive critical feedback. The size and quality of the crowd at the Expo exceeded my expectations, and I spoke at length with, among others, a venture capitalist, a game designer, an engineering professor, and a cognitive science student who poked and prodded into the feasibility and design of my game concept. I was challenged on a few points: firstly, the financial viability of building a game with top-level graphics. As the venture capitalist pointed out, budgets for blockbuster games rival those of Hollywood movies.
It’s very challenging to get a meeting at the major game makers, let alone approval for a new game. He suggested a more scaffolded approach, starting with a more modest web-based casual game, which, if successful, could be expanded into a console game. The engineering professor had a related concern. He rightly pointed out that all of my sample graphics are movies that take a supercomputer days to render – a far cry from real-time rendered game graphics! He pointed out that many new video games are rendered in the cloud. This is an interesting technical concern I look forward to exploring. Another possibility is to use an existing platform, such as LittleBigPlanet, to develop a high-level prototype for the game; in fact, this is exactly the structure for one half of the MacArthur Foundation-sponsored game contest recently announced by President Obama.
Another interesting point the engineering professor made regards the meaning of the scientific method. I pointed out a limitation of a science video game; namely, that true scientific understanding comes from creating knowledge with experimentation, as students do when participating in a science fair. The professor pointed out a compelling intermediate between passive gameplay and knowledge creation, namely hypothesis testing within an existing artificial world. By testing different game possibilities, a student could learn how to test assumptions and use the method of experimentation to verify knowledge. This seems quite achievable within a game context, and would nicely connect the game experience to the experience of actual scientists.
Overall, the audience was very enthusiastic about my proposal, which only adds to my passion to pursue it. The Expo felt like an excellent dry run for this summer’s Masters project presentations, and added to my feeling of urgency. I want to decide on my project as soon as possible and get cracking! Seven months will go by like
Lastly, the experience verified what I’ve learned in this class and at the dSchool this quarter: the importance of rapid prototyping and iteration. Only by having a visual model of my project was I able to elicit nuanced feedback from the audience, and I feel lucky that I didn’t spend more than a couple months on the project before I was able to present.
