Participatory Design

When a bunch of musicians get together and start jamming, they’re engaging in a form of participatory design. Everyone has ideas, which they offer up for approval to everyone else. Some ideas work, some don’t work, and others suggest better ideas. Computer programmers hacking together work the same way: Someone types, other people make suggestions, changes are made in the light of these suggestions, new suggestions are made. It’s an editing process undertaken (ideally) by members of a spiritual community ¹.

Participatory design is good because everyone gets involved, everyone can contribute, and everyone’s contribution is acknowledged. It helps build a sense of community, and gives all participants an investment in the final product. It’s ideal for virtual worlds, then?

At the design team level, yes. Final approval must formally be made by one (lead) designer, but this is essentially a rubber-stamping of the consensus opinion ². Brainstorming works.

Extending participatory design beyond the design team, however, is another matter entirely. Designers have always been open to ideas from players once their virtual world has entered beta testing, but what about before then? It can be very difficult to manage; in particular, inviting prospective players of a virtual world to participate in design increases the number of contributors by several orders of magnitude. The design team itself can either act in concert as a single unit, or split along individual lines. It’ll usually be the former, because otherwise players will try to play off designers against one another. However, that’s not the only reason they may do it. I’ll explain….

Why would designers want to get players involved in design? There are several laudable grounds for doing so:

• It allows players to feel they have an investment in the virtual world.

• Ten thousand minds are better than ten.

• Designers can act as culture seeds.

• Players feel influential—they really can make a difference.

• If players understand the design process more, they won’t make knee-jerk objections to things that superficially annoy them.

• It draws players into a community. There also are some less laudable reasons:

• Players can be manipulated into accepting suggestions that they may otherwise have found unpalatable.

• Designers can accept “new” suggestions they had already thought of, tricking players into thinking they’re participating when they’re not.

• Designers get to pick the choicest fruits of players’ unpaid endeavors.

The cynical view (and players can be very cynical) is that the whole effort is primarily a public relations exercise. Nothing important is ever discussed, unless it’s to get players to suggest a preferred solution in order that criticism will be deflected when it proves unpopular once implemented. After all, although some players’ ideas will be excellent, most will be unusable (jaded, inconsistent, off-the-wall, dull, unimplementable, copyright someone else, and so on); it’s a simple matter when posting a question to wait for the “correct” response to appear and then seize on it as a great, original idea. Players participating in design are at best sounding boards and at worst betrayers of the players yet to come. In this context, it’s easier for designers to stage-manage participatory design if they work as a unit than if they don’t.

This scornful view of participatory design has, fortunately, yet to gain a strong hold of the player population. Participatory design does work, and can bring substantial benefits. It will be used extensively for Star Wars Galaxies, where it will probably work well. On one great test—players’ coming to understand that newbies can’t be allowed to start with a Jedi character—its advantages are particularly clear ³.

Its long-term future is cloudier, however. As with player content creation, there are legal issues concerning the “rights” to aspects of a design. If a scriptwriter pitched a movie concept to a director, they would be calling in the lawyers were that concept to appear as a movie five years later without even a credit (let alone payment) ⁴. Why should a player of a virtual world who pitches a design concept receive no recognition (professional or monetary) when it’s used?

The response that it’s “advice freely given” only goes so far. It may, for example, be material that already exists in some other virtual world to which the designers of that world hold copyright. Besides, even though the assumption that the inclusion of your idea in a design is reward enough holds sway at the moment, this will not necessarily always be the case. Were a new, high-profile virtual world to pay for any player-suggested ideas it used, the situation could well change. Under such circumstances, full participatory design could be hard to apply effectively.