Crowdjump: Investigating a Player-Driven Platform Game

Abstract

We present Crowdjump, a player-driven online platform game: players could post ideas on how to improve the game, the platform, or any related aspect. Continuously, all players could then choose ideas which were implemented and released on a daily basis. We conducted an exploratory study with 25 players over the course of 23 days and aimed at releasing two features per day. We analyzed idea types and could show that players did not change an idea voting scheme based on up- and down-votes and were more focused on changing the game than any other component. In contrast, features that would improve the community feeling or would help to improve ideas of others were not often suggested or selected. Nonetheless, the experience was rated as quite enjoyable by players, showing the appeal of such a player-driven game design approach and the relevancy for further research in this context.