These questions were written using the current state of our prototype:
(1) Are prompts easy to draw for most users?
Written prompts should be intuitive to draw in order for users — which requires making prompts that are sensitive to cultural and age context. We could make an implementation prototype to answer this question, using varying written prompts, asking users which prompts felt the hardest to interpret and draw. I think that the prompts should be relatively easy to address for the most part, and represent a quick fix in our game, since we’re already thinking of making party packs for different age groups and contexts as part of our game.
(2) Do the point counts distributed between artists/judges and censors make sense? Should censors get more points than artists/judges when an incorrect guess is made? How should censor size affect point count?
The point count system represents a huge source of confusion in our game. The smaller the censor, the easier it should be that the judge can guess the censor, which means less points for judges and artists, and more points for censors. The larger the censor, the harder it should be that the judge can guess the censor, which means more points for judges and artists, and less points for censors. The question remaining is how to weigh the points between judges/artists and censors. We could make an implementation prototype to answer this question, using varying approaches to counting points and play testing across groups, to understand how the core function of how a user might win a game would change. Since we are coming into this question with a lot of existing confusion, I think that developing the various approaches to counting points will be equally difficult, and testing will require a lot of labor and iterations.
(3) Are the names intuitive and can users generalize from names to grasp basic game mechanics?
This kind of question gets at the aesthetic nature of the game, which is a game on art censorship, which seeks to understand how much of an image we can see despite censorship. If game theme is unintuitive, this represents a problem with look/feel in the prototype, which affects effectiveness of implementation. We could make a look and feel prototype to answer this question, which I predict would result in confusion being resolved, as the game gradually hones in on its looser concepts to develop into something that is more intuitive to user’s existing mental models. This could also result in a completely new theme for the game.
