Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Theoretical Philosophy and Thought Experiments

June 23, 2009

I have been a Master of Social Sciences (abbreviated to VTM here in Finland) from the last summer. The journey of 10 years with a specific interest on thought experiments as a method for philosophy (and science) ended into a Finnish master’s thesis where I reported my findings on the subject matter. I can never say that I actually was finished with this issue though.

The topic was never easy, and it doesn’t cease to interest me these days either. I am eager to find out how the area is evolving further.

But the burden of heavy philosophical arguments and deep waters of pure mind games is now officially come to an end from my side. I don’t think that I am able to ever dive into that deep end of science any more or at least not as intensively as I have been. But as they say: never say never. There are definite links with design research and game research with this meta-philosophical topic…

If you are interested, the thesis is available here, but unfortunately I have to inform you that in order to really understand it, you need to master Finnish and possibly also basics of philosophy. As a good reference in English, you can always start on reading Sören Häggqvists dissertation from year 1996. I follow the same lines in many respects with him.

Compiling the package for GameSpace idea generation study

December 4, 2007

We initiated our game idea generation study in October by pre-interviewing game designers and alike staff from our industry partner companies. Before the period of travelling between Tampere and Helsinki, interviewing people and presenting the package, I had to finish the final touches on the package. It was important to give the package a touch and feel of a real product to increase the appeal for use and to reduce the threshold for use, so I worked on a coherent visual layout with all the six techniques, instruction book, feedback cards and even the bag itself. The polishing phase took more time than I was expecting and the last piece, the instruction book, was actually delivered to press after staying up from 1pm to 1pm next day. Still a lot of typos and other mistakes were left in the book. One can do only so much.

The Package includes 1001 Game Ideas book, GameSpace feedback cards, materials for five techniques (one technique, Mecano, is only with instructions): VNA, MorF, GameSeekers, GameBoard and PieceBox. Also one commercial technique (Thinkpak) was included into the package.

Check out the contents of the package:

The GameSpace idea generation study package. Including our techniques and one commercial counterpart.

And the introduction slides:


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