Game design tools: Time to evaluate

Abstract

The art form of the video game has a very idiosyncratic reliance on the process and practice of its designers. We work with creative and computational problems that form a web of deep complexity. And yet, as I have noticed in my professional practice as a game designer, we do not use tools to support our design process. For more than a decade, designers and researchers have argued for the development and use of both conceptual and concrete tools. To this end, formal and semi-formal game design models have been proposed and, more recently, experimental software-based tools have been developed by the research community. To date, however, none of these tools or models have been adopted into mainstream practice within the game design community. In this paper I argue that it is difficult, if not methodologically flawed, to assess the work in the field of game design support without more qualitative data on how such tools fare in actual game design practice. Evaluation research would be an essential contribution towards answering the question of whether – and if so, how - these experimental formal models and tools can support and improve the game design process.