Innovation in Gaming: A Literature Review of Critical Success Factors - Essay Sample

Literature Review

Overview

Over the last few decades, the gaming industry has witnessed unprecedented growth, with more firms venturing into the market. Succeeding in this highly competitive environment requires game developers to offer high-quality games and their consoles in the market. Identifying critical success factors of innovation is imperative in maintaining a competitive advantage for companies in this sector. In order to study the role of innovation in the context of Nintendo Switch, the researcher first conducted a review of the technological innovation literature. This review provides the researcher with an overview of the research in this field and an opportunity to identify research gaps as well as evaluate the usefulness of previous studies to this research.

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Game Design Document Management

The game design document (GDD) refers to the output of the pre-production stage of the game development process. The GDD is used by the game development team who develops and edits it to organize their efforts and development process. Most researchers have explored the importance of the GDD and its management in the development process. Asuncion et al. (2011) emphasized the significance of the GDD by investigating the importance of requirements engineering in the development process. The study involved interviewing 27 software and hardware engineers from different game developing companies to get an insight into their process. Asuncion et al (2011) concluded that the engineers used approaches that are not comparable to requirements engineering. Instead, the methods were similar to requirements management. In a research with similar objectives, Assink suggested issues rooted in the transformation of pre-production document to final product are the main reason why many games fail. He proposed to game development companies to use game prototyping to eliminate such problems hence better game designs. GDD is a crucial tool in gaining a better understanding of the game design process. Design document also uses cognitive game development to explain the definition of gameplay. Developing good quality games requires proper management of game design documents. Hence, this study identifies GDD as one of its independent variable.

Game Asset Management

Game assets refers to anything that adds to the visual appearance of a game such as music, dialogue, sound effects, and artwork. Because of increased competition in the industry, gaming companies include hardware components as part of game assets. Much of existing literature on game assets focuses audio processing, animation, and content generation. According to Rieber (2005), developers consider animation to be a vital asset because it affects the performance of a gaming console. Studies conducted on animation maintain that different genres of games should use different animation models. For instance, Pena (2011) conducted an investigation into the better animation model for multiplayer games. The research compared two characteristics of animation models including memory load and frames per second. Their study found that bone-based or skeletal frameworks are better than keyframe models. Rieber reviewed the use of 3D accelerators common in the latest gaming consoles for graphics animation. By evaluating a variety of graphics cards available for gaming companies, the researchers revealed the benefits and limitations of application program interfaces (APIs) such as DirectX and OpenGL. Modern gaming consoles have pre-installed modules for asset management. From the two studies reviewed, this research considers game asset management to be a crucial independent variable that impacts the development process.

Quality of Game Architecture

Game architecture aims at providing support during gameplay by defining challenges through identifying constraints, exploration, and testing. In this sense, game architecture refers to the blueprint for the primary sophisticated hardware and software modules. Developers use architecture to perform trade-off analysis, delineate design, and assess system properties. While various aspects of the game architecture have been researched several times, only Sánchez et al.’s study has explored the importance of game architecture in the development process. They established that software architecture is crucial in achieving modifiability and high performance. According to the researchers, the game development process uses game-specific engines and middleware. These findings are in line with Bosser’s research which identifies the features of a reliable game architecture including reusability, modularity, tractability, and robustness. Game developers can make use of various development frameworks to define their architecture. Like Bosser, Keith and Clinton focused on the development framework focusing on vital features that the proposed frameworks should have. They named three subsystems including game logic, graphic, and input processing systems. The researchers advise game developers to separate these subsystems to work independently.

Additionally, they proposed a model-view-controller pattern for game architecture. The authors created the pattern by dividing the application into the three components reflecting the three subsystems. Ultimately, the code connected with each subsystem’s logic will operate in the desired manner. Therefore, game developers can use the collaboration among the different components in their development process.

Innovation and Consumer Behavior

Consumer habit is defined as the extent to which potential consumers of a product tend to perform automatically because of learning. According to Shifeng (2009), the degree of interaction between technology and its users and its familiarity determines consumer habits. In this sense, the prior use of products indicates a strong predictor of consumer habit. Arts and colleagues (2011), maintained that habit reflects the duration of time from the first use of the product. Accordingly, the researchers developed a measurement scale of 3. Scale 1 represents the lowest (The use of a Nintendo console is a habit), Scale 2 indicates addiction, and scale 3 showing dependence on a product. Research illustrates that companies that accept and use innovation are likely to grow considerably if their use matches the preexisting consumer habits. An example of a technological product that uses innovation that is based on existing habits is the Nintendo Switch console. When playing with the console, people usually depend on body movements that are natural to them including rolling a bowling ball or swinging a tennis racket. As mentioned earlier, game developers are encouraged to use the prototyping approach which is also known as a learning-cost view. However, Vogt (2013) proposes a benefit-based view where an innovation encourages its developers to actively explore more of its usage creating an experience of insight. The authors cite Nintendo Switch’s motion-sensitive remote to be an example of innovation where active exploration high-quality improves the product experience.

Summary

After reviewing the literature in technological innovation, this study identifies Game Design Document Management, Game Asset Management, Quality of Game Architecture as the primary success factors of gaming consoles. Proper management of the GDD positively affects the overall game development process, while Game Asset Management enhances the process. Quality of game architecture has a positive impact on the enhanced process. Innovation also impacts customer perception of a product thereby effectively influencing the customer’s behavior.

Bibliography

Aleem, Saiqa, Luiz Fernando Capretz, and Faheem Ahmed. "Critical success factors to improve the game development process from a developer’s perspective." Journal of Computer Science and Technology 31, no. 5 (2016): 925-950. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04293

Arts, Joep WC, Ruud T. Frambach, and Tammo HA Bijmolt. "Generalizations on consumer innovation adoption: A meta-analysis on drivers of intention and behavior." International Journal of Research in Marketing 28, no. 2 (2011): 134-144.

Assink, Marnix. "Inhibitors of disruptive innovation capability: a conceptual model." European journal of innovation management 2006.

Asuncion, Hazeline, David Socha, Kelvin Sung, Scott Berfield, and Wanda Gregory. "Serious game development as an iterative user-centered agile software project." In Proceedings of the 1st International workshop on games and software engineering, pp. 44-47. 2011. https://gpreview.kingborn.net/342000/948ba906a3694f559815d2a03a74db71.pdf

Bosser, Anne-Gwenn. "Massively multi-player games: Matching game design with technical design." In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, pp. 263-268. 2014. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1067343.1067378

Keith, Clinton. Agile game development with Scrum. Pearson Education, 2010. https://gpreview.kingborn.net/342000/948ba906a3694f559815d2a03a74db71.pdf

Pena, Jorge. "Collaborative framework for browser games development." In Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Open Source and Design of Communication, pp. 65-72. 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2016716.2016734

Rieber, Lloyd P. "Multimedia learning in games, simulations, and microworlds." The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning 2005: 549-567. http://lrieber.coe.uga.edu/mayer2005/

Sánchez, Jose Luis González, Natalia Padilla Zea, and Francisco L. Gutiérrez. "From usability to playability: Introduction to player-centred video game development process." In International Conference on Human Centered Design, pp. 65-74. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.

Shifeng, Mu. "Creating Discontinuous Innovation: The Case of Nintendo's Wii." PhD diss., 2009. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48631958.pdf

Vogt, Dennis. "Innovation Perception from a Customer Perspective." PhD diss., University of St. Gallen, 2013. http://verdi.unisg.ch/www/edis.nsf/SysLkpByIdentifier/4189/$FILE/dis4189.pdf