Category: games

Fall 2011 classes at the NYU Game Center

Some news about classes and the new minor at the New York University Game Center this fall.

I will be teaching a new “Advanced Topics in Game Studies” class which explores foundational issues in game studies in combination with a current topic (in this case “gamification”). (Details below.) For those interested and in the area, but not at NYU, PhD students at one of the schools in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium should find it straightforward to sign up.

Game Design Minor

Starting this fall semester, we are proud to announce that students will be able to get a Minor in Game Design from the Game Center! This degree requires are three Game Center classes and two electives from our approved course list. Additionally, elective courses that are related to games may also be approved by Game Center faculty on a case by case basis. For a full list of pre-approved elective courses visit our website here: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/courses If are interested in taking the minor, or have any other questions, please contact gamecenter@nyu.edu.

Fall Classes from the Game Center

We’re excited to introduce three new courses being offered by the Game Center! Along with Thinking about Games and Introduction to Game Design, we’ll be offering a large lecture course focused on game literacy (Games 101), a course which engages students with the current topics of Game Studies (Advanced Topics in Game Studies), and a game development course that will allow students to practice the skill of modding in small teams in a 3-D engine. (Game Development: Modding). For more information about any of our classes, see the text below.

Games 101

Instructor: Frank Lantz
Course Number: OART-UT 1600
Meeting Monday 6:20PM-9PM
Recitation Times (Students choose one section) Tuesday from 12:30PM – 3:15PM, Wednesday from 2:00PM – 4:45PM, Wednesday from 2:00PM – 7:40PM, Thursday 4:55PM – 7:40PM
Games 101 is the foundational course for the NYU Game Center. The focus of Games 101 is game literacy – a shared understanding of games as complex cultural and aesthetic objects. The class will incorporate lectures, discussion, readings, and writing assignments, but the primary activity of the class is critical play – playing games in order to better understand and appreciate them. The class will cover games on and off the computer, including classic and contemporary board and card games, sports, and games on the PC, internet, and consoles.

Introduction to Game Design

Instructor: Eric Zimmerman
Course Number: OART-UT 1605/2605
Meeting Tuesday from 9:30AM -12:15PM
Lab Time Tuesday from 6:20PM – 9:00PM
This class is an intensive, hands-on workshop addressing the complex challenges of game design. The premise of the class is that all games, digital and non-digital, share common fundamental principles, and that understanding these principles is an essential part of designing successful games. Learning how to create successful non-digital games provides a solid foundation for the development of digital games.
In this workshop, students will; analyze existing digital and non-digital games, taking them apart to understand how they work as interactive systems; create a number of non-digital games in order to master the basic design principles that apply to all games regardless of format; critique each other’s work, developing communication skills necessary for thriving in a collaborative field; explore the creative possibilities of this emerging field from formal, social, and cultural perspectives; develop techniques for fast-prototyping and iterative design that can be successfully applied to all types of interactive projects.

Thinking About Games

Instructor: Charles J Pratt
Course Number: OART-UT 1606/2606
Meeting Tuesday from 3:30PM-6:10PM
This class is an overview of the field of games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion.
The course will prepare the student to: Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective, as well as the components of a game; Apply new theories and evaluate them critically; Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts; Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods.

Advanced Topics in Game Studies

Instructor: Jesper Juul
Course Number: OART-UT 1611/2611
Meeting Thursday 2:00PM – 4:45PM
Advanced Topics in Game Studies is a research-focused course that examines methodological and foundational issues in the study of video games. In addition, a current topic relating to video game culture, design, or theory will be explored every semester. The class is thereby focused on allowing students to actively participate in the development of video game theory, with specific attention to how video game studies evolve as a theoretical field, and how it interacts with changes in the design and culture of video games. The topic of this semester is is “gamification” – the use of game design in non-game contexts such as teaching, politics, or business.

Game Development: Modding

Instructor: Katherine Isbister
Course Number: OART-UT 1610/2610
Meeting Thursday from 9:30AM – 12:15PM
Lab Time Wednesday from 4:55PM – 8:25PM
In this course, students get practice building game play experiences through a series of short-cycle exercises. Students work in small teams to create and tune gaming experiences in a range of game genres, using the game engine that they will use in Game Studio (a semester-long project class). The course introduces students to production roles, playtesting, considerations of audience and platform, and other practical concerns in building games.

