Why write a game diary?

When I started out working with my Master thesis it was largely inspired by my long history as a gamer. It was also part of my initial hypothesis that game design patterns can be identified and transferred into a gamified system, and part of my initial research was looking into games that contained some form of collaborative game experience. After having browsed through several different types of games I landed on using a combination of MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and RTS (Real Time Strategy) to look for the earlier mentioned game design patterns. To get started I chose three games that each contained game design elements I believed could be relevant to my thesis; EVE, World of Warcraft and Civilization V.

Why did I choose these three? EVE was chosen due to its massive space battles that involves collaborative game play at an unprecedented scale. According to an article in Wired more than 7500 gamers participated in the event making it a very interesting game to analyze. I have tried the game, but have no recent game play to refer to and my documentation for my thesis here is based on interviews with active players. World of Warcraft was chosen both for its popularity as well as its collaborative PvE (Player versus Environment where the environment is the virtual reality of the game world and its game challenges) team game play with focus on raids (large teams of 10 or 25 players). An enormous number of gamers join up in guilds to spend several hours every week facing the raid challenges in highly efficient teams where collaboration is a key element to succeed. Finally I spent some time playing Civilization V for its turn based game play. I found this interesting since a turn based gamified solution for open innovation would allow for more flexible collaboration that would not require the players to be online at the same time to interact with each other.

I spent time from November 2013 and until the end of February 2014 to look for relevant game design patterns, and during march I found three game elements that I would work with to design a prototype to test later this year. These were user profiles, game activities and ranking, each representing core game elements that I believe to be important for an open innovation gamification application. Since then the design process has included both participatory design workshops as well a several hours of actual game play. Both have been important sources of inspiration for the design work and contributed with key findings to help improve and innovate the prototype. To document how the game play has contributed to the design process I have created this game diary that will contain entries referring to actual game play experiences that have yielded interesting findings or input to the design process. I am quite sure I will not be able to make use of the data from these entries, but hopefully that will be something I will be able to work on later.