This seems timely, given that the next Star Wars movie is coming so soon (but hey, Spiderman already made up for the absence of great movies over the past several months).
Star Wars Galaxies: A Case Study in Participatory Design
It’s interesting to see how far community involvement went in the development of this massively-multi-player online community/game. For example, users debated with developers over what characters they could play and what it took to be a jedi. This is the best part of the article…
More important than the answers to these questions was how the issues were handled. The designers took a strong stand on issues central to the nature of the community, and then proceeded to respond to players’ concerns on the board, publicly, until the issue had been reasonably resolved in the community. Through the ensuing dialogue, readers gained not a thorough explanation, but unique insight into the reflections of top game designers as they practice their craft. As Holocron commented at the time , how community leaders respond to these issues is critically important in establishing the gaming community. The theory goes that if community leaders establish a social norm of open dialogue and civil discourse, thoughtful players will be attracted to the game, and civility and openness will become the social norms of the community. The designers hope that this core group of early game adopters will embrace this ethic, and make it the community ethos. So, in a very real way, building an active, involved player base — even months before release — is a critical part of the game design process.
Seems like this is a much more involved effort than most examples of participatory design (at least that I’ve heard). Involvement from users lasted a year, was considerably substantial, and involved a (relatively) large number of users. This type of approach seems ideally suited for online gaming communities, though I wonder how it would play out for other development efforts.
Does most open source development count as participatory design, if those who “participate” are coders as well? Hmmm. What are other examples along the participatory design continuum between a Star Wars Galaxy-level effort and gathering feedback from beta releases or harvesting feature requests from support bulletin boards? Thoughts? Anyone?
There’s also a link to the companion site for the book “Community Building on the Web”, which has a nice overview of the principles involved in community building.
Here’s a class on Simulations and Gaming that’s taught by Kurt Squire, who wrote the article and runs Joystick101.org, which he describes as focusing on “on examining issues surrounding games in depth — particularly the intersections betweeen games, human behavior, culture, design, and society.”