Not just users: mapping the range of user roles in open development games projects

Abstract

Open video game development systems provide a useful model for designing an engaging user experience (UX) research project. While UX research has typically framed people simultaneously as research subjects and users of a technology, some work has also problematized each of these categorizations. For instance, UX practitioners have questioned the framing of people as generic users, and participatory design has repositioned participants as co-owners of the results of research. This article offers a complimentary perspective by applying the concept of user roles to the activity of participation in open development. Open development, which is the prolonged process where incomplete games are publicly released and iterated on based on player feedback, is fundamentally a UX research process. In open development projects, user-participants adopt a variety of roles, including acting as consumers, players, bug reporters, player support services, community moderators, reviewers, developer advocates, playtesters, quality assurance testers, content creators, and ideators. This paper builds definitions for the user-participant roles and offers examples from the online forums for an open development game. Finally, it argues that we can design communications systems to support these roles.