Week 1: Positioning myself as a Design Researcher

As a game designer, the primary focus is always the player. Understanding how the player interacts and engages with the medium is the primary focus of this research; More specifically, how the player engages with narrative elements and how they respond emotionally. Games as a design medium are not a passive experience, like that of film or animation; the player can influence the story and engage with as much or as little as they desire. Therefore, players engage with different narrative elements but ultimately should have a universal emotional response to the narrative as a whole.

Rapid Prototpying Workflow. From: LinkedIn.com

Creating games requires the use of a game engine. This research will focus on the Unity game engine as the engine is well suited to rapid prototyping, the critical method that will apply to this practice. Rapid prototyping generates multiple different results quickly, allowing for the development of stand-out concepts; this helps narrow down a broad concept; such as “Narrative” or “Emotion,” and allows for experimentation and implementation of other media types such as sound design. This rapid prototyping will focus this research from simply looking at the relationship between narrative and emotion and instead look at more specific narrative elements and emotions such as level design and tension.

Diagram of how different types of "fun" correspond to different emotions. From: http://xeodesign.com/assets/images/4k2f

The ideal outcome for this research is to design interactive narrative elements to elicit an emotional response, further engaging the player in the game.