Consumer Driven Computer Game Design

The Critical Incident Techniques (CIT) is widely used to study customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the service industry and provides respondents with an open format to describe in their own words incidents that create lasting impressions. The purpose of this research is to develop a methodology for computer game design with the goal of creating games that increase the consumer’s satisfaction. Too often, game designers create games that satisfy their own perceptions of a good game without considering the needs of the consumers that will play the games. Customer driven computer game design applies the critical incident technique as a means to define the elements of good and bad game. A methodology is described whereby game designers establish the goal and intentions of the game by listening to the voice of the consumer. The concept was tested by distributing CIT surveys to active game players who each wrote two stories about their game playing behavior and experiences. The first story described the respondent’s best experience playing games and the second story described their worst experience. The stories were archived and content analyzed using Gremler’s best-practice methods for identifying categories and critical incidents. A summary sheet describing the frequency of good and bad incidents was derived by three coders. The respondents’ original game playing stories were further abstracted into key good and bad descriptions and appended to the summary CIT frequency data sheet to create a consumer game report. The report was then used by creative designers as a reference point for designing new games. Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. © 2005 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author.