In my previous post, I introduced you to my concept of an artifact-centric text adventure game. However, as some have pointed out, my post lacked depth. Indeed, the concept, as I presented it, proved sufficiently nondescript as to garner itself criticism that it bears little relation to the concept of artifacts in design. As such, I felt that a supplementary post could help to clarify things a bit.
A More Detailed Look at the Concept
Last Wednesday, I established that my semester project proposal was the following: a single-player, text-based, narrative-driven adventure focusing on design. However, I failed to go into detail about what aspect(s) of design the project would deal with.
The game’s focus would be on having the “player” traverse various stories, which would be presented in a second-person perspective. Similarly to Kim’s proposed project, many stories would be collected from the field. Unlike Kim’s project however, this would not be a requirement, as stories could also be fictional. To illustrate, consider that stories in the game would generally fall into two categories: concept-oriented and user-oriented.
Concept-oriented stories are intended to dramatically illustrate a particular concept or concepts. They can be purely fictional, derived from real world scenarios, or even true stories collected from the field. These stories could would be comparable to the anecdotes found on the “Creative Whack Pack” cards.
User-oriented stories, on the other hand, would only represent real-world anecdotes collected from the field. While user-oriented stories may illustrate a concept as well, this is not a requirement. The purpose of these cards is to help the designer see things from a different perspective (namely that of a user, though not necessarily that designer’s target-user-in-mind), hopefully learning something in the process.
As the player progressed through the game, they would collect an “inventory” of all the stories though which they had played, and could view the main point of any story by selecting it.
The project targets two groups: beginning designers looking to learn about fundamental design concepts in a story-driven and immersive way, and more experienced designers searching for inspiration or perhaps perspective. These targets are comparable to what I perceive as the IDEO card set’s intended audience. (Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m not targeting anyone-searching-for-inspiration, as the Creative Whack Pack does. This is because game is planned to be a more design-centric product than the generically-focused CWP.)
How does this tie into artifacts, again?
Is this game an artifact in and of itself? Not really, no. But keep in mind that previously, it was established that “stories” can be classified as artifacts — this is an integral part of Kim’s project. This concept provides the basis for my view that this project contains artifacts — after all, each “story” through which the player traverses and “collects” is another artifact.
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