Anchel Labena - Videogames Producer

Isn’t this map amazing? This island… it’s so mesmerizing! Check out all the tiny little details in it! There’s a whirlpool, an ice volcano (yes, it’s ice, not lava) and look at that little light bulb at the top of the lighthouse!

Now, I wish I could say that I have drawn that, but sadly my skills are nowhere that good.

Instead this was a drawing by Stine, my muse for the User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen.

How did this get to happen? Well, after that little participatory design game I showed her where she came up with the idea of a desert island with a jungle in it, I decided it would be an interesting idea to see her try to draw her own map of an island and fill it up with anything that she found interesting. This was part of my cultural probe which I used to gain more insight into how Stine thinks, acts and what she likes.

When one week later she came to me with this map I was shocked. Definitely so much more than what I expected. It’s clear that she had a lot of fun drawing this!

And she didn’t just draw a bunch of random stuff. She gave a lot of thought to even the tiniest little detail, and she explained to me what this was all about.

The most interesting thing was that many of the things she didn’t really know why they were there. What are those things on the southwest island? Stones? Rocks? Monuments? She said she didn’t know, but she so badly wanted to be able to dive into her own world to see it with her own eyes and discover the mystery of the stones.

The same goes for the houses Northeast. They look like little hills where people live inside them. I asked Stine if those were hobbit holes, and she declined the idea. There could be hobbits inside, sure, but wasn’t it more exciting to go there and discover for yourself? Also they live near a swamp, and who knows what kind of creatures could live there…

What about the castle? Does anyone really live there anymore? Especially with that misty, creepy forest so close to it… Apparently those skeletons from the participatory design game are in that forest, so you might not want to wander for too long in there.

Want more? How about the little village next to the beach? It’s kinda small, but it seems protected from all dangers around thanks to the cliff.

Those are just some of the things that Stine told me about her map of the island. An island that she really wanted to visit, explore and get lost in it, learn its mysteries and who knows what she could find in it?

If this is not a very clear indicator of what Stine wants in a game, then I don’t know what is. As in the participatory design game the keyword here is exploration.

But don’t trust me for this. There’s still a lot of work ahead, and soon enough an interview will reveal more details about Stine’s obsession with exploring new worlds!

Sometimes you just have no ideas at all when you want to make a game. At least not when you need to create a game for a very specific target audience. And, as mentioned in one of my previous posts, this audience is Stine.

Luckily there are a lot of tools that can help a designer come up with something interesting, and one of my favorites we have learned so far in my User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen is the Participatory Design Game, or PD for short.

The objective is very simple: in short it consists of creating a short and simple activity that will open up the creativity of your “muse” you’re creating the game for (Stine) and give you ideas of what she will like.

Martin Ørbæk and I created a card game designed specifically for that. Each card has a concept drawn in it, be it a game character, an environment or a weapon or item. These concepts can be combined together to make even more concepts. For example, you can combine a gun with a laser, and you get a “laser gun”, or put together space and an island, and you get a “space island”.

But it is not us who were supposed to combine those. It’s Stine who had to play the game, drawing cards one by one from a pile, all facing the table, and combine those concepts as she sees fit to her liking.

As such Stine showed me her taste and preferences when it comes to videogames. She quickly dismissed certain ideas like those of a monster or space (she doesn’t like space travelling or spaceships, but can live with a game that takes place in space), while preferring environments that would be interesting to explore.

I found it funny that she didn’t use the skeleton card as an enemy, but rather as a remain of a dead body in a desert island, which fueled her interest in discovering how that person died.

A few more cards drawn later, she told me the story of those skeletons: they became ghosts. But not just any type of ghosts, those were explosive ghosts (by making use of the bomb card).

It’s very easy to make a story with Stine around, she doesn’t simply combine ideas. Instead she creates a full world breathing with background stories and interesting characters (the protagonist is a small boy with a sword and a shield who can also conjure spells, but he doesn’t really know how to use them).

It’s a very interesting take on starting a new game as a designer. You’re no longer thinking about doing what you would like to do, but rather making the ideas that she likes into a fully realized game. And it is something that I intend to see through to the end for this course.