Hey!

It’s Jean Jean, Senior Interaction Designer here at Normative.

Today I’ll be talking about something that’s both near to my heart, and an aspect of interactive design we’re discussing more and more here at Normative:  Game Design. 

As many of you may know, a little game named Starcraft 2 has been recently released by Blizzard after 5 years and over $100 million in development costs.

Starcraft 2 particularly interests us here at Normative for a number of reasons.  First, many of us had played the original title in some form or another during our formative years.  But more importantly, Starcraft 2 is one of the premier examples of designing for the network that we’ve seen in the past while.

Before I dig into specifics about Starcraft 2, how Blizzard improved Player Experience, and what we can learn from their examples, I thought I’d discuss Player Experience itself.

I’d like to start with a working definition of Player Experience.  I’ll share my thinking as a starting point, but I’d be really interested to hear what you think defines PX.

For starters, let’s say that Player Experience is the crossroads of Game Aesthetics, Game Mechanics and Game Control. 

• Game aesthetics refers to the narrative, various models, textures, static meshes, animations, and various other elements that comprise the visual and audio portion of a given title.  
• Game mechanics are the underlying rules of the virtual game world that impact elements as fundamental as physics simulation, and as tactical as how much damage a particular weapon can wage.
• Game control is comprised of the means by which a player can impact the game world, and often shares commonalities between the design of webpages, applications and other forms of HCI.

All of these, viewed together, comprise Player Experience.

So how did Blizzard change and tweak these elements to improve Player Experience, and what can we learn from them that we can apply to other types of interactive design?

Well, that’s a topic for another blog post.  Stay tuned.  For now, I’d love to hear about what you think comprises player experience, so please share your thoughts here, or on twitter @jpmcardle