**3/30/08: I want to say this study design is a work in progress and there have been significant changes since this posting. Please stay tuned for update info.
A Qualitative study on Creative Drama in emergent games: a survey on user affect for Façade
What is the user’s experience of the emergent narrative game Façade using process-drama as a lens for inquiry?
The goal for this study is to study perceived user affect in the emergent narrative game Façade. The process based creative drama theoretical approach will be applied in this pursuit. Developed by Cooper and Collins, the 5 P’s describe creative drama as Pique, Present, Plan, Play, Ponder, and Punctuate. Creative drama is commonly used in educational settings where participant/students are guided by a leader/teacher to recast, replay, and reevaluate the story or lesson being told through enactment. The main purpose for this study addresses the end user evaluation of emergent games through a creative drama lens. The implications for this research also address role playing strategies that incorporate and become embedded in simulation and game technologies in pedagogical learning settings.
Method:
A phenomenological approach will be used to understand the participants lived experience of this interaction model as it is applied to an emergent game. Each session will call for participant pairs to verbalize their ongoing understanding of the game, a technique often used in game play-testing. There will be two survey groups for this study. The fist group will chronologically follow the 5 steps that situate the game Façade as a creative drama activity. The second group will only play the game itself thereby omitting the creative drama steps. The second group will thus rely on the game authors own criteria for a satisfying player experience. Both groups will then take a survey at the end to address participant attitudes, suspension of disbelief, and their involvement to the experience. Other data to be collected and considered in this study include voice data of the entire session, a text transcript of the keyboard inputs over the course of the game play, game play story results, and rough observations of body language and facial expressions during the play session itself.
FYI – Christopher Ireland is female, not male – you should change the pronoun. She is married to Davis Masten; the two of them were the principals of Cheskin Research (I had the pleasure of working with them and my wife, Brenda Laurel, on the Purple Moon computer games for tween girls, at Interval Research).
Thank you for the correction Rob and stumbling onto my blog…!