‘Lifting the Fog & finding the Fun’ – How my PhD is linked to Zelda and ‘MetroidVania’ Videogames

I want to start this blog post by stating that I have just received my grades for 2 assignments I completed for the PGcert in Research Practice.

Both assignments tackled various issues:

1. detailing a methodology (in essence a ‘map’) of how to progress with my PhD,
2. writing the aforementioned Critical Analysis (in essence, the ‘story’) of my journey as an emerging researcher so far,
3. outlining my work-plan (in essence ‘an ‘interactivity journey’) of how I aim to complete the PhD itself.

It’s worth starting at this point that when I teach Games Design to Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, I focus on something I call ‘The Tri-Force’ of Games Design. The term ‘Tri-Force’ comes from ‘The Legend of Zelda’ franchise of videogames. It looks like this:

Within the ‘The Legend of Zelda’ franchise each of the smaller triangles corresponds to 3 core areas within the main character Link’s journey towards achieving his quest. These are:

In videogames, within the context of high-level games design, my philosophy of teaching corresponds to 3 core pillars; each are one part of a larger whole associated with the videogame itself. These are:

• Core mechanics – the main game action(s) which the player performs within the game.
• Narrative & Story – the story which the player participates within; this can either be designer driven (a fixed narrative), player driven (actions defined by the player define the story told), or a mixture of both.
• Interactivity – the method(s) in which the player interacts with the game, from a visual, audio and physical perspective.

With both assignments now behind me (for which I was pleased to have scored favourably), I am now in the process of looking at the Methodology, my ‘map’, my ‘core mechanic’ so to speak, to assess my both tasks I have completed so far towards achieving demonstration of/revealing the ‘map’, along assessing tasks I have completed and tasks I have yet to complete. I’m also considering the ‘story’ of my journey so far, and what now remains of my story and how I plan to tell that. I’m also looking into detail into my plan to ‘interact’ with the ‘map’, to help me achieve the goals I have set myself.

I also have to consider that I am currently ‘wearing’ various ‘HATS’; in other words, I have a number of different jobs and roles of responsibility. These jobs include:

• Working as a Programmer Director at BCU on Undergraduate & Postgraduate programmes
• Working in Research & Enterprise at BCU
• Working as an entrepreneur and creative director in the Games Industry
• Working as an emerging researcher/PhD student

Let me explain further…

Whilst all the ‘HATS’ on face value may appear different, they are actually all interlinked, and fortuitously a great many of the outputs from them can most definitely plug into my Research Practice. I’m now at what I’m calling the ‘Lifting the Fog & finding the Fun’ stage of my PhD.

If this were a videogame, more specifically a game with a map with enemies and/or a set of objectives, how do I reach my goals when the map is most definitely there, you can ‘possibly’ see the boundaries but the map specifics/smaller details/smaller areas are hidden by a ‘Fog’? What must I do to ‘lift the fog’, so that I can see smaller areas of the map more clearly, and more importantly, what must I do so I can see the routes more clearly to my goals/objectives?

In a videogame, the game designers build ‘Compulsion Loops’ into the game’s User Journey/User experience. This is so that the affective turn is focused upon ‘FUN’ within the Meta-Critical journey; this being the second-to-second, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour user experience. The ‘Compulsion Loop’ can be something which stands out within the remit of the ‘Core Mechanic’ the ‘Story’ or the ‘Interactivity’ of the game.

This then begs the question; how can I try and use either videogame analogy to have fun doing tasks for my research practice, or more importantly, how can the affective methods focused upon fun adopted within a videogame to navigate through a map’s ‘fog’ (considering the aforementioned compulsion loops within the user journey/user experience) be used to migrate over to navigating the ‘fog’ in research practice?

Read on…

To start with, high level, I think it’s a good idea to outline what my ‘map’ broadly looks like. I also need to consider some important questions, such as: am I certain that I can see the ‘boundaries’ even though the specifics, whilst known/apparent to me in some ways, in other ways are not so clear?

I have already worked so far to define the high-level ‘map’, in other words the methodology of my PhD. As a reminder, here’s what it looks like:

Now going deeper to identify smaller areas of my ‘map’, I think it’s a good idea to go into further detail of what I’m doing from the perspectives of the ‘HATS’ I’m wearing, so I can start to attempt ‘boundary definition’, before I move forwards. Now this is where it gets interesting. Funnily and serendipitous enough, part of the work I am doing at the moment as part of my work as a Programme Director teaching postgraduate students involves actual map design and map analysis, for a ‘Metroidvania’ videogame (here is a good definition of this type of game is: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/17005/what-does-metroidvania-mean)

Looking more closely at one of the ‘HATS’/jobs I am wearing, it’s worth looking at how elements of that work align into a broader sense of ‘map analysis’, which in turn provide me with guidance on lifting the immediate fog within my PhD.

