Activity 3: Rapid Ideation

This week we were challenged to reverse engineer the finished work of another practitioner, in order to better understand its composition and practice some rapid ideation and prototyping techniques.

I decided to prototype Encarta 98’s Mind Maze. Mind Maze is a quiz game that came built-in as part of the Encarta CD-ROM encyclopaedia. When I was searching for content to work on, I had forgotten that Mind Maze existed. When I remembered, I had an immediate feeling of nostalgia for the game that I wanted to replicate.

Mind Maze is an educational game, primarily aimed at engaging the player in recalling and researching questions on a range of topics you can select from. The game is set in an enchanted castle and you as the player are trapped inside it. The only way to escape is to answer questions posed by a cast of classic RPG-style characters, which then in turn allows you to move from room to room and explore the maze. The characters also add flavour by telling you snippets of lore about the castle and the curse which has trapped you in it.

Having had an emotional response to the original content, I decided that I wanted to attempt to replicate this in my prototype. I selected the MDA approach to ideation, first focussing on the aesthetic (Hunicke et al, ca 2004). I began by considering what I want the player to feel and experience:

• Nostalgia
• Surreal fantasy
• Adventure
• Low-risk, relaxing play
• Varied experience at every play-through

To achieve this, I decided to build on the content, creating an homage to the original game. It became my aim to maintain the mechanics but to add the sense of nostalgia I feel about the 90’s culture and aesthetic in general; while keeping the experience surreal.

As I was focussing largely on the aesthetics and mechanics of the player interface, I decided to use Paper Prototyping. Carolyn Snyder describes the benefits of this approach in her book Paper Prototyping: the fast and easy way to design and refine user interfaces.

• Provides substantive user feedback early in the development process – before you’ve invested effort in implementation.
• Promotes rapid iterative development. You can experiment with many ideas rather than betting the farm on one.
• Facilitates communication within the development team and between the development team and customers.
• Does not require and technical skills, so a multidisciplinary team can work together.
• Encourages creativity in the product development process. (2003: 12)

I used this approach in combination with a variation of the ‘Wizard of Oz testing methodology’; in which a human simulates all or some aspects of machine work in a user testing scenario (Snyder 2003). This combination allowed for exploration of the visuals and narrative, while also enabling me to reverse engineer and test some of the game’s core mechanics. Fast prototyping, iterative testing and the low technical barrier to design were critical benefits given the short timeframe for this activity.

First, I roughly created some digital representations of the sort of visuals, narrative and questions I wanted to test. I adapted them to reference 90’s popular culture, in the hope of transporting the player back to that time and place – perhaps remembering fun media or events they hadn’t thought of for a while.

Then, I created the play area to simulate some of the core game mechanics. The elements I aimed to replicate were:

• Randomising of questions and characters
• Travel through the maze
• Torch functionality
• Points system

Paper prototyping in combination with Wizard of Oz testing proved a great combination for this challenge and allowed me to focus on the core aspects that I wanted to replicate and test within the timeframe. Prototyping a game on paper isn’t something I would have considered doing previously and I will definitely be using these techniques to do early testing in future.

The value quickly became apparent as I was going through the process. To achieve my goals, I found myself prototyping my prototype in order to avoid investing too much time before learning and iterating. For example, I only created a few variations of the character and question combinations and one variation of the maze map in order to test my main assumptions:

• The images and narrative would place the player in a surreal adventure.
• The player would find nostalgia in the images, questions and narrative style.
• The structure would create low-risk, relaxing gameplay.
• The mechanics would create variety in each play through.

Due to the time constraints, my user testing was limited to my husband and course peers I shared my work with. In doing so, I recognised the inherent bias involved in evaluating the success of your work through those you have a pre-existing relationship with. This created a question for me in the value and challenges of early friends and family testing.

This also led me to another reflection about the Wizard of Oz approach and the potential for introducing one’s own bias into the process. If a human is acting as the machine in testing, can they ever be impartial? Even if they believe they are, are they introducing unconscious bias into the test? Furthermore, as a developer am I introducing bias and assumptions into the very design of a game or the code I am writing. Shockingly but unsurprisingly, yes. A number of recent studies have shown that machine learning algorithms trained with biased data can discriminate based on demographic characteristics such as gender and race. (Bolukbasi et al., 2016; Caliskan et al., 2017). Furthermore, there have been calls for transparency and public reporting on such biases under the banner of Algorithmic Justice (Buolamwini 2018) which I would support in the same vein as the publishing of gender pay gap data.

As a woman I often feel like an outsider in technical teams and so for me this is an area of particular personal interest and concern. As I move through the course I intend to do some further research and reading into this topic and will be carefully reflecting on my own work from this perspective. For instance, I have realised that in the last three activity challenge, I ran with the first idea I felt strongly about. As we move into next week’s Rapid Ideation challenge I will spend more time ideating, and create at least three solid concepts to select from. I will attempt to take a more objective view as to which of these ideas is the best, as opposed to leaning into my own biases and selecting the one I am immediately drawn to.

References

BELLA, Martin and Bruce HANINGTON. 2012. Universal Methods of Design. Beverly MA: Rockport Publishers

BOLUKBASI, Tolga, Kai-Wei CHANG, James Y ZOU, Venkatesh SALIGRAMA, and Adam T KALAI. 2016. Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? debiasing word embeddings. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29, Curran Associates. Available at: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6228-man-is-to-computer-programmer-as-woman-is-to-homemaker-debiasing-word-embeddings.pdf. [accessed 23rd December 2021]

BUOLAMWINI, Joy and Timnit GEBRU. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in
Commercial Gender Classification. [online] Available at: http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/sites/default/files/2019-01/buolamwini18a.pdf [accessed 23rd December 2021]

CALISKAN, Aylin, Joanna J BRYSON, and Arvind NARAYANAN. 2017. ‘Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases.’ Science, vol. 356, no. 6334, pp. 183-186. [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4230 [Accessed 23rd December 2021]

HUNICKE, Robin, Marc LEBLANC and Robert ZUBEK. 2004. ‘MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research‘ paper for the 2004 AAAI Workshop [online]. Available at: https://aaai.org/Library/Workshops/ws04-04.php [accessed 13th October 2021]

SNYDER, Carolyn. 2003. Paper prototyping : the fast and easy way to design and refine user interfaces. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. 

Full list of figures

Figure 1. Mind Maze. 1993. Microsoft Corporation. [screenshot by the author]

Figure 2. Mind Maze. 1993. Microsoft Corporation. [screenshot by the author]

Figure 3. Mind Maze. 1993. Microsoft Corporation. [screenshot by the author]

Figure 4. Morwenna GRIFFIN. 2021. Mad Maze: Play Area

Figure 5. Morwenna GRIFFIN. 2021. Mad Maze: Alternative Scenes