Get Milk – A Game of Lenses 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... though teaching game design has been discussed in numerous scientific and commercial publications there has been surprisingly little work discussing the merits and drawbacks of interactive learning tools that make game design theory an experience as part of an educational strategy. A common challenge while teaching game design is to help students to regard games with the perspective of a game designer and not as a gamer during the design process. For students the challenge lies in understanding the purpose and merits of game design theory and how it may help designing better games, in other words, how to apply the theory successfully in practice. In order to enable students to start looking at games from the perspective of a game designer with the purpose of discussing the suitability of applied game design mechanics (Hunicke et al., 2004) or patterns (Björk & Holopainen, 2004) we designed the game prototype ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’, see figure 1 ( The game prototype is based on the concept of “Game Design Lenses” (Schell, 2008) and presents a selected number of design “Lenses” as part of a 2D side crawler game. Game design lenses introduced in this early prototype include “meaningful choice”, “pleasure”, “rewards”, “problem solving”, “endogenous value”, “economy”, “feedback” and “obstacles”. The game thus assists in both playing the game as a gamer and analysing it with the perspective of a game designer while playing the game. Once the player comes close to a specific game design lens the player sees a flashing pink book icon (see Figure 1). Now the player can choose whether to continue playing as a gamer or to explore the game design lenses by clicking on the view icon. Figure 1 shows the perspective as a gamer on the left and the perspective of a game designer on the right. The game designer perspective allows browsing the game design lenses used in this particular game. It is designed to invite critical reflection on whether and how the lenses match the game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004) and how they might influence game play. ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’ is part of a transmedia learning experience prototyping platform, the ‘HCI Learning Sphere’, where we continuously research how to illustrate interaction design as part of a transmedia learning experience. The goal of the game is to teach game design theory while participants actually play a game with the purpose of increasing and intensifying the learning experiences. Rather than only reading about game design theory we invite students to experience the game design lenses as part of a simple side crawler game. In order to foster critical thinking and intellectual discourse focusing on game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004), we built upon the notion of experience-oriented or Experience Design (Gaver et al., 2003, Forlizzi et al., 2004 and Hassenzahl et al. 2006) while designing the game. Specifically, we followed Hassenzahl's (2013) theory of “psychological needs” with the purpose of increasing the human need of “hedonic stimulation” during our interactive learning experience. Hassenzahl et al. (2013) defines the need for “hedonic stimulation” as the capability of a product to satisfy the human need for improvement. However, before organizing a large-scale international evaluation of our learning game and its didactic meaning we organized a pilot-study that would focus only on the hedonic quality of ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’. We searched for a method that would allow us to successfully distinguish hedonic from pragmatic qualities. AttrakDiff (Hassenzahl et al., 2003) is a commercial web-based experience design evaluation method that helps to focus on ‘psychological needs’ by matching product attributes. This tool distinguishes pragmatic from hedonic qualities by matching attributes to four qualitative dimensions that shape an experience, pragmatic, hedonic- identification, hedonic-stimulation and attractiveness. The product attributes assigned by AttrakDiff to hedonic stimulation include ‘creative’, ‘original’ and ‘challenging’. As part of the study we ran 10 explorations with undergraduate students (average age. 24, 40 % female). The overall individual experience was scheduled for 30 minutes following with an open focus group discussion of 20 minutes. This pre-study revealed a number of interesting results. The evaluation confirmed that the overall impression of the system was rated as very attractive and showed room for improvement in the hedonic quality of stimulation. Prompted with the question “How could we increase the stimulation of the system” most testers mentioned a more challenging game play. The focus group revealed that most testers evaluated the game and not the learning experience. It further suggested that the score would significantly change if participants where to evaluate only the game designer view of the game. This illustrates the difficulty of the students to distinguish between game play and the integrated learning experiences but also the need for a more detailed instruction of how to use the ...