Firstly, looking at the work I am doing as part of my role as Design/Creative Director with Masters Students at Gamer Camp, as part of the experiential learning process, the students have to complete a Playstation 4 game, which heavily focuses upon map design and exploration. So far they have worked together in a number of teams, addressing the areas of Game Mechanics, Narrative and Interactivity, to complete a prototype phase of delivery, based on a creative brief which we, the teaching team, designed and distributed at the start of the PlayStation 4 Module back in January. Now they must move into the development and competition phase to create a working videogame, and this game will also be linked to videogames which my undergraduate 2-year fast-track BA(Hons) Games Design and Production students will be developing, during their collaborative project module. Working on these projects as a key stakeholder from the perspectives of Programme Director, and also the Design/Creative Director, means that I have had a great deal of design and creative steer on all of the projects and as stated earlier, the games are focused on ‘MetroidVania’; a game-type which focuses upon map navigation, exploration and character skill-acquisition, which then in turns facilitates navigating through a detailed and complex, unexplored map, full of secrets.

At this point I thought it might be useful to consider if there are other potential case studies within the remit of both workplace ethnography and auto-ethnography (and the interaction between them) worth discussing. I liaised with my Gamer Camp design students and I was pointed to this:

“How to design a great Metroidvania map” (https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-design-a-great-metroidvania-map/). The interview with the developers of Hollow Knight discuss their process of map design; what is good to see here were the similarities with creating a map for this type of videogame and also creating not only a methodology for a PhD, but also creating a work-plan/interactivity journey prediction for a PhD. The developers had to consider a number of elements associated with their core mechanics, narrative and interactivity, including:

• The basic path
• Optional routes
• The skills the player character needed to progress; when and how they would be learnt, acquired and demonstrated
• Goals and what must be accomplished to achieve them
• The Scope of the game

Now at this point, I took a step back and thought to myself:

“Wait a minute, my PhD and Research is somewhat like the User Journey of a ‘MetroidVania’ game; there is a map, it has goals, there is an overall objective, the map specifics aren’t clear to the player at the start; whilst some area boundaries are clearly defined, others aren’t defined at all! Whilst there’s a lot of ambiguity/fog, one must use and gain skills to progress and unlock more and more of the map, to reach new ground, complete objectives, to ultimately conquer the overall goal”

Now that is really serendipitous!

I then looked at the other roles I am doing to identify where and how I’m performing some sort of ‘mapping’ exercise, to see where and how I can learn from this. I found from my reflection that this included:

• the map and spatial design work I did as part of the BCU School of Architecture ‘Co-Lab’ project to design and ‘interactive playground’ for King Heath Primary School, incorporating future technologies such as ‘eXtended Reality,
• the user-journey experience mapping for a series of Design Thinking workshops I have to deliver at BCU, as part of the ‘DT.UNI.-Design Thinking Approach for an Interdisciplinary University’; organised by BCU’s Research, Enterprise and Innovation department within the frame of an ERASMUS + project,
• the work I am doing as part of my research and enterprise responsibility, which also involves ‘strategic business road-mapping’ for ‘Games@STEAMhouse’ and the network-hub/digital cluster mapping work as part of the Midlands Game Engine,
• the work I’m doing at my existing company SmashMouth Games, and the new company venture I am looking into, called ZAM Studios; this work naturally involves strategic business planning, company and product ‘road-mapping’.

This now brings me up to-do-date; I can look at these ‘HATS’/Jobs’ and ascertain how all the ‘mapping’ I’m doing can potentially help me to identify where and how I can start to ‘Lift the Fog’ working as a student to develop my PhD. Hopefully these blogs have started to act as a means of ‘fog-lifting’, allowing me to critically reflect and then analyse further what have I done, what have I learnt (the good and the bad), and what do I plan to do to progress, so that I may carry on with my PhD journey, hopefully moving forwards to achieve my short, medium and long-term research aims.

Watch this space!

Thanks to Dr Nick Webber, Dr Oli Carter & Dr Jacqueline Taylor Boote for the awesome feedback on my PGcert Assignments!

Finding Method in my Madness – How my Research Approach is developing…

Today I had my weekly supervision meeting, where I outlined my current proposed methods of working within the PhD and ultimately the Methodology, or ‘Framework’ as I like to call it, and Nick my Supervisor graded the tutorial as ‘Very Satisfactory’; needless to say that I’m feeling slightly pleased. I must be doing something right.

