A proposal for cognitive gameplay requirements

Abstract

In cognitive gameplay, players must identify inputs, classify and integrate them in a contextually appropriate manner, then draw conclusions and provide feedback to the game engine to demonstrate their mastery of the challenge. Established requirements practices do not exist for this domain and game development teams rely upon ad hoc approaches to specification and iterative requirements-through-implementation-and-test techniques to achieve their goals. In this work we report our observations of a game development team as they prepared a game design in response to a third-party commercial request for proposal. We report upon three examples of cognitive gameplay definition and propose a definition for cognitive gameplay requirements, capable of capturing the requirements from within the case study, that can be used as the basis for further investigations.