CO-CREATION & USER CENTERED PARTICIPATORY DESIGN IN VIDEO GAMES

         Producers of texts (whether they be digital, print, or multimedia in nature) have historically neglected the potential of co-creating these texts. These texts tend to operate in a top-down, producer to consumer distribution framework that often fails to gauge or address user expectations for a satisfactory user experience. As Huatong Sun and Guiseppe Getto (2017) say: “at a time when global cultural flow has shifted from a diffusion model to a participatory model…more relationship building work…will be needed to address the increasing demand for community building,” (p. 92). I argued in my critical glance at the implications of user design on marketing strategy that in order for producers to engage in this relationship building work that Getto and Sun describe, producers need to implement a user centered participatory design framework to textual production. A user centered participatory design framework will seek to not only engage users with textual production, but also reflexively and continuously incorporate their values and input into design processes. Not only is the implementation of a user centered participatory design framework critical for building rapport with users, it has also proven to be an effective marketing tool that drives increased engagement in texts. In short, user centered participatory design is mutually beneficial for producer and user alike, generating more collaborative and more engaging content creation. In this piece, I will highlight some of the general successes of user centered participatory design oriented marketing campaigns to demonstrate the potential for such a strategy. Then, I will shift the focus to discussing design choices in video games that go against user experience best practices associated with usability, which, as demonstrated in my piece on dark video game design, could use improvement. I will suggest that user centered participatory design is the solution to developers’ competing interests of user satisfaction and profit generation, showcasing examples where this model has been utilized successfully in certain game design choices, demonstrating that this design model should be more readily employed. Finally, I will provide a video production of my own creation, a mock community highlights video for the popular multiplayer game Rocket League, as an example of ways that video game designers and developers might engage in textual co-creation with their audiences to maintain user engagement and trust.

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            My approach to more user centered design principles differs from that of other usability scholars in that my argument for the utilization of these principles rests not solely on the fact that they enable the user to accomplish their own goals interacting with textual productions. In addition to this stance, I also believe (and marketing campaigns have shown) that the implementation of user centered production practices will lead to a more successful production in accordance with producer goals. To demonstrate, I will outline a few successful marketing campaigns that have taken a more user centered approach to textual production.

            In 2013, Frito-Lay launched the “Do Us a Flavor” campaign for their Lay’s potato chip brand. The campaign invited consumers to devise a new chip flavor. Lay’s would choose three finalist flavors to be sold in stores, and during this time consumers could try out the three new flavors of chip in order to vote on their favorite. The flavor with the most votes would be made into a permanent flavor addition to Lay’s selection of potato chips, and the creator of the winning chip would win $1 million dollars. While the company expected to receive about 1.2 million flavor suggestions, the “Do Us a Flavor” campaign ended up generating flavor submissions from 3.8 million consumers. Not only did the campaign generate a great deal of consumer buzz, it also generated an increase in year-on-year sales of 12%—four times their desired sales increase (Chief Marketer, 2013).

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            Heineken, looking to generate ideas for ways to improve their beer and make its draughts stand out from the crowd, decided to ask its consumers how they might make more enjoyable the beer Heineken had produced for 150 years. The campaign was part of the Heineken Ideas Brewery, which had previously launched another user centered idea generation strategy when it asked consumers to help the brand create more sustainable packaging for their products. After receiving hundreds of consumer suggestions, Heineken was able to improve its product by providing consumers the experience they preferred while generating general interest in the brand (Siu, 2015).

            Starbucks also utilized user centered content creation to great effect with their White Cup Contest, launched in 2014. The contest asked customers to draw on Starbucks’ white coffee cups and submit pictures of their designs on social media as entries. The winning entry’s doodle was then featured as the design of a limited edition re-usable plastic Starbucks cup. The contest saw entries from roughly 4,000 consumers over a three week span (Starbucks, 2014).