In all fairness, the work I presented today is a culmination of action points, investigations and research I conducted following on from my last blog post, at the Writing Retreat as part of the PGCert in Research Practice.  I last wrote that I would need to speak to my supervisors and test the waters with my findings, whilst also discussing the myriad of literature articles I have to review to help me galvanise the ‘rebuilding of my house’, my main research question and also to then help me to ‘find the people’, the sub questions.

So, after trawling through numerous literature articles from these sources, using these words in my search: ‘AFFECT’, ‘GAME’, ‘DESIGN’:

ACM digital library: dl.acm.org/

DIGRA: www.digra.org/digital-library/

Whilst also going through numerous articles sent to me from colleagues and also students of mine, from wesbites such as:

Gamesindustry.biz

Youtube

I did collate a whole batch of very interesting articles, one of which was called “Design Box Case Study: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Design in Game Development” (Altizer,Jr., Roger and Zagal, Jos{\’e} P. and Johnson, Erin and Wong, Bob and Anderson, Rebecca and Botkin, Jeffery and Rothwell, Erin). I did initially panic when I read the abstract, as the article was only released in October this year, it focuses upon a case study illustrating how a participatory design method – the design box – can facilitate the collaborative efforts of interdisciplinary teams. I panicked as I thought that the researchers who wrote the article had covered my research, making my work redundant; the initial focus of my PhD was to investigate the feasibility of creating a new video game design framework which utilises a cross-disciplinary approach for practitioners/students/researchers, underpinned by methods of gamification, so that developers can have better understanding of each other’s disciplines and can also utilise methods to instigate fun during development, whilst attempting to find the fun-factor within the end product. As I have worked within numerous jobs within the Games Industry and also within Higher Education, (ranging from Games Testing, Games Design & Creative Direction, Marketing & PR, Business Development, Programme Direction), this has meant that I have worked with numerous disciplines who are not versant with each other, nor do they wish to be versant with each other. I have historically found that within what I class as ‘old-school/old-guard’ game development, there is a disparity in working processes, vocabularies and ultimately working appreciations between disciplines such as marketing and game development, where the two should ideally work synergistically hand-in-hand, as the end users are the focus of the product creation, and the people and the processes should be governed by symbiotic, optimal outputs of delivery, always focusing upon the target recipients.  Fortunately I found that the article discussed using a particular methodology/process not unlike one I use in Industry and in Higher Education; however the one I use is slightly different, and more importantly, within the context of ‘fun’. The core process I use is 4 tiered and is cyclic, simply put I call it ‘The Process of Design’:

Phase 1 – Problem: Before starting the task, ask as many questions as possible related to the problem/design task in hand. Once the questions have been asked, they are then put in an order of priority, so that one must identify which questions must be answered first before others can be answered.

Phase 2 – Research: Once the questions have been correlated and tiered, before any ideas can be synthesised (either alone or in a group), these questions are then investigated by compiling and dissecting research material, from a myriad of different sources and media

Phase 3 – Synthesis: Once the first set of priority questions have enough research material to reference against, then, and only then is it logical to brainstorm (one can use a variety of techniques to brainstorm, either alone or in a group; I am a fan of the ‘Post-it Method’ – I learnt whilst working at EA Games). It is important to ensure that all stakeholders involved with the Brainstorm (which should take place over short-burst cycles of 20 minutes so as not to exhaust the creative flow) are versant with the research material, so that they are able to synthesis competent ideas within the context of the task; without synthesising ideas which may be redundant/contextually inappropriate/unfeasible.

Phase 4 – Refinement: Once the Brainstorm has been completed, the ideas are then mind-mapped, so that they can then be reflected upon by those involved, so as to ascertain if the Synthesis phase as indeed productive or if there are still ‘gaps’ which need to be addressed. If this is the case, then the process can be re-explored from the start, with any new questions arising going through the 4 stages, right from the start of Problem, to help to eventually reach Refinement once again. If the Refinement stage is complete, then the next stage of tiered questions are then able to be tackled; they too are then taken through the process systematically. This is repeated until the whole task is complete.

