Questions that our various game prototypes might answer:
Background: Our game is a card-based game where users play a game of life pathway, earning happiness and money points along the way. The player that earns the most amount of happiness will win.
- Are users interested in the happiness component of winning, or an adjacent factor such as money?
- One big concept in this game that we want to emphasize as a game lesson is that money isn’t all that matters. However, this also comes as an assumption for players.
- Therefore, we want to test whether players are interested in earning happiness points as a means of winning, as opposed to money, as structured in our game prototype.
- My guess is that players will not be inclined to primarily want to win via means of happiness. We can then use this insight more in-depth to adjust our design in order to do so.
- Are users motivated to interact with one another in a collaborative way in order to win?
- This is an important question since, in our structure, it makes sense that users will want to pair together with other players in order to combine their overall results in order to win.
- We can create a prototype where there are cards that motivate players to combine their resources and efforts in order to advance – creating scenarios where one player is in debt but really happy, and another player is rich but unhappy, and the combining of resources can result in a win-win situation both both parties.
- My guess is that this is possible, since our game does touch upon this intuition.
- Will users feel engaged throughout the game play, even if their turn is not directly active?
- This is an important question, since players may lose motivation, especially as their situation changes throughout the game.
- A prototype we can make to answer this question can include activities or storylines that non-active players can focus on as their turn is inactive – e.g. similar to Fake Artist, I want to mediate a design that allows users to be engaged actively throughout the entirety of the game, as opposed to when the player’s turn arrives.
- I think that this will be a tough design question, since our prototype currently is not designed for this yet, in my opinion. However, this is a component that is important to our team, so we will continue our iteration process in order to hone in on this.