Context 2

... though teaching game design has been discussed in numerous scientific and commercial publications there has been surprisingly little work discussing the merits and drawbacks of interactive learning tools that make game design theory an experience as part of an educational strategy. A common challenge while teaching game design is to help students to regard games with the perspective of a game designer and not as a gamer during the design process. For students the challenge lies in understanding the purpose and merits of game design theory and how it may help designing better games, in other words, how to apply the theory successfully in practice. In order to enable students to start looking at games from the perspective of a game designer with the purpose of discussing the suitability of applied game design mechanics (Hunicke et al., 2004) or patterns (Björk & Holopainen, 2004) we designed the game prototype ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’, see figure 1 ( The game prototype is based on the concept of “Game Design Lenses” (Schell, 2008) and presents a selected number of design “Lenses” as part of a 2D side crawler game. Game design lenses introduced in this early prototype include “meaningful choice”, “pleasure”, “rewards”, “problem solving”, “endogenous value”, “economy”, “feedback” and “obstacles”. The game thus assists in both playing the game as a gamer and analysing it with the perspective of a game designer while playing the game. Once the player comes close to a specific game design lens the player sees a flashing pink book icon (see Figure 1). Now the player can choose whether to continue playing as a gamer or to explore the game design lenses by clicking on the view icon. Figure 1 shows the perspective as a gamer on the left and the perspective of a game designer on the right. The game designer perspective allows browsing the game design lenses used in this particular game. It is designed to invite critical reflection on whether and how the lenses match the game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004) and how they might influence game play. ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’ is part of a transmedia learning experience prototyping platform, the ‘HCI Learning Sphere’, where we continuously research how to illustrate interaction design as part of a transmedia learning experience. The goal of the game is to teach game design theory while participants actually play a game with the purpose of increasing and intensifying the learning experiences. Rather than only reading about game design theory we invite students to experience the game design lenses as part of a simple side crawler game. In order to foster critical thinking and intellectual discourse focusing on game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004), we built upon the notion of experience-oriented or Experience Design (Gaver et al., 2003, Forlizzi et al., 2004 and Hassenzahl et al. 2006) while designing the game. Specifically, we followed Hassenzahl's (2013) theory of “psychological needs” with the purpose of increasing the human need of “hedonic stimulation” during our interactive learning experience. Hassenzahl et al. (2013) defines the need for “hedonic stimulation” as the capability of a product to satisfy the human need for improvement. However, before organizing a large-scale international evaluation of our learning game and its didactic meaning we organized a pilot-study that would focus only on the hedonic quality of ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’. We searched for a method that would allow us to successfully distinguish hedonic from pragmatic qualities. AttrakDiff (Hassenzahl et al., 2003) is a commercial web-based experience design evaluation method that helps to focus on ‘psychological needs’ by matching product attributes. This tool distinguishes pragmatic from hedonic qualities by matching attributes to four qualitative dimensions that shape an experience, pragmatic, hedonic- identification, hedonic-stimulation and attractiveness. The product attributes assigned by AttrakDiff to hedonic stimulation include ‘creative’, ‘original’ and ‘challenging’. As part of the study we ran 10 explorations with undergraduate students (average age. 24, 40 % female). The overall individual experience was scheduled for 30 minutes following with an open focus group discussion of 20 minutes. This pre-study revealed a number of interesting results. The evaluation confirmed that the overall impression of the system was rated as very attractive and showed room for improvement in the hedonic quality of stimulation. Prompted with the question “How could we increase the stimulation of the system” most testers mentioned a more challenging game play. The focus group revealed that most testers evaluated the game and not the learning experience. It further suggested that the score would significantly change if participants where to evaluate only the game designer view of the game. This illustrates the difficulty of the students to distinguish between game play and the integrated learning experiences but also the need for a more detailed instruction of how to use the ...

Context 3

... though teaching game design has been discussed in numerous scientific and commercial publications there has been surprisingly little work discussing the merits and drawbacks of interactive learning tools that make game design theory an experience as part of an educational strategy. A common challenge while teaching game design is to help students to regard games with the perspective of a game designer and not as a gamer during the design process. For students the challenge lies in understanding the purpose and merits of game design theory and how it may help designing better games, in other words, how to apply the theory successfully in practice. In order to enable students to start looking at games from the perspective of a game designer with the purpose of discussing the suitability of applied game design mechanics (Hunicke et al., 2004) or patterns (Björk & Holopainen, 2004) we designed the game prototype ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’, see figure 1 ( The game prototype is based on the concept of “Game Design Lenses” (Schell, 2008) and presents a selected number of design “Lenses” as part of a 2D side crawler game. Game design lenses introduced in this early prototype include “meaningful choice”, “pleasure”, “rewards”, “problem solving”, “endogenous value”, “economy”, “feedback” and “obstacles”. The game thus assists in both playing the game as a gamer and analysing it with the perspective of a game designer while playing the game. Once the player comes close to a specific game design lens the player sees a flashing pink book icon (see Figure 1). Now the player can choose whether to continue playing as a gamer or to explore the game design lenses by clicking on the view icon. Figure 1 shows the perspective as a gamer on the left and the perspective of a game designer on the right. The game designer perspective allows browsing the game design lenses used in this particular game. It is designed to invite critical reflection on whether and how the lenses match the game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004) and how they might influence game play. ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’ is part of a transmedia learning experience prototyping platform, the ‘HCI Learning Sphere’, where we continuously research how to illustrate interaction design as part of a transmedia learning experience. The goal of the game is to teach game design theory while participants actually play a game with the purpose of increasing and intensifying the learning experiences. Rather than only reading about game design theory we invite students to experience the game design lenses as part of a simple side crawler game. In order to foster critical thinking and intellectual discourse focusing on game aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004), we built upon the notion of experience-oriented or Experience Design (Gaver et al., 2003, Forlizzi et al., 2004 and Hassenzahl et al. 2006) while designing the game. Specifically, we followed Hassenzahl's (2013) theory of “psychological needs” with the purpose of increasing the human need of “hedonic stimulation” during our interactive learning experience. Hassenzahl et al. (2013) defines the need for “hedonic stimulation” as the capability of a product to satisfy the human need for improvement. However, before organizing a large-scale international evaluation of our learning game and its didactic meaning we organized a pilot-study that would focus only on the hedonic quality of ‘Get Milk- A Game of Lenses’. We searched for a method that would allow us to successfully distinguish hedonic from pragmatic qualities. AttrakDiff (Hassenzahl et al., 2003) is a commercial web-based experience design evaluation method that helps to focus on ‘psychological needs’ by matching product attributes. This tool distinguishes pragmatic from hedonic qualities by matching attributes to four qualitative dimensions that shape an experience, pragmatic, hedonic- identification, hedonic-stimulation and attractiveness. The product attributes assigned by AttrakDiff to hedonic stimulation include ‘creative’, ‘original’ and ‘challenging’. As part of the study we ran 10 explorations with undergraduate students (average age. 24, 40 % female). The overall individual experience was scheduled for 30 minutes following with an open focus group discussion of 20 minutes. This pre-study revealed a number of interesting results. The evaluation confirmed that the overall impression of the system was rated as very attractive and showed room for improvement in the hedonic quality of stimulation. Prompted with the question “How could we increase the stimulation of the system” most testers mentioned a more challenging game play. The focus group revealed that most testers evaluated the game and not the learning experience. It further suggested that the score would significantly change if participants where to evaluate only the game designer view of the game. This illustrates the difficulty of the students to distinguish between game play and the integrated learning experiences but also the need for a more detailed instruction of how to use the ...