Need help for exam - Difference between programmers and gamers experiences'

I'm about to create a 4 minute long presentation as an exam in Swedish with the topic "different worlds", and we're allowed to research our subjects 2 weeks in advance.

I'm planning on speaking about the differences between how game developers and 'regular' people experience gaming. This will probably differ further between a developer's roll, such as an artists, a designers, a writers, a programmers, etc.

I came here to ask for help on key points to talk about. How do you think the experience differs between developers and 'gamers'? You have any ideas for key points? Does this topic have enough for a 4 minute presentation?

Any help and thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

I notice that I do think alot about how a given game is designed when I play it. I was just playing BF3, for example, and I while I was sniping on a mountaintop I wondered how many polygons the landscape would have. (I am mainly a 3D designer)

So in general, yes I do think game developers look slightly different at games. For one, they are able to grasp the huge amount of work that was put into a product. The same would go for a writer reading a book, or a musician listening to other musicians.

 

The best way to find out what normal people make of games is to ask some.

We could give you all sorts of references and theory but in the real world of game design nothing beats getting a real person to try something for five minutes and then talking to them.

This experience should give you more than enough information for a 4 minute talk and will be really useful experience

 

As a solo developer, one of the most important thing for me is to get people to try my games before they're published.

The reason being that you *know* how everything works, but a new player doesn't.

Thus, even obvious things (to you as the developer) can be very confusing to new players.

Additionally, players may give you insight into something incredibly obvious that you've somehow missed.

For instance, my game 'Air Supply - Infinite' I thought was really easy to play, control wise.

You tap once to jump, double tap to use a smart bomb.

Easy!

One of my play testers just couldn't get comfortable with it. He wanted different buttons for 'jump' and 'smart bomb'.

So I put in new control setups just for him. It's something I would never have thought of doing if a 'gamer' hadn't played it.

As you develop a game over many months, you get 'used' to things that aren't working properly, and compensate for them until they aren't a problem anymore.

As a player, you're thrown into the deep-end, without this 'months of compensating' and can end up confuzzled or worse!

The onus is on the developer to make things as clear as possible to new players.

Overall though, I still consider myself a gamer first, and a developer second. I find that if I make games with gamers in mind, they generally turn out better!

Here's an article about the making of Bioshock Infinite about how player feedback affected the development of the game: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-17-the-true-story-of-bioshock

I hope that's all in part relevant somehow to your talk. Good luck with it!

QS =D

 

The best way I would explain it is that gamers see the game as a whole, while developers see the game as a collection of it's components.

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf It's a good paper that should help get your head around it. It's pretty academic, but at least it's only four pages long.

 

LOL, programmers know how to have fun.

 

I have started noticing that when I play games I now look for flaws and what could be done to overcome them, I think about how hard it was to make the game, I think about the games inner workings. For example, I was playing Guns Of Icarus, a very neat game, and I found myself thinking how long it would take to make a boarding feature. I found my self scrutinizing every detail of the game trying to guess how they made each and every thing. I didn't play I 'examined'.

All that aside, I still play most games just as a gamer. It is only when a game gets complex and interesting that I start trying to build it in my mind XD

 

I build everything in my mind, I often watch playthroughs and stuff to see how gamers experience a game and can view how a gamer would play a game. I only play games these days for the sake of looking at how they work, not really to have fun.