This last Thursday (October 23, 2008) a bunch of interaction and game designers made the trek across 520 or across campus to the IxDA’s local monthly meeting hosted by Office Labs.

The theme this month was “Lessons from Game Design” with three speakers who have worked or participated in the game design industry to present on their experience and insights. Microsoft was kind enough to host the event in their building 33 Conference Center and also provide hungry designers with free dinner, er, i mean hors d’oeuvres.

But enough about food, let’s get on to some good gaming… can you figure out how to rescue the princess?

Daniel Cook first spoke on “Prototyping and Sketching” by describing how to apply game design methodology to software interaction design. He did so by attempting to rebuild the common “Rescue the Princess” game scenario as a general software or productivity application.

This little gem (figuratively and literally) above is the “Web 2.0″ newly improved version of “Rescue Princess Enterprise 2008.” (Although that one button design may descrease the time needed for users to complete the task, it’s probably still not as fast as these guys). Through these and many other examples he described how the secret ingredient to game design is “Exploratory Learning.”

Exploratory Learning provides that:

• You are given a goal
• You aren’t told how to reach it
• You can fail
• You can succeed
• Delight comes when you figure it out on your own

and most importantly:

• The designer has to believe the user is smart

In game design where the user is constantly rewarded in the game and pulled through a narrative story (usually with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping visuals) this makes sense and works. It reminded me of a typical “Usability Study” where a piece of software is tested to see how well the user can use it on the first try. Typically, success (or failure) rates are measured in how long or how many tries it takes the user to figure it out, with 0 being the ideal. But in game design, failing is part of the experience and provides greater reward when the user figures it out on their own.

Purposeful failing is typically something that is avoided at all cost in software applications, where the user’s goal is to accomplish a task quickly rather than blow off some steam shooting space aliens. Dan proposes that both can be possible – that the use can accomplish tasks while having fun at the same time. It’s something to think about.

All of this reminded me of a TED Talks video (part 3, timecode 16:40) I watched recently about a educationally-challenged student who became self-taught in computer programming because it was “fun” and “rewarding” as opposed to learning to read which didn’t seem to have any value to him.

Take a look at Dan’s blog post and linked powerpoint deck to read more about his presentation.

Next up, Mark Long, founder and co-CEO of Zombie Studios, spoke on the role of “Narrative in Game Design”, and how it then may apply to software interaction design.

In particular, Mark descrbied how games like Grand Theft Auto IV have built on the narrative rise and fall in classic story telling, tying the user’s interactions directly into that story. But he also wanted to show that game design is, can, and should develop beyond the current “grammar set” that has been established and used since the early days of film (reaching its full vocabulary with Citizen Kane) by debunking 2 faults of typical games:

• using rewards as a way of dragging the user through a mediocre story
• fixating on telling a story from a single character “hero’s” perspetive

He proposed that games, or some iteration thereof, will become the defacto entertainment of the future and, like the Nintendo Wii, will incorporate more advanced methods of interation.

At the end of the evening, George Amaya, User researcher at Microsoft Game Studios, spoke on his work conducting usability studies on local multiplayer (social) games like SingStar, and others while developing the Xbox 360 game “Lips.”

Among the interesting findings, they discovered that karaoke and karaoke games is very different between Japan, the US, and Europe (Germany in particular). Totally different dynamics and style of play were discovered in these different regions via these user research sessions. They also discovered interesting dynamics within groups – different behavior and interaction between the performers and the observers.

The one universal take-away? Karaoke games like Lips are a lot more fun when you’re drunk.

Amen, brother.

Note: It was stated that a copy of the slide decks and a full video of the session would be posted at some point on the Office Labs blog. So far, we haven’t seen it but will update this when it comes live.