Convergence: Theory into Practice

Scope Creep: How We Saved the Game from Violet Beauregarde Syndrome

KW: When we had a rough outline of our concept, a set of best practices, and the beginnings of a script, I decided to run everything by my colleagues at Bedford and that is when scope creep became one of our challenges. Anyone who has worked on innovative new media projects probably already knows about scope creep (also known as “feature creep”). As a new media editor/producer I've gotten so intimate with the phenomenon that I've given it a nickname—Violet Beauregarde Syndrome. For those of you who don’t remember, Violet is a character in the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She is a chewing gum fanatic and can’t resist trying Wonka’s experimental “three-course-meal” gum in spite of his warnings that the prototype still has bugs. She chews through the entire virtual meal without incident, but when she gets to the desert, blueberry pie, she begins to swell and fill with blueberry juice. When she reaches critical mass, the Oompa-Loompas roll her off to the juicing room to squeeze her before she explodes. Violet’s experience in Wonka’s magical factory perfectly embodies the dynamics of scope creep. It happens when passion gets the better of you and the sweet parts are allowed to grow out of control. Soon the project is a bloated mess that has to be squeezed back down to size lest it explode.

The problem of scope creep can’t be overstated. It is almost irresistible, at the planning stage, to think of ways to make a digital product more exciting, complex, and multi-layered, (more “juicy” if you'll pardon the extended metaphor). But each add-on, however small, increases the scope, adds cost, and lengthens the schedule. The realization I had at the conference—that the game would require a strict aesthetic and an ingenious manipulation of resources—had to be policed. Ryan understood this. He had worked on other game projects and had dealt with similar issues. His experience made him amenable to my kill-joy project management philosophy. But my Bedford colleagues enthusiastically embellished my simple, affordable template at every status meeting. They wondered if players should be able to create their own avatars and enter into a multiplayer platform to experience elaborate narratives with infinite variations. To them, the game project had no edges. There was no page count, no production model, no precedent. The limitations had not been systematically put in place as they were for print media, so the issue of creep wasn’t really on anyone’s radar.

To manage creep we kept reminding ourselves (and our colleagues) that the purpose of the game was to act as an introduction to peer review. We kept the best practices in mind and would ask ourselves if we really needed this or that feature to teach those underlying concepts. We kept in mind our goal of making the game a starting point and a motivating force around which much of the learning would take place. Unlike a textbook, the game is not a comprehensive tool. It is part of a collection of learning objects with a compelling experience (the game) at its center. All the lessons did not have to be in the game, but touchpoints or bridges to those lessons did have to be there.

RM: I desperately wanted to place Peer Factor in a multi-player environment where student players could give each other feedback based upon the best practices we taught in the game. At the same time, however, I realized the enormous production costs associated with that desire. MMORPGs are extremely costly to develop and produce, and ours would need to facilitate the exchange of sometimes large amounts of text. My work on another project, Aristotle’s Assassins, helped keep my goals for Peer Factor in check.

Aristotle’s Assassins is a game modification of the popular computer game Neverwinter Nights, and it currently consists of about 5 or 6 hours of gameplay set in Ancient Greece. The player controls a musician, a bard, through the murky and dangerous political climate of what was 4th century B.C.E. Greece. The player—perhaps unwittingly—becomes an accomplice in the assassination of Aristotle, and must choose a political alliance among the democratic faction, the aristocratic faction, and a bizarre and terrorist theocracy.

It has been far from an easy, playful task to see the realization of these 5 or 6 hours of gameplay. It has taken numerous design and preparatory hours across two teams at different institutions—the original design was planned by a team at the University of Arizona and implemented to a large degree by a team at Utah State University—to draft the narrative, choose a game engine, and to begin to build some of the areas. The implementation alone has been costly, consisting of at least 2500 laborer hours (to date), including 2 undergraduate technical writers, 3 undergraduate graphic artists or modelers, 1 graduate student implementer and project manager, and my time overseeing multiple aspects of the project. The project budget has grown to over $30,000 for equipment—high-end 3d modeling software and computers to run it on—designer and programmer labor, project management costs, and university space.

The point is that Aristotle’s Assassins has exhibited a production cost of 500 laborer hours and $6,000 for each one hour of gameplay. That’s 8.3 laborer hours and $100 for each minute of gameplay. And we did not have to build the software to design the game; we were just modifying the existing game to suit our educational purposes.