Two Can Play at this Game! Reciprocal Experience-Based Design Learning

Past students in my design courses have struggled with designing experiences for someone other than themselves. In this assignment, students took a quiz to identify what motivates them to play games, and what types of experiences they are drawn to. Students were then paired up and given each other's game motivational profile to design a game around. The students then shared their idea with the person they designed with and had a reflection exercise to integrate the feedback into their design.

The assignment and associated activities pushed the students to create for someone other than themselves, and had a surprising benefit of improved peer-connection, in which paired students self-referred to themselves and each other by their shared gamer motivations (e.g., Team Destruction, Team Design, etc.) even after the assignment was over.