Here’s a visual example of the Process of Design I use with my students, to show how ‘OUTPUT BLOCKS OF KNOWLEDGE’ are created by going through the iterative cycles, to then develop a GAME CONCEPT:

 

Having gone through the article, I then considered and realised that I am currently using my Process of Design to devise my PhD Question and ultimately my Research Approach,

• Problem – by asking a set of questions reflexively using a number of different ‘lenses’ towards finding the gap, governed by three main trigger questions:
  • So What?
  • Who Cares?
  • What’s the Problem?
• Research – by collating a myriad of reference material from different sources (and also prompted by interfacing with different people in different perspectives), all interrelated to the questions that have arisen
• Synthesis – formulating findings based on the research material, from the task of identifying and refining the main research question, to now, identifying and refining the Research Approach
• Refinement – Being able to take a step back and analyse the work done and also get feedback and feed-forward from different people with different perspectives, so that I can re-analyse and establish how to progress, which means going back to the beginning if necessary.

 

Following on from this, to help me galvanise my considerations towards Workplace Ethnography and also Auto Ethnography, I then went through in more detail an article sent to me by one of my MSc Video Game Enterprise, Production and Design students; about how Fireaxis saved ‘Xcom Enemy Unknown’ by having “Mutator Mondays” where each week the developers would try out new features in an attempt to ‘find the fun’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U168v1-3YbA&index=4&list=PLTZXfIDHhP2tR7DGq4t4_zGXFyPCmv5Jx

Looking back at the article, it described how the development lea, Jake Solomon, and his team, went through many years of iteration of the game, only to constantly start again from the beginning, due to implementing systems which did not work, or by over-complicating the design and play of the game. Ultimately this ruined the ‘fun’. Interestingly enough the article describes how the developers became so close to the problems with the game, that they were no longer able to see them, as they were so close to them. The break cam when the development team had to present the game to other people in the company at an event which took place called ‘Mutator Mondays’ – anyone from within the company could attend if they had an interest in Games Design – where they then would discuss the state of play with the game, to come up with a ‘Mutator’ – something that would ‘change’ the way that the game was being played. It would start with a question which they would then explore e.g. “what happens if the units have double hit points?’. If enough people thought that was interesting then it would be introduced as that week’s mutator – so for the next 7 days when the game was booted up, people could manipulate the hit points of the units in the game and try it out. This was not without its problems; it did lead more problems being introduced and also made the game not fun to play at times, however overall it allowed the development team a chance to better understand how everything slots together (all gameplay elements working on a macro/micro inter-related perspective). But sometimes ideas would come along which would improve the fun, and then stay in the game forever, so the weekly brainstorm sessions really helped to improve the playability (sometimes even at the cost of huge chunks of work being cut for the cost of large amounts of fun gameplay ideas)

Reflecting back after watching this, I was taken back to all the very similar circumstances which took place within my history working as a Games Designer/Creative Director within the Video Game Industry and also within Higher Education when I have helped students (and staff) make games. One particular example which came to mind was last academic year whilst working at Gamer Camp on the Playstation 4 game as part of the joint MA/MSc Video Game Development & MSc Video Game Enterprise, Production and Design project, towards the end of the development of the game, the team were having problems ‘finding the fun’. As Gamer Camp is a year-long full time programme, the delivery of the Playstation 4 game is aimed at August of the year, and normally at this stage I embed myself within the development team to help to bring the project together. One thing that I encouraged was the process of the ‘Daily Build’; this is when the team would create a playable version of the game and then it was actively encouraged that every member of the team play the game, during a fixed timeslot, every day, so that they could identify what was fun and what was not, on a day-to-day basis, to then identify what they must do to rectify any issues which would arise. This process works with a comparatively small development team working within one fixed location, and towards the end of the development of the game, it is also a way of developing intrinsic motivation towards completing the development of the game, as best possible, whilst also building team cohesion within the final, and potentially stressful times of development.

Furthermore the reflection allowed me to look at what I am currently doing within the context of the PhD and developing my Research Approach, and I am starting to consider how I can adopt an innovative approach to utilising a mixture of experimentation and structure, to allow for tiered and cyclic output, all of which are driven by ‘methods of fun’. So after further discussions with my supervisors, both of whom confirmed that it would be good if my PhD could potentially demonstrate:

• UNIQUENESS WITH APPROACH TO METHOD
• NEW KNOWLEDGE WITHIN THE FIELD OF STUDY

I then started to consider how I can make my PhD like a Game…

Following on from this I then used the Process of Design to ask this question in the PROBLEM PHASE:

‘How can I make a PhD like a Game?

