There are a number of reasons why this approach is so well-regarded, even among educators who have had experience designing videogames in a large-team, industry context.
why paper prototyping works
Most ideas for videogames far outstrip the resources, time, and programming expertise available to design students. Paper prototyping means being able to test the strengths and weaknesses of a game design without any knowledge of computer programming.
Furthermore, even within a context where programmers and animators would be readily available, paper prototyping remains the fastest way to make multiple runs in the “iterative cycle” of a game’s development. Iteration entails rapidly adding and discarding elements of a design in order to flesh out what works and what doesn’t, what parts of the design should be emphasized and focused upon, whether the game has any obvious, game-breaking master strategies, etc.
And, finally, the practice can be used to show students who might have entered the field on the sole basis of their love of videogames how much the new medium has taken, and how much it still shares, with tabletop games.
What intrigues me most about the rough production of games on paper is that it has, until recently and in limited scope, been underdeveloped for the purposes of distributing editorial games. Of course, many of the paper prototypes developed in educational contexts end up being fleshed out into full-featured boardgames: Simon Winscombe and Nonny de la Peña presented their Three Generations, a boardgame about the California Eugenics movement of the early 1900s, at the 2011 Games for Change Festival, and James Taylor’s The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands, an absurdist critique of Victorian courtship, was a finalist at IndieCade 2010.
But these artifacts are singular and difficult to reproduce and distribute. Further, they attest to a long process of articulation and production. In order for a tabletop newsgame to meet the requirements of timeliness (that is, finishing production and being ready for distribution on the web while a news story is still relevant and novel), it seems like the paper prototype itself might be a promising format.
(via MediaShift Idea Lab . Why Newsgame Development Should Look to Paper Prototyping | PBS)
And, as importantly, novices and experts alike need to be able to distinguish between issues of gameplay, and issues of code. Paper prototypes help to retain that distinction. Click through for the full post, there’s more.