Open Video Game Development and Participatory Design

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes user work during open game development and presents an alternative model for participatory design. During open development, developers publicly distribute incomplete games, discuss their design goals, and facilitate user feedback. This article examines user work on an open development forum using conventional content and discourse uptake analyses. It finds that users customize their participation, engage with multiple objects of design, and affect design through collective action.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory design
• games
• game development
• gameplay
• user experience
• open development
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

I thank Andy Garcia for his work on the interrater reliability coding. I also want to thank David Maletz for graciously agreeing to let me discuss Aground in this article.

Disclosure statement

I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Notes

1. I adapted the term “user-participant” to describe people engaging with open development projects from recent UX work that frames users as participants instead of as research subjects (Hartson & Pyla, 2019, p. 437). Occasionally, I shorten this term to “users” or “participants” for sentence-level clarity.

2. An incomplete, preliminary version of this study was previously published in the ACM SIGDOC 2019 Proceedings.

3. Theorycrafting is the analysis of game mechanics to create optimized play strategies (Wenz, 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke Thominet

Luke Thominet is an Assistant Professor at Florida International University. His research interests include technical communication, user experience, and organizational communication. More specifically his work examines user experience in video game development and academic institutional communication practices.