There were two texts which came up in my RESEARCH PHASE which were contextual to what I then asked in Problem:

• The first was an article written by a former colleague of mine, Tomas Rawlings: ‘How do you turn PhD research into a game?’ https://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2012/07/23/how-do-you-turn-phd-research-into-a-game/. Whilst again I was anxious that my consideration towards making a PhD like a game had been done, the work discussed within this article was more centred on taking Research within Biomedicine and creating a Video Game platform to demonstrate the findings; in essence putting ‘the scientist in the role of a game designer.’ Fortunately the consideration I had in mind was to look at the core processes within a PhD’s Methodology and look at how one can try and create ‘Compulsion Loops’ within the methodology; Joseph’s Kim’s definition of Compulsion Loop is: A habitual, designed chain of activities that will be repeated to gain a neurochemical reward: a feeling of pleasure and/or a relief from pain (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JosephKim/20140323/213728/The_Compulsion_Loop_Explained.php). To do this would require some method of cyclic iteration/development…
• The second was a fun read: ‘20 Reasons Your PhD Journey Is Really A Pokémon Go Game’, by Jeremy Chan, in Asian Scientist Magazine at: https://www.asianscientist.com/2016/07/columns/hacking-a-phd-20-reasons-phd-journey-pokemon-go/. This confirmed that the overall phases/methodologies within a PhD can be looked at like a game, and subsequently one could arguably use different games to compare their PhD’s against; in this example it is within the context of Scientific Research and Pokemon Go, filled with Short-term, Medium-Term and Long-Term Compulsion Loops.

Therefore reflecting on these articles and also my own working practices, I considered that adopting a Methodology from a ‘Gamified Perspective’, Cyclic Iteration is important, as well as Short-Long Term Compulsion Loops, so that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is consistently maintained.

At this stage I felt comfortable then to attempt to go into the SYNTHESIS PHASE, especially after having been galvanised by content delivered in the round-table discussion sections and also the presentation sections of the PGCert classes, in particular

• Oliver Carter’s session on ‘Doing Ethnography’,
  • where I gained further insight into the differences between Ethnography and Auto ethnography, complete with techniques on conducting interviews (Structured, Semi-Structured)
• and also Jacqueline Taylor Boote’s round table on ‘Participation in a community’
  • where I considered further the communities which I would engage with, which would include:
    • Practitioners/developers making small-scale video games either for themselves or for the consumer market (through observation and experience of individual professional practice making commercial/industry artefacts in ‘Indie’ development)
    • Practitioners/developers making large-scale video games for the consumer market (through observation and experience of individual professional practice making commercial/industry artefacts in ‘AAA’ development)
    • Practitioners/developers making video games within Higher Education as part of learning and teaching strategies (students and lecturers)
    • Practitioners/developers making products outside of the medium of video games who can identify linked to video games, within the design and development of their own products, within their specified medium of delivery (for example App developers or designers/manufacturers who deliver services or develop physical products linked with video games)
    • Fellow Researchers within Academia, either directly related to this field of study or potentially not, where intersections may occur with research findings

So I then Synthesised my Research Approach; my Methodology/Framework which I would use to create the PhD:

 

One of the core goals of this methodology is to be able to work iteratively; within the contexts of the Workplace Ethnography and the Auto Ethnography, to then help create an Artefact or a series of Artefacts. This would require using the Cyclic Process of Iteration within both Agile Project Management using Scrum, whilst following the 4 tiered Process of Design (Problem, Research, Synthesis, Refinement); this cyclical process of design where each sub-process leads to the next, or as and where necessary leads back to the previous, will allow for flexible and reflexive practice to continue, so that that reflections at the end of each sub-phase can potentially inform the next phase with appropriate knowledge moving forwards. Furthermore moving forwards this reflective data is valuable to understand if and how a cyclical process of design can be improved, whilst also potentially reinforcing the process with gamification methods such as compulsion loops and reward ratios as and where appropriate, especially by analysing each phase within each cycle, henceforth, potentially gamifying the methodology of the PhD.

As I mentioned in my original proposal, the generation of one or more artefacts, will attempt to fully engage and address the problem, in other words, the main research question. The penultimate step within REFINEMENT would be to critically reflect on the artefact(s) as a whole; this would act as a method of discovering any new knowledge which could prove to be positively disruptive within establishing an effective process of design. Finally the artefact(s) will form the basis of a portfolio of practice leading to the final submission, which presents and illustrates answers to the overall research problem.

As mentioned at the start of this article, moving forwards with this Methodology, I have had feedback from my Supervisors in that they were pleased with it; I would now like to reflect back and go through a process of REFINEMENT WITH THIS METHODOLOGY to ensure that it is galvanised as best possible, before moving forwards into the next phase of developing my Research Approach.

So once again, watch this space!

Thanks to Dr Nick Webber, Dr Oli Carter, Dr Jacqueline Taylor Boote, Oliver Williams and Eir Causey

My journey starting a PhD