Pre-Thesis Week 10: Research Plan
Last week, we learned some interesting and useful research methods including quantitative research and qualitative research. And using the template on class, I chose three methods to continue my primary research. Since I decided to make a video game, so I would mainly do qualitative research to get some inspiration on scenes and characters.
Through the One-on-One meeting, professor suggested me to review the timeline and to start making materials for the game immediately. So I might simplify the research process, and start to look into some serious games as referrences. One example that prefessor Ahmed highly recommend is a choices-based game about cyberbully and sexual assault, Decisions That Matter, which is created by studetns in CMU.
In the game, Decisions That Matter, the player could give their choice to change the direction of the plots, so that they could try to prevent assaults from happening. Through the form of interactive graphic novel, opinions and choices’ influence could be intuitively perceived. Therefore, I would definitely refer to this type of games. But from my perspective, choices-based novel games seems a little straight forward and too serious, also regarding my previous experience making platformer games, I prefer to explore how the players could collect items and solve puzzles in the platformer scene to piece together the whole events about negative feelings happened on social media platform. Then the player could try to relate the game to their real life about how to deal with negative feelings, or to get some comfort at least. I plan to finish the moodboard and storyboard of this narrative game with puzzle-solving and platformer this week.
For the other two on-class exercises, I formed reading group with Nikole, we tried to write fictions about our theme after reading each other’s posted blogs. Since Nikole planned to research on pets branding, I wrote a user story based on one real person’s experience on raising her dog. I hope Nikole find this helpful. Nikole’s writing also inspired me a lot. Illusional choices as metaphor about palyers when they wanna run away from the realistic problems would be an intereting mechanic in the game!