Unfortunate Game Events Seminar, May 19th 2011

The Unfortunate Game Events Seminar
-A Seminar on Failures, Tragedies, and other Unpleasant Aspects of Games

I have the pleasure of inviting you to the Unfortunate Game Events seminar on May 19th, 2011 at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen.

The Unfortunate Game Events seminar explores the dark side of games: It is clear that games are not simply “fun”, but what does it mean when games are decidedly unpleasant? How and why do we deal with failure in video games? Does the structure of game necessitate straightforward heroics, or can games contain tragic content? Have the introduction of usability methods into game design and the expansion of the game audience led to games becoming too easy? How can these lessons from games be applied to other types of design?

The seminar is free, but space is limited, so reserve a seat by emailing seminar@jesperjuul.net. Hope to see you there!

 

The seminar is sponsored by the Danish Centre for Design Research.

Up-to-date program and directions are available at http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/unfortunate-game-events

 

Preliminary Program

12:30   Coffee, registration

13:00   Welcome by Jesper Juul

13:15   Miguel Sicart & Douglas Wilson: Aesthetics of Abusive Game Design, From Kaizo Mario to Marina Abramović

13:55   Sara Mosberg Iversen: Failure in a broad challenge perspective

14:25   Jesper Juul: Video Games, the Art of Failure

14:55   Break

15:10   Lisbeth Klastrup: Death in Games and Social Stories

15:40   Jaakko Steenros: Tragedy and Live Action Role-playing Games

16:10   Aki Järvinen: Social Disasters: The Role of Failure in Social Games

16:40-17:00:    Final discussion

Seminar Directions

Seminar location: Auditorium 5, Philip de Langes Allé 10, DK-1435 Copenhagen C, Denmark.

Directions at http://dkds.dk/skolen/find_vej

Speaker bios

Sara Mosberg Iversen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Literature, Culture and Media at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Her research interest is new media with a particular focus on digital games. Currently she is investigating how players of The Sims 3 construct, modify and play with place. Her earlier work focused more on digital games and the ways particular designs may facilitate and motivate different types of experiences.

Aki Järvinen is Creative Director at Digital Chocolate’s Helsinki studio. His PhD on emotions and video games, Games Without Frontiers was completed at University of Tampere in 2008. He blogs regularly on Games for Social Networks.

Lisbeth Klastrup is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where she is affiliated with the Digital Culture and Mobile Communication Research Group. She researches internet communication and culture, gameworlds and mobile communication, in particular social media formats. Currently, she is focusing on forms of personal storytelling (such as blogs or status updates) and user-generated content.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist currently at The Danish Design School and New York University Game Center. He has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His books Half-Real and A Casual Revolution were published by MIT Press in 2005 and 2009. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.

Miguel Sicart is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book The Ethics of Computer Games, based on his doctoral work, came out on MIT Press in 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.

Jaakko Stenros (M.Soc.Sc.) works as a game researcher and a doctoral candidate at Game Research Lab (University of Tampere). He is an author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009), as well as an editor of three books on role-playing games, Nordic Larp (2010), Playground Worlds (2008) and Beyond Role and Play (2004). He lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Douglas Wilson is a PhD candidate at IT University of Copenhagen’s Center for Computer Games Research, where he teaches and researches game design. He is also a co-founder of the Copenhagen Game Collective, a multi-gender, multi-national game design collective based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Wii 2 in 2012, Playstation and Xbox in 2014

The end of this unusually long console cycle is visible, with Nintendo today announcing that the Wii successor is coming in 2012; Sony and Microsoft “sources” saying that they are holding out until 2014.

Still an interesting time: now that the traditional 5-year console cycle is no longer set in stone, what will happen? Is there room for another console cycle based on (technically) better graphics? Will physical distribution go away? Is AAA development sustainable?

As I like to point out, budgets have traditionally been doubling for every console generation, but exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely. If the PS4 has graphic capabilities that require a doubling of budgets, how many Red Dead Redemption*2 games will investment money be willing to support? And if there are only few games that exploit a PS4 properly, will people buy one? And if too few consoles are sold, how will platform holders recoup their investment?

The sound you hear is from an army of analysts working their spreadsheets.

Digital Culture & Education on Games and Second Language Acquisition in Asia

New issue of Digital Culture & Education on Digital Games and Second Language Acquisition in Asia.

