Some students produced hardly anything. Some vented their frustrations and asked for more cards to write on. The latter tended to be the ones who were more design-oriented, but not always. Anyway, once they were pretty well done with writing on the cards, I told them to organise in groups. Then, they had to sort the cards by their content (so not in, say, alphabetical order).
I gave them free rein to do this. Some groups would have 20 piles. Some would have 4 or 5. I'd go around the groups, topping up their own card supply with ones written by students in previous years.
Once the card piles were fairly solid, so that they could put any new cards I gave them into an existing pile, I went through each group asking them what they called their piles. I listed all these on a whiteboard. There would usually be 20 or 30 of them, with some duplicates (more than one group might have an "interface" pile, say).
Some categories were more general examples of others ("pay to win" and "cheating", perhaps, or "art style" and "graphics"). I'd get the students to point out such categories and sub-categories, then ask for some general categories that might connect them together. Thus, we'd construct a tree of categories and sub-categories and sub-...-sub categories of things that students past and present found annoying as a player of computer games.
The result of this exercise was almost always a tree that mapped directly onto the way that computer game development studios are organised: company leadership; sales and marketing; finance and accounting; software development; software support; quality assurance; operations and IT; human resources. The development side would be subdivided into: production management; art and animation; audio; software; design. Occasionally, one or more groups might be missing, but the result was still a mirror of the organisation of a company.
Here are some sample cards to show you what they looked like:
Now the thing is, I have collected a large number of these since I started this exercise in 2011/2012, and have lot of cards as a result.
I don't know how many there are there, but as you can see, there are many.
The students were told that if they didn't want their cards to be used by future generations of students then they should throw them away. I don't think any students ever did this. As a result, all these cards are anonymised and exist with the permission of their author.
I don't know how many students were involved, although I guess you could tell from the handwriting. I don't know the demographics, except that they were all year 2 so at least 95% 0f them would be aged 19-20. I don't even know what year they were written in, although some will refer to older games by name so can be identified that way.
I did have a notion when I started this class that I could later give the cards to a student as a project of some kind, either for their undergraduate capstone or maybe for an MSc dissertation, but that proved impossible in a Computer Science department. It might be useful in a Game Studies context, though.
Anyway, I have no use for them now. If anyone out there wants them, let me know and I'll send you the collection. Otherwise, I'll be throwing them out next time I'm in my office.