From breaking to making

Abstract

When I started making games four years ago, I didn’t quite envisage I’d be still at it four years later. It was meant to be a one-time experiment to get a maker’s perspective on the objects I’ve dedicated my life to researching. Many game designer colleagues had suggested engaging in a shift of lenses, promising a world of back-stage insight that my analytical gaze was unable to penetrate. After years or resistance I plucked up the courage to embark on the process of making a game. Up until recently I made an effort to keep my research and design work separate. Although I came up with a solid excuse to justify that split, the truth is I didn’t have enough belief in my design-self not to embarrass my research-self publically. Now I’m at a point where the cross-pollination of these two sides of my working life is so pervasive that the pretense of separation is untenable. This paper is an academic post-mortem on the two games I have worked on to date. Postmortems tend to communicate the design and production choices made during the development process and how these panned out when the game made it to market. This paper will instead outline the theoretical questions and agendas that informed the creation of the game in question, how these were reflected in the process of design, followed by a reflection on the utility of the design process of that particular game for my research work. While sharing qualities with Gaver’s concept of research through design, here the theory that is generated does not stem primarily from the artifact in question, but rather it is the theory that acts as the seed out of which the artifact grows, and in turn informs the theory that gave it birth. I’ll give an overview of each of these sections below. The first game I made was Will Love Tear Us Apart. WLTUA is an attempt at making a game adaptation of a song. The game was sparked by my interest in the relationship between poetry and games, particularly in relation to metaphor and simulation. It also dealt with the commonly held assumption that games are, or at least should be, fun. This section will thus discuss the difficulties in translating lyrics to game mechanics, dealing with ephemeral concepts such as love through a cybermedia object that resists ambiguity and the challenges of creating a purposely frustrating experience to fit the essence of the song in question