“Dollars as Points: Marrying Real and In-Game Progress”
Serious game creators want good play to create measurable real-world benefit. Players want games to provide positive feedback for good play. Learn strategies to satisfy both of these requirements in a harmonious, efficient way, and how to identify warning signs that your game may be missing the mark.
4. About CGS
• We make scientific discovery and math
education games
• then use those games for research.
• Ultimate goal: expert-level knowledge from
games
• centerforgamescience.org
Foldit
Treefrog
Treasure
12. Designing a scoring system
• Is a score that reflects real metrics feasible
and practical?
• How much flexibility do we have?
• Prototype/iterate.
• Does it work for the players?
• Does it work for the partners?
16. Does it work for players?
• Qualitative, non-leading questions:
– Do they understand the concepts?
– Is it motivating them?
• A/B test if possible
• Hopefully:
17. Does it work for partners?
• Quantitative, statistically significant data:
– Compare to control group.
– Show transfer to real life.
– Compare to value of non-game methods.
• Hopefully:
19. Conclusion
• Scoring needs to suit the players.
• For use as a real metric, it needs to suit
the partners, too.
• It’s critical for the designer to understand
the field and constraints.
• Qualitative evidence from
players, quantitative evidence to partners.
20. Acknowledgements
• The DNA team: Brian Britigan, Matt Burns, Seth
Cooper, Rowan Copley, Barbara Krug, Sundipta
Rao, Zoran Popovic, Georg Seelig, and Eric Winfree
•
• Screenshots credited to: Terry
Cavanagh, Firaxis, Green-Eye Visualization
Centerforgamescience.org
jbarone@cs.washington.edu
Hinweis der Redaktion
Welcome, I’m Jonathan Barone, a project lead at the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington etcetc
This is the hope for serious games. Players play them because they want to, because they are as fun and engaging as any game, maybe even more engaging because the player understands the real-world benefit of their play. The stakeholders get a quantifiable benefit, hopefully with a better ROI than they would have achieved through methods other than SGs.
Now I don’t have any illusions that this talk is going to solve this problem as a whole. But I think I can help a bit with the player side and a lot with the stakeholder side.
Examples of a few games, shout-out/jab to Zoran
Mention score as general term for primary feedback mechanism
Dollars as only metric, changing constantly, what does it mean to a player?