Author: Jesper

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 5 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday. The final day of Game Developers Conference 2011  (March 4th) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: Ron Gilbert’s talk on Maniac Mansion, Will Wright’s talk, Brian Moriarty’s talk, which helped art (as in “are video games art”) trend. Only game company today is Nintendo.

I will do an overview of the entire week in a few days.

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 4 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday: Game Developers Conference 2011, day #4 (March 3rd) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: From the Twitter helicopter view, this day looks almost content-free. Main words are “party”, “awesome”, “great”, “talk”. Actual themes show up as Chris Crawford, Eric Chahi (developer of Another World). Below that, Bejeweled and Populous (Molyneux’s postmortem). Only platforms today are the iPhone and the 3DS. The experimental gameplay sessions and the rants also make it, as does Doom.

Again, notice the conspicuous absence of buzz for big-budget console games.

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 3 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday: Game Developers Conference 2011, day #3 (March 2nd) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: The Nintendo keynote gets the top tweets (Iwata, 3ds, Netflix, Mario, Zelda). Then awards, Minecraft. Battlefield 3 barely makes it to the list.

It’s interesting how the consoles have so far been nearly absent in tweets. Wii and Playstation are tiny specks in the cloud. The buzz so far is clearly around social games and cell phones – the 3DS is the first dedicated game hardware to trend so far.

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 1 on Twitter

First: I am not in San Francisco for this year’s Game Developers Conference. I think this is the first one I am missing since 2002.

I was briefly considering whether one can fake a GDC presence using Twitter, but decided against it. (“Saw you at the Google talk. I was in the back.”)

This does not prevent me from following the conference on Twitter and using Wordle to do a word cloud like in previous years.

Here is Game Developers Conference 2011, day 1 – Monday February 28th. Top themes so far: Angry Birds, Social, Indie, Gamification.

 

Second No Quarter exhibit at the NYU Game Center

In case you are in New York City in May:

The NYU Game Center is proud to announce the second annual No Quarter Exhibition, featuring new games by Terry Cavanagh, Ramiro Corbetta, and Charley Miller, as well as a showing of Clock by Luke O’ Conner.

One of the primary missions of the Game Center at NYU is to foster the development of creative and groundbreaking independent games. To this end we started the No Quarter Exhibition last year by commissioning three games from independent game makers, including the IGF nominated Nidhogg by Mark ‘messhof’ Essen, as well as Recurse by Matt Parker, and Deep Sea by Robin Arnott. You can find pictures from last year’s event on this link.

This year we’re continuing the tradition by commissioning new games from Terry Cavanagh, the creator of VVVVVV and Don’t Look Back, Ramiro Corbetta, a game designer on the IGF Award winning Glow Artisan, and Charley Miller, a New York-based designer of board and big games. We’ll also be showcasing Clock, by Luke O’ Conner, which premiered at the New York indie arcade, BabyCastles.

The new games will developed all semester and then debuted at the No Quarter Exhibition opening party on May 12th, where they will be on display and available to the public for the rest of the month.

Game Studies 11/01: Special Issue on Game Reward Systems

The new special issue of Game Studies on Game Reward Systems is out. This issue was edited by Mikael Jakobsson and Olli Sotamaa.

Editorial

Editorial.

by guest editors Mikael Jakobsson and Olli Sotamaa

The guest editors introduce this special issue on game reward systems by discussing its origin, the focus, the need for further studies, and by presenting the included papers.

Articles

by Christopher Moore
Virtual millinery items were introduced as achievement based rewards for players of Team Fortress 2 in 2009. With attention to these highly sought after items, this article is concerned with promoting attention to the many ‘affects’ involved in the design and play of First Person Shooter (FPS) games.
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by Jason Begy, Mia Consalvo
Multiple frameworks for examining the motivations and achivements of MMO players exist, but many are based on assumptions about what kinds of fictional worlds these games contain. Using examples from the casual MMO Faunasphere, this paper argues that any such examinaton must start with the particular game’s fiction and rule systems.
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by Mikael Jakobsson
Xbox 360 achievements are explored through casuals, hunters and completists. The dichotomy between MMOs and console games is questioned by framing Xbox Live as a MMO. The ambiguity towards achievements is seen as a result of deeply rooted ideas of what games should be; while at the same time appealing to some of games’ most fundamental pleasures.
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by Alison Gazzard
By exploring ideas surrounding exploration, obstacles and avatar death, this article seeks to understand the various ways in which both space and time create reward systems in the gameworld. New categories of rewards are defined in relation to how goals may be constructed within different genres of videogames.
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by Ben Medler
This article presents a framework for understanding player dossiers, data-driven visual reports comprised of a player’s gameplay data. The framework describes how dossier systems validate player motivations and contextualize recorded gameplay allowing players to analyze or share the resulting data.
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by Paul Williams, Keith V. Nesbitt, Ami Eidels, David Elliott
This paper outlines the development of a top-down shooter designed to investigate the psychological phenomenon known as the ‘hot hand’. Such a game requires a well-balanced risk and reward structure. We chronicle the iterative tuning process, focusing on quantitative analysis of how players adapt their risk taking under varying reward structures.
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by Douglas Wilson
This article presents a case study of designing an intentionally “broken” console party game. Using Henning Eichberg’s concept of the “impossible game” and Bernie DeKoven’s notion of the “Well-Played game,” the article argues that “self-effacing” games of a certain type can help nurture a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play.

A History of Choose Your Own Adventure

Slate has a nice write-up on the history of choose your own adventure books.

As usual, the article has a reference to Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, but there is more detail to the history than I have seen before. I did not know (or had forgotten) that B.F. Skinner was part of the story.

A more prosaic early attempt at interactive texts were psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “programmed learning” books that culminated with Doubleday’s interactive TutorText series, which debuted in 1958 with the thrilling The Arithmetic of Computers. Basically an extended multiple-choice quiz, a correct answer sent you forward in the text while an incorrect answer sent you to a page explaining just how wrong you were. But all of these efforts were eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in 1969.

Julio Cortázar’s 1963 Hopscotch novel goes unmentioned though. And you could have discussed OuLiPo. I can’t help but wonder if there are more non-English branching narratives that we have neglected.

(Via Nick Montfort.)