 

Digital Culture & Education: Special Issue on Digital games and second language acquisition in Asia

-Guest edited by Michael Thomas

 

Articles

Learn English or die: The effects of digital games on interaction and willingness to communicate in a foreign language

-Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana

 

Learner autonomy development through digital gameplay

-Alice Chik

 

Digital gaming and second language development: Japanese learners interactions in a MMORPG

-Mark Peterson

 

Teaching and learning English through digital game projects

-Jonathan deHaan

 

Book Review

Nicola Whitton’s (2010) Learning with digital games: A practical guide to engaging students in higher education.

-Darren Elliot

Games are Getting Shorter (and that is Good)

Ars Technica has a good discussion of how and why games are getting shorter.

I do think that (single-player) video games still tend to be too long. When was the last time you completed a game in which major parts didn’t feel like filler?

The article notes the problem of time, which I also discussed in A Casual Revolution: However much players would like to put 40 hours into a game, there is only a tiny audience with that kind of time. Here are the completion rates for various recent games, from the article. (Note the Red Dead Redemption 7% completion rate!)

[Note: The graph should probably be titled Completion achievement rate – it represents the percentage of users who have earned the achievement for game completion – which means the percentage of user who completed the game (rather than % of achievements earned that it may sound like).]

Game completion rate

I like to joke that games should have twice-as-expensive but quarter-as-long Executive Editions for players with busy lives and more disposable income.

Part of the issue is that we may intuitively feel that a longer game gives more bang for the buck, even if we end up not completing it because all the filler is so uninspired. As the article says, hopefully we are starting to move beyond that.

Gamification Backlash Roundup

[Scroll to the comments to see the articles that I missed.]

Following the release of Reality is Broken and the appearance of dedicated gamification conferences and books, it is fair to say that the gamification backlash is in full swing. (Such is the natural order of the world.)

Chronologically,

Long before anyone thought of the word gamification, Edward Deci published the paper “Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18, no. 1 (1971), arguing that external monetary rewards decreases our intrinsic motivation for a task. (Note that this is slightly different from what Kohn argues later.)

“Results indicate that (a) when money was used as an external reward, intrinsic motivation tended to decrease; whereas (b) when verbal reinforcement and positive feedback were used, intrinsic motivation tended to increase.”

*

In a way, the most direct pre-gamification & anti-gamification argument comes from Alfie Kohn’s 1993 book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, which argues against the use of points, stars, and so on in companies.

“Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run.”

*

Then came Jesse Schell’s 2010 DICE Talk.

*

A few people picked up on the question of motivation and external rewards:

I wrote about Kohn and a 1973 study, arguing that there is a problem with external rewards: Demotivated by External Rewards.

“Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.”

*

Chris Hecker gave a very thorough talk, Achievements Considered Harmful?, at the 2010 Game Developers Conference.

“For interesting tasks,

  1. Tangible, expected, contingent rewards reduce free-choice intrinsic motivation, and
  2. Verbal, unexpected, informational feedback, increases free-choice and self-reported intrinsic motivation.”

*

I think the first multi-pronged, post-gamification & anti-gamification criticism I saw was Sebastian Deterding’s Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents:

“Games are not fun because they are games, but when they are well-designed.”

*
My own comment was about The Dangers of Games in the Workplace:

“Much of the financial crisis was due to the application of game-like design principles to work, where employees were forced to work toward short-term goals that were detrimental to the health of their company and the economy at large.”

*

Steven Poole remains unconvinced of the motivations behind gamification:

“Does something in your life suck? Then turn it into a game! This is postmodernism’s infantile version of the consolatory techniques of stoic philosophy.”

*

Heather Chaplin doesn’t want to be a superhero:

“I believe whole-heartedly that wonderful things can happen when people play. But gamification advocates do not preach the beauty and power of play. Perhaps without knowing it, they’re selling a pernicious worldview that doesn’t give weight to literal truth. Instead, they are trafficking in fantasies that ignore the realities of day-to-day life. This isn’t fun and games—it’s a tactic most commonly employed by repressive, authoritarian regimes.”

*

There are three main threads to this criticism:

  1. Deci, Kohn and Hecker warn about the problems of extrinsic rewards as demotivators.
  2. Poole and Chaplin argue that gamification is a wrapping that either adds nothing or is a lie pure and simple.
  3. My own later take is that the player optimization and performance measurements that work great inside games have often proven to be disastrous outside games (when wrongly applied at least).

Deterding combines all three threads (as well as the argument that play has to be voluntary).

There surely is more to be written on the subject … (Am I missing any references? Let me know.)