March 2006
Team member roles:
Madhur — program; design input
Judy — research; content writing; design input
Maryann — design; content and program input
Judy's Additions
My idea is to have two menus that the user can choose from. One
represents location/cultural factors and the other the
personality/character which can be directly pulled from the case
studies. A plus to doing this is that it folds in nearly all the
information we have discussed. One obvious drawback is that it combines
'cultural' factors with 'regional' factors thus perhaps not making each
difference as nuanced. However, I argue in favor of this because, on
the whole, each of these factors are significantly 'smaller' in
measurable importance when compared to more obvious issues like
publications, teaching. The idea, really, is to relate each of these
'cultural/regional' factors to increased values in the other categories
(i.e. teaching publication, etc.).
Consider:
Mike is a liberal arts professor at a small Christian college. Because
this cultural issue is small but crucial, it is folded into the issue
of personal. Instead of personal = likabilityFactor x teachingQuality,
it now equals (likebilityFactor x teachingQuality) x culturalFactor or
something like this. Thus it has more of an effect, and a particular
threshold will have to be crossed in order to succeed in that
particular section of the game.
I think offering a user the ability to 'choose' who they are and where
they are to a certain extent will offer enough autonomy to the user
while still allowing us to built in certain things behind the scenes.
It also potentially helps us manage content. For example, we don't need
every single combination of possible cultural factors. One could choose
from an urban, research institute, a rural liberal arts school, a
small-town religious school, and a women's college. Behind the scenes,
new thresholds are programmed in, depending on what the user chooses,
cultural factor-wise.
Game Design
I think it would be interesting to approach the game from a top-down,
2d world approach. Once the user selects their 'character' and
'cultural factor', the user starts perhaps 'on campus' at some icon
that represents that. Using the mouse, and or arrow keys, the 'walk'
somewhere else, perhaps to the 'student center'. I'm envisioning the
map being the same for all 'campuses.' To differentiate between the
campuses, certain areas will or will not be locked. For instance, at
the research institution, maybe it's not an option to go to the student
center because why would you want to interact with students? To drive
this point home, it is important to provide "student center -- where
you go to interact with students' somewhere before user actually
chooses it. Perhaps just using point-and-click mouse actions vs.
mousing over is best for this after all. Well, a minor point. As the
user moves within the campus, and stumbles across open areas, a
question is posed, a user decision made, points added or subtracted and
this scale shown on screen, and some sort of "CV percentage done
correctly" icon is also shown. I think it would be doubly helpful to
give users the ability to toggle between playing the game and reading
the CV as it comes together, or rather doesn't, if that's the case.
After decisions are made, the animations could then be played, assuming
they were very short. If gameplay does last a while, animations played
could be purely randomized.
My idea hinges on the concept of tying important factors to physical
locations, posing questions to the user, providing visuals of points
added subtracted, and toggling to the cv as it's complete.
Maryann's feedback
The computational design is a sound one, but I think the implementation
idea has already been done in Navigating Your Career. The only
differences are that this drills down into a campus map (instead of the
world at large), and multiple questions are always available from which
the user can choose (instead of several red dots randomly placed). And
the cumulative feedback is in the form of a cv instead of abstract
scoring boxes.
I'd like to see a totally different approach that really allows the
user to see information (much of which has already been presented in
the other modules) in a different light. Since the end product (a
well-crafted cv) is very individualistic, it makes sense to make the
representation of the subject/object equally personalized. If not a
customizable jigsaw puzzle, then some other game metaphor with a new
dimensionality added.
Also, I think it is crucial to include ways to tie this game to the
body of research that is already available (the bibliography), as well
as introducing new data. This body of research is large and rich, and
only partially tapped by users depending on how much time they have to
play the modules, which modules they access, how soon they get bored,
etc.
Judy Additional Ideas Regarding Prototype
As far as visual representations, my prototype is very simple. However,
I was thinking it might be interesting to have an office as a visual
metaphor. A bookcase might represent publications, and a book is
'added' to represent each publication. This eliminates the need for
'scores' and might be more visually interesting for the player.
Additionally, the animations would still be part of the game, I just
did not implement this or give it a playholder in this prototype.
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