My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
Continued from yesterday, here is March 18 of the 2016 Game Developers Conference, in tweets:
VR is still there, main story is Microsoft hiring dancers for their party. And then, experimental gameplay workshop and a fan giving “David Brevik money to make up for pirating Diablo back in the 90s”.
Continued from yesterday, here is March 17 of the 2016 Game Developers Conference, in tweets:
VR, Iwata and the expo continue to dominate. New upcoming themes: Women. Rez. Slides.
Continued from yesterday, here is March 16 of the 2016 Game Developers Conference, in tweets:
VR wins again. The Game Developers Choice Awards and the IGF awards make their mark (“congrats”), as does the Satoru Iwata tribute. Marketeers have discovered twitter, hence encouragements to stop by a booth for a giveaway.
VR is so far the only theme to stand out. (Some years have clear themes, some don’t.)
A few years ago I did word clouds based on Game Developer Conference tweets as a quick way of gauging the main themes. Why not do it again? I also get to see how the Twitter API has changed since last time.
Here is Monday March 13th, before the conference started. General arrival and anticipation:
Tuesday March 14th, summits and VR conference. No big themes, but VR and Ubisoft show up (Ubisoft mainly for their lounge, though):
Wednesday March 15th, more summits, VR, and the announcement of PlayStation VR. Complete domination by Sony (President Andrew is Andrew House, president of Sony):
Will post the coming days as well.
I am interviewing Katherine Isbister on the MIT Press website about her new book How Games Move Us (in the Playful Thinking series).
Feel free to share: I am now head of the Game Art, Design and Development master’s program at KADK in Copenhagen. Application deadline for the 2016-2018 class is March 1st. Please join us!
Applications are now open for the Game Art, Design and Development master’s program at KADK – the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design in Copenhagen.
This is a two-year program running from September 1, 2016. The application deadline is March 1st.
Game Art, Design and Development is a master’s-level game program with an emphasis on visual design, while giving students the technical and design skills needed to build game prototypes and full games, as well as allowing for theoretical projects.
During the two-year program, students will continually be making games, while learning graphical design, 3D modeling and animation, Unity3D, game design, game studies and video game history. As part of the program, students partake in a full-semester large game production with students from multiple universities.
The program prepares graduates for a career in the game industry and beyond, either as entrepreneurs or as employees.
Who can apply?
The master’s program in Game Art, Design & Development is in English, and is open to all students, Danish and International, with a relevant bachelor’s degree in fields such as graphical design, game design, or 3D modeling.
More about the program
To read more about the program, go to the website or email program head Jesper Juul, jjuul@kadk.dk
https://kadk.dk/en/programme/game-art-design-and-development
How to apply
Please find application details on the admissions page
https://kadk.dk/en/admission-ma-design
Tuition
Tuition information at https://kadk.dk/en/tuition-fee-0
Why study at KADK in Copenhagen?
KADK is a leading academy in Scandinavia in the fields of architecture, design and conservation. It is located centrally in Copenhagen.
Copenhagen is a hub for video game development, with a vibrant English-language game development community, and home to both small and bigger companies such as Sybo games, IO Interactive and Unity3D.
Remember when the current console generation was being launched, and there was a widespread idea, also shared by me, that the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U were going to fail in the face of tablets, mobile phones, indie games, and all? That the new generation was a “prayer to stop time“?
And many articles on “Why consoles gaming is dying“, “Consoles are dying“?
And yet here we are. Ars Technica has an article comparing sales across console generations, with the current generation doing much better than the previous one, on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
I suspect that the story was that many critics, myself included, were personally jaded by console hardware, and much more interested in indie and experimental games than in the latest military shooter. But our sentiments just weren’t widely that shared. People still want new games on new hardware, even if they only look marginally better than those of the previous generation. The PS4 is slick, and the share button is worth paying for. You also buy a new console because that is where the games are going to be.
Also, cloud gaming never took off (and I suspect it won’t due to latency issues).
Yes, you can be wrong.
PS. And Super Mario Maker is also an exhilarating experience.
For your very real, theoretical pleasure:
| Editorial — Game Studies In Media Res: Beginning From The Middle-State | |
| Michael Hancock, Steve Wilcox | |
| Editorial introduction to this special guest-edited issue of Loading. |
| The Tyranny of Realism: Historical accuracy and politics of representation in Assassin’s Creed III | |
| Adrienne Shaw | |
| Like other games in its series, Assassin’s Creed III (AC3) is heavily invested in a wellresearched, nuanced representation of historical… |
| Disability, Neurological Diversity, and Inclusive Play: An Examination of the Social and Political Aspects of the Relationship between Disability and Games | |
| Sarah Gibbons | |
| This article explores existing connections between disability studies and game studies, and suggests how the two fields might greater inform each… |
| Renegade Sex: Compulsory Sexuality and Charmed Magic Circles in the Mass Effect series | |
| Meghan Blythe Adams | |
| This article examines portrayals of sexuality in video games, particularly in terms of the increasing inclusion of queer and non-normative… |
| Cyborg Games: Videogame Blasphemy and Disorientation | |
| Elise Vist | |
| This paper describes the genre of “cyborg games,” using examples of independent videogames (such as Gone Home) to illustrate the genre, as well… |
| Going Beyond the Game: Development of Gamer Identities Within Societal Discourse and Virtual Spaces | |
| Jan Grooten, Rachel Kowert | |
| What is a ‘gamer’? And what does it mean to be a gamer today? This paper will address these questions through a theoretical discussion of the… |
| The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games | |
| Dominic Arsenault, Pierre-Marc Côté, Audrey Larochelle | |
| This paper lays out a unified framework of the ergodic animage, the rule-based and interactiondriven part of visual representation in video games…. |