The Forms and Uses of Undergraduate Student Game Design Logs

Design logs provide a way for designers to articulate their goals, track their progress, and record decisions. Undergraduate students in an introductory game design course were assigned to keep design logs during a multi-week, community-engaged tabletop game design project; this work addresses how students used their game design logs and what this means for their creative efforts. During the semester, the students produced eleven design logs and seven designer’s statements totaling approximately 32,000 words. These were analyzed via inductive coding, and thematic analysis included the 22 analytic memos created by the research team. We discovered that the design logs varied significantly from each other and from the recommendations, and we separately analyzed the form and the uses of the design logs. The forms can be described along dimensions of multimodality, composition style, and document structure. The content of these documents revealed nine distinct categories of use. Four of these aligned with direct instruction and recommendations: action items, activity logging, decision logging, and playtesting notes. Other uses include addressing the instructor, class notes, tracking defects, research notes, and stating rules. Despite their idiosyncrasies, the logs and reflections demonstrate that students learned to follow a rigorous, iterative design process. Regular use of design logs kept students engaged through a multi-week design project, and the design logs themselves had a positive impact on our community partnership. Our findings suggests a positive correlation between students’ compositional skill and the quality of their designs which suggests opportunities to enhance students’ design skills by improving their general writing abilities.