Last week I visited the excellent Game On exhibition at the Science Museum in London. It’s a fantastic opportunity to explore the history of video games and consoles and brought back some fond memories.
As well as having hundreds of consoles and games set up for visitors to play, the exhibition also included various background material for the games such as maps, concept art and storyboards. I was particularly interested to see the design boards used in the production of Grand Theft Auto, a complicated story based game. The game is broken into a series of ‘scenes’ that, to varying degrees, the player can direct and control the outcome.
The designers used post-its to map these scenes, with different colour notes representing rewards, challenges and animated cut-scenes. It’s interesting to see a very different industry using similar design processes to facilitate group discussion of experiences or processes.
Feb 7th, Paul Thurston said:
The exhibition looks great and highlights once again the learning everyone can take from other industries, this time the games industry.
The creativity and lengthly process that goes into developing a computer game is often underestimated, with the games industry being seen as working outside of the design industry – more like the movie industry.
The focus games manufacturers place on the ‘experience’ of a player using their game is especially useful, with every aspect of the game designed around this. This has similarities to the work thinkpublic has piloted around experience based design, this time it was within within a healthcare environment rather than a virtual one. It would be good to learn more about the games industries approaches to design…perhaps it could help with the design process or even result in an innovative new way to deliver services.
If your interested in computer games then here is my gamercard for the XBOX360:
Feb 8th, Ivo said:
If you would like to learn more about how the games industry designs computer games we could invite my friend Isti Beringer-Simmons, the Austrian games programmer from a major games producer, to come and talk to us about this. He is currently programming a new driving game that if successful will encourage many more young people to express themselves in their bedrooms through shooting, punching, crashing and killing in a place that looks very much like London.
I have many discussions with Isti about the morals of the computer games industry, which as Paul touched on, is now richer than the film industry, with 69% of American heads of household playing computer games regularly.
I always argue that computer games take people away from the things that matter: real human interactions. Whereas books, films and other media regularly inform actions in the real world, computer games very seldom manage this, and if they do it generally has a negative effect.
Isti thinks that computer games are necessary escape from the real world, a way of venting frustrations after work or forgetting life’s troubles momentarily.
I think if you do not play computer games then you are more likely to address these problems in your real life rather than put up with them.
I think technology should be used to improve communication, in most cases computer games deteriorate it.
Feb 8th, David Ollerhead said:
I accompanied Ian to this exhibition.
The exhibition serves to give visitors a chance to experience the history and development of computer games, and the chronoligical layout of the machines emphasised this. As you walked in Pong and Pacman, as you left the Wii and Playstation 3.
I suppose what struck me the most about the development of the gaming industry, and inherently the technology was not the consistent improvement of graphics, but moreso the sudden boom in the diversity of interaction devices.
The first several rooms were confined to joypads and joysticks, but the last room had people singing into microphones, playing guitars and swinging controllers around for tennis rackets.