Capstone

Capstone Defined

A Capstone is a two semester culminating project as part of the Master’s Degree program in Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d) at Indiana University. Some schools refer to this as a Master's thesis. If you would like to find out more information check out their handbook here.
For my capstone I choose to explore advergames. More specifically how advergames can be used to affect society in a postive manner. Uncover IU is an advergame I designed to help universities recruit students.

Abstract / Design Rationale

The design history of this game stems from a university's need to recruit more prospective students. Currently, most universities use paper brochures, online websites, and interactive DVDs to recruit students. All of which are engaging at some level, yet when examined further each artifact is nothing more than an information vending machine. For the student, no experience that can be assoicated with the university has been created. Advergaming has been around since the early 1990s and is currently being utilized by militaries throughout the world for recruitment. Militaries rely on attracting new recruits as do universities rely on attracting the best and brightest students. Unfortunately, I have not found any statistics for the recruitment game America's Army, made for the United States Army, and how it has affected their recruiting. It should be noted that America’s Army has been actively updated since July 2002. If this game did not affect their recruiting efforts, I have doubts that it would still be around and gaining popularity since its relasese. Based on my assumptions from studying and analyzing America's Army and other recruitment games, there is a high probability a university recruitment game would be an effective and popular recruitment tool and utimately affect universities recruiting numbers.

Skills Used

C#, XNA, Google Sketchup, Photoshop, MS Office, InDesign, Prototypying, Heuristic Evaluation, Personas, Storyboarding, Focus Group, Requirements Gathering, Usability Studies

Associated Media