Comments on What Happens Before Game Design?: Response to The Civics of Potential Video Games

Yeah. If you click the comment thing on the side a...

2009-06-04T19:15:29.873-07:00

Yeah. If you click the comment thing on the side a pop up window appears. I'll have to look into the code to see what is happening. Sucks!

Ooops, only thing is it fucked up the comments rea...

2009-06-04T19:04:37.577-07:00

Ooops, only thing is it fucked up the comments really bad.

Yeah. i've been looking high and low for a dec...

2009-06-04T19:00:59.255-07:00

Yeah. i've been looking high and low for a decent free xml template and I think I finally found it. Now to go find some food.

Okay that makes sense! BTW, this layout is the shi...

2009-06-04T18:59:30.828-07:00

Okay that makes sense! BTW, this layout is the shit.

Oh man, that's a loaded question. The basic ...

2009-06-04T18:56:39.270-07:00

Oh man, that's a loaded question.

The basic difference is mostly single people doing something (e.g. playing a game) vs group (e.g. playing a game with tons of people). We're more concerned with if the society the people live in is psychologically sound.

Thanks man! Probably gonna pick up at least one of...

2009-06-04T18:47:55.749-07:00

Thanks man! Probably gonna pick up at least one of these. In game studies/design we talk a lot about playtesting, but you can tell the professionals from the amateurs by the kind of people they have doing the playtesting. Like, for one of our classes it was just us sitting around watching people playing and asking some basic questions. Then you look at what Bungie did with Halo 3: hire a team of psychologists to analyze people qualitatively. What's the diff between sociological and psychological qual analysis?

There are some great books on the subject but gene...

2009-06-04T13:58:35.704-07:00

There are some great books on the subject but generally you have to learn through guided doing. In my next class we focus on interviews/focus groups but as I have a few years of interviewing under my belt i'm doing some qualitative based content analysis (women in games). I'd recommend / have read:

http://www.amazon.com/Qualitative-Methods-Research-Kristin-Esterberg/dp/0767415604/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244148971&sr=8-7

http://www.amazon.com/Qualitative-Reserch-Education-methods-ebook/dp/B000UYCP6S/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244148971&sr=8-16

Man, you know research but you sure as hell don...

2009-06-04T13:46:21.380-07:00

Man, you know research but you sure as hell don't know design. Keep working on the theme of the blog duder! The right justification of the stuff on the right sidebars is particularly heinous.

Where exactly do you learn qualitative research methodology? Is it like one of the major things psychologists and sociologists do, and that's why you know so much about it? I can say as a fact that I've never learned how to do any of this number critique stuff. It's really awesome to see you know how to do it. Seems like every game studies department of the future is going to need a sociologist on staff.