Group items tagged

"Keywords for Video Game Studies Colloquium Saturday, May 19, 2012 8 AM to 4 PM Communication 202 University of Washington, Seattle" "The Keywords for Video Game Studies colloquium invites game scholars, artists, designers, developers, and enthusiasts to participate in roundtable discussions, presentations of individual and collaborative work, scholarship, and play. This year's colloquium, broadly themed by the keywords "research/design," is the capstone event to a year-long series of workshop sessions on democracy, time, altplay/fandom, gold farming, and hack/mod. The colloquium, now in its second year, hopes to foster the growing engagement with what it means to study or make or play digital games."

"Kellian Adams worked at SCVNGR Inc. for three years in the museum department before striking out on her own in January 2012 to found Green Door Labs Inc. in Cambridge to create location-based educational games. So it's no wonder that her first collaboration was with one of the country's foremost museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York."

Abstract: "The collaborative nature of many modern multiplayer games raises a lot of questions in cooperative game design. We address one of them in this paper by analyzing cooperative game patterns in remote gameplay in order to define benefits and drawbacks for each one. With the help of a user experiment, we analyzed player experience in a set of existing cooperative patterns for games played remotely without communication. By comparing patterns, supporting closely- and looselycoupled collaboration, we discovered that the first type provided a more enjoyable experience but introduced additional challenges in case of a lack of communication. By analyzing patterns for both closely- and loosely-coupled interaction, we determined the most beneficial pattern within each type. We concluded with the results of a pattern comparison in colocated and remote setups."

"paper discusses the question of how game designers can keep their games fair when adding collaborative content and rewards. The paper presents findings from World of Warcraft in-game chat transcripts and data gathered through an online survey that was placed online for approximately 9 months during 2010. From the chat transcripts, we find that players sometimes do abuse mechanisms for collaborative content, which displeases the other players involved. We also find that players believe that there needs to be some kind of sanctioning mechanism to players that abuse grouping mechanisms. Finally we present suggestions to game designers on how to create sanctioning mechanisms based on human cooperation research."

Abstract: "This article discusses the application of an Alexandrian pattern language to the design of interactive systems. It grew out of an University course titled A Pattern Approach to Action Game Design, which was offered as an elective in the Creative Technologies program at Auckland University of Technology, NZ, in 2011. We sketch out the idea of design patterns and describe our experiences with the process of using them for designing oldschool action games, that is, finding patterns, making a language, using it for creating several game designs and realizing one of these designs collaboratively. We discuss the concept of the course and present our pattern language and the game we made. While the language is arguably more like a patchy pattern collection, the various game designs quite loose and the realized game unfinished, the process was challenging and intense, and offered students a new perspective on design. In the spirit of design patterns, we only did what the task at hand required, not artificial exercises. We attempted to connect theory and practice in a natural, direct way as we presented, discussed and used everything we did in order to continue our journey. Our course was not aimed at fixed or frozen products, but on a process that is constantly in flux through collaboration by people who interact and share a common pattern language, use, test, revise and refine it while moving on."

From the introduction: "This paper describes why and how an introductory video game design course was conceived and implemented, the best practices developed, and lessons learned since its first implementation in spring 2009. Introduction to Video Game Design was conceived at Johns Hopkins University as a creative, design-based course in which undergraduates work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams on authentic projects. Students gained a broad knowledge of the gaming industry, along with practical development skills, through regular lecture-discussion sessions coordinated with weekly labs. The interdisciplinary student teams were mentored by industry professionals and worked throughout the semester to produce video games. The course development team faced a variety of challenges stemming from the inter-institutional, inter-departmental collaboration. The authors hope the case study described and evaluation data shared can help other schools planning to implement design-based courses, whether it is based on video game design or not."

Abstract: "Scalability, fast response time, and low cost are of utmost importance in designing a successful massively multiplayer online game. The underlying architecture plays an important role in meeting these conditions. Peer-to-peer architectures, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs and can achieve high scalability. They can also achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players. However, these architectures face many challenges. Distributing a game among peers makes maintaining control over the game more complex. Peer-to-peer architectures also tend to be vulnerable to churn and cheating. Moreover, different genres of games have different requirements that should be met by the underlying architecture, rendering the task of designing a general purpose architecture harder. Many peer-to-peer gaming solutions have been proposed that utilize a range of techniques while using somewhat different and confusing terminologies. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of current peer-to-peer solutions for massively multiplayer games using a uniform terminology"

Abstract: "The software engineering process for games has enough special structure that it can be formulated as a kind of game itself. This, in turn, p ermits the teaching of game construction in a unique way with new potential to motivate students. We present a new game design client program for an existing collaborative problem-solving website known as CoSolve. The client was built with an emphasis on increased interaction and fine control over a problem's state. With this comes the opportunity to more easily design and test games in the CoSolve space. It is our hope that this will teach and inspire student users to learn more about game design, problem posing, and programming in general."

