Periodic Report Summary 1 - REFLECT (Reflective Game Design)
Reflective game design concerns games that are designed to trigger critical reflection in their players, particularly concerning what game actions may mean in a larger socio-cultural context. Critical reflection, in this context, refers to consideration of our values, practices, actions, and awareness of agency in relation to socio-cultural, gender, religious, and economic forces as a means for change, action, and empowerment.
While there exists a growing body of literature examining critical and reflective design in interaction design, such a literature does not yet exist for games. To this end, Prof. Khaled completed a literature survey focusing on how knowledge and practices related to reflection might inform game design. She examined how reflection has been defined in the education literature, and traced its influence from the arts to interaction design and game studies. She then identified barriers between serious and mainstream game design tropes and reflection. These include: game environments that feel too safe, focusing on solvability and clear solutions, stealth learning, immersion, satisfying the everyplayer, and quantifying motivation.
Within the experimental games scene, it is possible to find games that echo the characteristics of reflective game design. As studies of the design practices of experimental game designers are rare, especially in the context of critical reflection, Prof. Khaled conducted interviews with experimental game designers known for designing critically-acclaimed games that evoke responses related to reflection. From these interviews emerged a set of common patterns, ideologies, and practices behind the creation of games that invoke reflection. These included intentional subversion, multiplicity of interpretation, experience before mechanic, autobiography as narrative, art as a method, accessibility, and technology as material.
As reflection is a lived experience, it is also crucial to look to the experience of players in understanding how it might take place in relation to games. To this end, Prof. Khaled conducted focus groups with players who had played the following games that invoke reflection to varying degrees: dys4ia, Today I Die, Unmanned, and September 12th. She analysed the outcomes of these sessions and derived insights about conditions that are more likely to give rise to reflection, including private play experience, complex rather than simple rhetoric, feelings over situations, defamiliarising games, and avoiding goal orientation.
To explore some of the aforementioned design concepts, Prof. Khaled has developed a number of reflective games. The first of these games, Strait Street, is a locative game-like experience that explores people’s competing memories of Malta’s once infamous Strait Street. The second, Love S War, is a mod of Atari’s classic Combat game that subverts the notion that video games serve to entertain their players and plays off of our ready acceptance of in-game violence. The third, What We Did, a collaborative project with indie game designer Pippin Barr, presents a poetic 2-player Bonnie and Clyde-like experience of being hunted, with increasingly limited player agency.
Due to family reasons, Prof. Khaled is now leaving the University of Malta, and hence has terminated her CIG 29 months early.
While there exists a growing body of literature examining critical and reflective design in interaction design, such a literature does not yet exist for games. To this end, Prof. Khaled completed a literature survey focusing on how knowledge and practices related to reflection might inform game design. She examined how reflection has been defined in the education literature, and traced its influence from the arts to interaction design and game studies. She then identified barriers between serious and mainstream game design tropes and reflection. These include: game environments that feel too safe, focusing on solvability and clear solutions, stealth learning, immersion, satisfying the everyplayer, and quantifying motivation.
Within the experimental games scene, it is possible to find games that echo the characteristics of reflective game design. As studies of the design practices of experimental game designers are rare, especially in the context of critical reflection, Prof. Khaled conducted interviews with experimental game designers known for designing critically-acclaimed games that evoke responses related to reflection. From these interviews emerged a set of common patterns, ideologies, and practices behind the creation of games that invoke reflection. These included intentional subversion, multiplicity of interpretation, experience before mechanic, autobiography as narrative, art as a method, accessibility, and technology as material.
As reflection is a lived experience, it is also crucial to look to the experience of players in understanding how it might take place in relation to games. To this end, Prof. Khaled conducted focus groups with players who had played the following games that invoke reflection to varying degrees: dys4ia, Today I Die, Unmanned, and September 12th. She analysed the outcomes of these sessions and derived insights about conditions that are more likely to give rise to reflection, including private play experience, complex rather than simple rhetoric, feelings over situations, defamiliarising games, and avoiding goal orientation.
To explore some of the aforementioned design concepts, Prof. Khaled has developed a number of reflective games. The first of these games, Strait Street, is a locative game-like experience that explores people’s competing memories of Malta’s once infamous Strait Street. The second, Love S War, is a mod of Atari’s classic Combat game that subverts the notion that video games serve to entertain their players and plays off of our ready acceptance of in-game violence. The third, What We Did, a collaborative project with indie game designer Pippin Barr, presents a poetic 2-player Bonnie and Clyde-like experience of being hunted, with increasingly limited player agency.
Due to family reasons, Prof. Khaled is now leaving the University of Malta, and hence has terminated her CIG 29 months early.