Project Heidegger
Project Duration: January - May 2013
Project Website
In collaboration with Electronic Arts' Office of the Chief Creative Office, or OCCO, the goal of Project Heidegger is to develop a system that identifies player types with the purpose of making recommendations to gamers accurately, unobtrusively, and with a high degree of personal specificity. We’re most interested in connecting previously unlinked games, franchises, and genres, and are focusing on the co-op experience. The games serving as the basis of our research and experimentation are Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel.
Our team formed a hypothesis about what kinds of players are attracted to co-op gameplay, worked with a level designer from Visceral Games to build a custom Dead Space level to test our hypothesis and gather player metrics, conducted and analyzed comparative playtests of our Dead Space level and a complementary Army of Two level, and constructed a functioning Origin module which visualized for users the data we'd collected in the form of unique recommendations.
During this project, my responsibilities were:
Project Website
In collaboration with Electronic Arts' Office of the Chief Creative Office, or OCCO, the goal of Project Heidegger is to develop a system that identifies player types with the purpose of making recommendations to gamers accurately, unobtrusively, and with a high degree of personal specificity. We’re most interested in connecting previously unlinked games, franchises, and genres, and are focusing on the co-op experience. The games serving as the basis of our research and experimentation are Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel.
Our team formed a hypothesis about what kinds of players are attracted to co-op gameplay, worked with a level designer from Visceral Games to build a custom Dead Space level to test our hypothesis and gather player metrics, conducted and analyzed comparative playtests of our Dead Space level and a complementary Army of Two level, and constructed a functioning Origin module which visualized for users the data we'd collected in the form of unique recommendations.
During this project, my responsibilities were:
- Producing a team of seven (myself included) on a highly technical, rapidly evolving, data-driven project
- Contributing to the overall design of our theoretical recommendation system
- Collaborating in the design of a Dead Space 3 level custom-built for our testing purposes
- Serving as the primary team contact point for our client--Electronic Arts--and our ETC faculty advisors, and effectively dispersing information to the team
- Administering over 30 playtests over a two-month period to collect as significant a data sample as possible
- Developing and enforcing the team schedule
- Leading team meetings and recording and distributing team meeting notes
- Ensuring (to the best of my ability) that each team could benefit educationally and professionally from the project