On educational games and learning outcomes and consideration of games as complements to teacher instruction and collaboration

Abstract: "A key problem for crowd - sourced systems is motivating contributions from participants and ensuring the quality of these contributions. Games have been suggested as a motivational approach but there are concerns about data quality , particularly when the data are to be used for scientific research . To address these concerns, w e compare the quality of data obtained from two citizen science games, one a "gamified" version of a species classificatio n task and one a fantasy game that used the classification task only as a way to advance in the game play. Surprisingly, though we did observe cheating in the fantasy game, data quality from the two games was not significantly different . As well, the quali ty of data from short - time contributors was at a usable level. These findings suggest that games can be a useful way to motivate contributions to citizen science projects. "

Abstract: "In 2010, the authors (Jacobs, a game design professor, Sugarman, a pediatrician, and Rice, a psychotherapist ) started meeting to brainstorm design and play concepts for a therapeutic, physiologically-controlled videogame intended for use by people diagnosed with anxiety and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The goal was to combine cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), narrative therapy (NT) and biofeedback supported psychophysiological selfregulation (PSR) into a game that would engage adolescents and provide hard data on a player's physical and emotional states during a therapy session. The game concept that emerged is "MindGamersTM in School" (MG), a therapeutic game prototype being developed and tested across two 6-month sessions by the authors and two teams of undergraduate game design and development students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Pursuing the design required half the team to learn principles, terms and methods of strength-based, client-centered psychotherapy and their application to psychophysiological selfregulation and biofeedback theory and practice. The other half of the team needed to engage in understanding the current state of role-playing videogames, avatar creation systems and game design/development processes. This paper will describe the current game prototype and then focus on MG's design and development process by looking at how the initial design period brought the game design to its current state and how it has continued to influence the production process."

From the abstract: "Research methods and statistics are core competences across various disciplines but pose significant challenges for many students. The CHERMUG project aims to develop a digital game to support students in acquiring methodological and statistical expertise. A key issue that has to be addressed in developing a game is to identify the desired learning outcomes for students. This deliverable describes the user requirements analysis. The aim of the user requirements analysis was to establish the general attitudes to and acceptance of higher education nursing students and staff in the collaborating countries towards the use of digital games as a component of a blended learning approach to teaching methods and statistics to nurses. "

From the introduction: "We introduce the FCO-IM modelling methodology and some of the short comings we perceive. Next we introduce some theories. First we introduce the notion of serious gaming. Then we move on to the Game Design Theory as proposed by Järvinen, augmented by a view on goals for serious gaming. These theories helped us generating the framework for a serious game. Next we introduce the concept of Focused Conceptualisation. This theory helped us shaping the contents of the game. In the final section of this chapter we will discuss some previous attempts by students to design a serious game for FCO-IM and how we want to make a new contribution towards this field. In chapter 3 we unified the theories by creating a first design. We do not exhaustively describe these first designs, but only the genesis and design choices made at the start and during the process. This work culminates into a final design in chapter 4. The final design consists of a global description of the game, a more detailed description and an abbreviated "rulebook". The rulebook can be compared to the rulebook of a board game. It is intended for someone already familiar with the game. The detailed description can be viewed as a thorough reference guide for first time players or players seeking clarification. This final design was subjected three test sessions. We realize this is not a whole lot. But the objective was to see whether the approach is workable. Exhaustive testing was not part of the scope. We gained some valuable insights nonetheless. In chapter 5 we derived a generic conceptual model for dialogue games. We present a framework that can be used to create dialogue games for a number of different purposes. We hand one the basic tools, make one's own game. This can be viewed as a basic game engine as it is found in the video gaming industry. Chapter 6 will recap our design question and discuss if and how this design question has been answered. This includes insights gaine

Abstract: "Reality-based interfaces bring new design opportunities to social games. These novel game interfaces, exemplified by Wii, Kinect, and Smart phones, leverage players' existing physics, bodily, environmental, and social skills. Moreover, they enable a shared hybrid physical-digital space in which the players' co-presence can be enhanced by their physical and digital co-location. However, many digital social games occupy players' attention with the digital display and content, reducing their attention spent on one another and limiting the synchronization of actions and emotions among players. How do we design technologies that do not interfere with social play but enhance and innovate it? In this thesis work, I focus on one particular kind of reality-based interfaces, Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR), to extend players' interaction from the small mobile devices to the shared hybrid space around a computationally trackable surface. This thesis explores how to encourage social play with HAR interfaces, which brings in challenges of designing with the affordances and constraints of the HAR interface, understanding the complicated phenomenon of social play, and integrating these understandings in multiplayer HAR game design. Adopting Research-through Design as the overarching research method, I collaborate with multiple teams, design and study three multiplayer HAR game prototypes. I present four main contributions. First, this work yields design artifacts and examples of social games with HAR interfaces. I communicate to the game design and Augmented Reality communities through these prototypes, including BragFish, ARt of Defense, and NerdHerder. Second, I provide empirical findings on social play in a shared hybrid space. Through lab-based user studies, observation, video analysis, interviews, and surveys, I collect and analyze interpersonal play behaviors and emotions in the shared hybrid space enabled by the HAR interface. Third, I adopt and adapt sociologic

"In spring 2011 University of Tampere Game Research Lab in collaboration with Aalto University organized a working paper seminar with the aim of bringing together scholars of games and innovation from diverse fields and stimulating dialogue between them. Moreover, the goal of the seminar was to encourage the further development of rigorous academic research on the topic while keeping the work accessible to game professionals."

"The appearance of collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, social media, and video games has altered the way individuals and organizations relate to one another.[i] There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner."

Train2Game students collaborating with Epic Games

"3D GameLab is a quest-based learning platform for teachers and students of all ages "