            These marketing campaigns all have one thing in common: user centered participatory design. Typically, these types of marketing campaigns are labeled as consumer-generated marketing, defined as a marketing strategy composed of inviting customers to create material for an advertising campaign (Marketing School, 2012). There is one important factor in the aforementioned marketing campaigns that distinguishes them as design favoring user centered participatory design rather than consumer-generated marketing. These campaigns did not merely ask consumers to make content for a marketing campaign. Every campaign asked consumers to create content to be a part of the brand or product itself. In the Lay’s campaign, consumers were actually able to conceptualize and vote on a new flavor of potato chip. In the Heineken campaign, consumers’ ideas were implemented to positively change their experience drinking a Heineken. With the Starbucks campaign, users were able to create a cup design that would then be available for purchase. As stated in my introduction to user centered participatory design, the term revolves around the ability of a text to enable users who interact with it to achieve their own goals and determine their own uses for a particular communication. These campaigns didn’t just ask consumers to help them market their products, they asked consumers to help them co-create their products. Users were able to voice their desires for particular content in textual production, and moreover, were able to implement their own thoughts and goals for the final production into the text itself, whether it be in the form of their favorite potato chip flavor or in the way they consume a beer. These campaigns gauged and addressed users’ goals for the productions created in addition to catering to producer goals, just as Simmons and Zoeteway (2012) suggested producers should. This invitation to co-create is part of what makes these campaigns so singular. Considering the success of these campaigns in increasing sales and awareness for marketers while fostering feelings of inclusion and agency for consumers, it stands to reason that user centered participatory design not only gives more agency to the user but also sees positive returns for producers.

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            This notion of engaging the user in design processes is one that can not only benefit companies in the food service industry or beer industry, but also those in the video game industry. As noted in my piece on dark video game design patterns, the video game industry has had a poor time in recent years of connecting with their audience and providing pleasurable user experiences that value and address user concerns and feedback. This can be seen in video game developers’ integration of lamented microtransaction methods, integrated in-game purchases that unlock new content for the user instead of creating a complete game that the user can access with one upfront purchase.

            Now, while I don’t believe microtransactions and in-game purchases will go away altogether, I do think it is the responsibility of video game designers and developers to ensure that the content they do put out in microtransactions and other in-game purchases aligns with consumer desires by utilizing a user centered participatory design method to creating new content. One example of this strategy done well can be seen in the way that video game company Riot Games creates new content for its popular online multiplayer game League of Legends. The game features a plethora of characters, over 100 in fact. The characters all have a base design model that players have access to for free, but if they so desire, players can purchase in-game currency called Riot Points in exchange for real world currency in order to obtain skins which change the appearance of character models as well as the aesthetic appearance of the characters’ actions and abilities. These skins are completely optional and are not a requirement in order to play the game. They do not enhance character performance in any way and there are no in-game purchases which will increase a character’s power in game, unlike the loot box system that was employed in Star Wars Battlefront II, wherein players could purchase with real-world money upgrades to their character that would put them ahead of other gamers who refused to purchase these upgrades. This already portrays the in-game transaction system employed by Riot Games as a little more fair than that of games like Star Wars Battlefront II. Riot’s system doesn’t make the player feel like purchasing anything in-game is a necessary component to performing well, which is an obvious dark game pattern meant to get more money from players invested in the game.

            However, the fact that skins aren’t required to play the game and have the same experience as other players isn’t what designates Riot’s skins as user centered participatory design. It is the manner in which Riot releases these skins, and the ways in which they employ player feedback and desires into the creation of these skins, that warrant the application of user centered participatory design to their process. Take for example two skins that Riot recently released for League of Legends characters Tristana and Illaoi. Most of the time, Riot creates a concept for a skin and releases it without totally gauging user interest. The company has its own artistic and creative freedom and as such shouldn’t always be relegated to creating new content that is only in line with ideas that gamers created or desire. However, Riot does not ignore what League players want and this is prevalent in the implementation of player voting to determine the newest skins for Tristana and Illaoi. Riot concepted three different possible new skins for both of these characters. Then, Riot showcased all three of their designs for each character in an article that asked League players to vote for which skin they’d like to see implemented into the game for the associated character. Once Riot received the votes for these characters, they maintained transparency with their users and released a second article discussing the voting numbers for each skin concept and which skin had received the most votes to be included into the game. Riot could have merely announced the winner for each skin, however, they released all of the voting results for the skins as well as the voting results for each skin based upon the number of games that players had played each champion under. For an example of this, check out the bar graphs put out by Riot below: