This is the master report by Nanna Thyra Fischer Topp. It is created as the finishing report from the master program “Interactive Digital Media”, Aalborg University.
The problem statement for this report is:
How can computer game design and communication, internally on a developer team, be improved through the method Object Theater, with focus on computer game design and communication?
By understanding myself as an apparatus for this research project, two methods have been read through each other by doing diffractive reading. Diffractive reading is a method from Agential Realism, which is a humanistic theory created by Karen Barad (2007), feminist and researcher, whom got her inspiration from of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr argues that light can be seen as both waves AND particles, but not as both at the same time. It de-pends on the apparatus you look at the light with. Karen Barad accepts this way of thinking, and argues that re-searchers should know about, what kind of apparatus they look at their research with. Furthermore, researchers should be able to discuss, what the results of their research would have been, if they had chosen a different appa-ratus for their research. The phenomenon is created through the apparatus, like we as researchers and people are created through the world, we are influenced by through our lives and through the current situation, we put our-selves in.
By accepting myself as being the apparatus to write this report, I have been capable of creating a data archive to gather the theory about computer game development and the method Object Theater. Having the awareness that the data archive is subjectively (with objectivity in mind) picked out by me, I know some data might have been left out. Data, which might have had impact on my analysis and results for the report. However I accept the data I chose to be correct enough to be analyzed on and to build this report on.
Østhimmerlands Ungdomsskole (East Himmerland’s Boarding School) have a game design course, which my husband helped teaching, as being the specialized teacher in game design. I was asked to come and help the students use a new tool for designing computer games. I chose to take the method Object Theater with me. By using the artifacts, everybody, also the children who never participated, was drawn into the game design process. Everybody was ca-pable of talking about his or her ideas, and everybody could show their inputs, without having to be able to draw or write clearly. Simply by taking an artifact and showing the idea, the students formed new games. They did however take the form of the artifacts a bit concrete, and did not interpret them as much as I wished they would. However they all enjoyed the crazy ideas they designed, because crazy was fun.
I discovered (or so I thought) that the method Object Theater had to make some changes, but I did not know why.
Beside the case at Østhimmerlands Ungdomsskole, I have, in this report, studied the theory behind the game design process and the method Object Theater. By reading these two diffractively together, I was able to see, why the method moved as it did. Where the brainstorming in game design had some weak spots, the method Object Theater supplemented and filled the holes. This meant the method was not the problem, it was me, as an inexperienced facilitator of the method, who had misunderstood the problems caused by using the method as concretely as I tried to, based on papers I had gotten from Anete Strand. I was unaware, that the method should be reconfigured for the situation I was about to use it in. I just used it step by step from the papers, because I thought it was the right thing to do.
In this report, I have successfully, based on my data, concluded that the process of Game Design could benefit from the method Object Theater, because of its tangible and silent approach, which everybody could be a part of. The process of having Object Theater as a method for game design, I chose to call a “Tangible Game Design Process”.