{"title":"Game design documentation: four perspectives from independent game studios","authors":"Richard Colby, Rebekah Shultz Colby","doi":"10.1145/3321388.3321389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3321388.3321389","url":null,"abstract":"Changes in technology, development philosophy, and scale have required game designers to change how they communicate and mediate design decisions. Traditional game design studios used an extensive game design document (GDD), a meta-genre that described most of the game before it was developed. Current studies suggest that this is no longer the case. We conducted interviews at four independent game studios in order to share their game design documentation processes, revealing that, while an exhaustive GDD is rare, the meta-genre functions are preserved in a variety of mediated ways.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125287476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the book review editor","authors":"Avery C. Edenfield","doi":"10.1145/3321388.3321394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3321388.3321394","url":null,"abstract":"The role of a book review is to serve the authors by bringing visibility to (and increasing the impact of) their work. For readers, it offers a snapshot so they can decide whether or not to invest in the book. For Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ), book reviews should aim for an audience made of practitioners, teachers, and researchers. So, to resist the bifurcation between academic scholarship and practitioners, we recognize that many of our readers' concerns are shared. Books that are selected for review should be useful for scholars and practitioners alike. Similarly, reviews should aim to address shared concerns.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"152 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133446396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DJs, playlists, and community: imagining communication design through hip hop","authors":"Victor Del Hierro","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358936","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for the inclusion of Hip Hop communities in technical communication research. Through Hip Hop, technical communicators can address the recent call for TPC work to expand the field through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor communities and their practices. Using a Hip Hop community in Houston as a case study, this article discusses the way DJs operate as technical communicators within their communities. Furthermore, Hip Hop DJs build complex relationships with communities to create localized and accessible content. As technical communicators, Hip Hop practitioners can teach us to create community-based communication design for more diverse contexts.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114787660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Meng, Stephanie M. Steinhardt, Andreas Schubert
{"title":"How developers use API documentation: an observation study","authors":"Michael Meng, Stephanie M. Steinhardt, Andreas Schubert","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358937","url":null,"abstract":"Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play a crucial role in modern software engineering. However, learning to use a new API often is a challenge for developers. In order to support the learning process effectively, we need to understand how developers use documentation when starting to work with a new API. We report an exploratory study that observed developers while they solved programming tasks involving a simple API. The results reveal differences regarding developer activities and documentation usage that a successful design strategy for API documentation needs to accommodate. Several guidelines to optimize API documentation are discussed.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124531703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reducing harm by designing discourse and digital tools for opioid users' contexts: the Chicago Recovery Alliance's community-based context of use and PwrdBy's technology-based context of use","authors":"K. Bivens","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358935","url":null,"abstract":"The United States is struggling with an opioid overdose (OD) crisis. The opioid OD epidemic includes legally prescribed and illicitly acquired opioids. Regardless of if an opioid is legal, understanding users' contexts of use is essential to design effective methods for individuals to reverse opioid OD. In other words, if health information is not designed to be contextually relevant, the opioid OD health information will be unusable. To demonstrate these distinct healthcare design contexts, I extend Patient Experience Design (PXD) to include community-based and technology-based contexts of use by analyzing two case examples of the Chicago Recovery Alliance's and PwrdBy's attempts to decrease deaths by opioid OD. Next, I discuss implications of community-based and technology-based PXD within communities of opioid users, critiquing each method and suggesting four contexts of use-heuristic categories to consider when designing health communication information for users in these contexts.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128028431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of \"Rhetoric and experience architecture, by Liza Potts and Michael Salvo,\" Parlor Press: Liza Potts and Michael Salvo","authors":"L. Potts, M. Salvo, Leslie Hankey","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358939","url":null,"abstract":"From the perspective of an instructor who teaches \"Productivity and Tools\" in a Technical Communication program, many concepts from the essays in Rhetoric and Experience Architecture ring true, such as when the writers say we need to focus on human experiences that are augmented by technology. Students enter my classes, and often the technologies they seek to use are their masters. My wish is that they learn to make those technologies serve them as they go forward to design human interactions with complex systems, and that they become sensitive to multi-faceted scenes of rhetorical relations in user experience (UX). In Rhetoric and Experience Architecture, Potts and Salvo successfully foreground the rhetorical dimensions of user experience.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134166913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queering consent: design and sexual consent messaging","authors":"Avery C. Edenfield","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358938","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, sexual violence prevention and sexual consent have been a recurrent topic on college campuses and in popular media, most recently because of the success of the #MeToo movement. As a result, institutions are deeply invested in communicating consent information. This article problematizes those institutional attempts to teach consent by comparing them to an alternative grounded in queer politics. This alternative information may provide a useful path to redesigning consent information by destabilizing categories of gender, sexuality, and even consent itself.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121336900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Testing the difference between appearance and ability customization","authors":"Ryan Rogers, Laura Dunlow","doi":"10.1145/3358931.3358934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3358931.3358934","url":null,"abstract":"Gaming literature largely treats customization as a monolithic concept. This article provides three experiments that test the differences between appearance customization and ability customization. While these three studies provided a degree of replication, they examined between 105 and 147 college students in three different video game scenarios (no game play, non-human avatar, and difficult game). While the results varied slightly based on the scenario, evidence emerged that appearance customization was more likely than ability customization to enhance participant attitude toward the game and likelihood to spend money on the game. The findings of these studies should inform the types of customization used in a variety of domains and should provide guidance on the design process to offer simple and cost-effective methods to improve sales and attitudes toward content. Specifically, appearance customization is a more effective way for organizations to influence users.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134120397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Earth discourses: constructing risks and responsibilities in Chinese state and social media","authors":"Lin Dong","doi":"10.1145/3331558.3331566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3331558.3331566","url":null,"abstract":"Defining global warming as a rhetorical construct built by stakeholders, this study investigates how Chinese state and social media understand risk and responsibility regarding climate change. This multi-layer, multi-dimensional, statistical and qualitative textual analysis focuses on the ratification and implementation of the Paris Agreement and the U.S. withdrawal from it. Findings indicate that a new green public sphere led by grassroots experts and aided by lay people is burgeoning in China and changing the way people conceptualize environmental risks and engage in environmental protection. With theoretical and methodological innovations, this study contributes to the emerging field of transnational environmental communication.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129263756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Communicating activist roles and tools in complex energy deliberation","authors":"Barbara George","doi":"10.1145/3331558.3331562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3331558.3331562","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes online policy tools used by public participants to participate in complex environmental risk deliberation, specifically in terms of HVHF (high volume hydraulic fracturing). This article argues that institutional environmental deliberation tools, which are increasingly found online, are embedded in ideological discourse frames that are often at odds with public user ideologies. This article argues that environmental deliberation tools designed and created by stakeholders through participatory design models are more effective in promoting complex deliberations about environmental risk. Such participatory tools more clearly take into account environmental justice, intersectional and precautionary considerations.","PeriodicalId":191917,"journal":{"name":"Communication Design Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126335721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}