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Garrett Eastman

The Late Modern Hero's Quest for Meaning - A case study on the psychological constructi... - 0 views

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    "This essay focuses on two cases studies that include two game designers' views of meaning- making construction in games and an analysis of their corresponding games. This is placed in relation to the late modern Sweden context. The study examines how the designers conceive purposeful play by employing a multi-disciplinary approach consisting of Pruyser's three-world model, Bell's ritualization framework, and, Howard's quest theory. Such a study is relevant due to the new ways meaning-making is actively produced within games and contributes to the understanding of meaning-making in late modern Sweden."
Garrett Eastman

Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning | ETC-Press - 0 views

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    "this book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. Contributors analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create fulfilling a playing experience unique to this medium. "
Garrett Eastman

The Ritual Model: How to Use the Mechanics of Ritual to Create Meaningful Games - 0 views

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    "For millennia, humans have participated in rituals in order to experience meaning and purpose in life. With the rise of digital games as a form of media, designers are increasing seeking to use games to provide meaningful experiences - the kind of experiences provided by rituals. This project, Farosia, explores the mechanisms by which rituals convey meaning, and presents a detailed framework for how to incorporate ritual into interactive experience design. The project consists of several small game prototypes, each intended to emphasis different aspects of ritual. By developing and playtesting these prototypes, we were able to determine how to implement these ritual modes within digital experiences, and how to use them to create a more meaningful experience to the user."
Garrett Eastman

Well Played Journal | ETC-Press - 1 views

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    "a Journal on Video Games, Value and Meaning"
Garrett Eastman

Mazes in Videogames: Exploring Paths and Spaces - Alison Gazzard - Google Books - 0 views

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    To be published in May 2013, excepts in Google Books. "From the text adventures of Zork, to the arcade game of Pac-Man, to the corridors of Doom, and on to the city streets of Grand Theft Auto IV, the maze has often been used as a space to trap and confuse players in their navigation of gameworlds. However, the maze as a construction on the landscape has a long history before the invention of the videogame. By examining the change in the maze from the landscapes of open spaces and closed gardens through to the screen of the videogame, both mazes and labyrinths are discussed in terms of historical reference, alongside the author's personal experiences of walking and playing these structures. This book shows how our cultural experiences of real world maze landscapes may have changed, and how we negotiate videogame worlds along the various paths and meanings they so often create for us."
Garrett Eastman

Know Your Pixels? - 0 views

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    "browser game using CSS3 metaqueries ...After starting the game it will show you 2 pixel values, the first represents the width, the second one the height. Your task, if you choose to accept, is to resize your browser window as fast as possible to the presented width and height. The background color of the webpage indicates whether you're far off the pixel values or not. Blue means "far off", red means "almost there" and green "you've done it." The countdown in the middle shows how much time is left to resize your window. Depending on what game level you choose you have to be more or less precise and faster with the resizing. "
Garrett Eastman

RESEARCH+DESIGN | Critical Gaming Project - 0 views

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    "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."
Garrett Eastman

Archicraft: video game, architecture, Electronic entertainment research center - 0 views

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    Abstract: Video games are no longer a means of simple entertainment that serve as a form of escapism. They are perceived not simply as free time distractions, but as logic of engagement and platforms of creative thinking. Furthermore, online video games have taken the idea of interaction to a level no any other media has ever achieved. Online video games known as virtual world or MMO (massively multiplayer online) are a mega interaction platform that attract millions of players across the globe. They are the ultimate goal that all architects have ever dreamed of, i.e. to create an interactive space that satis es the needs of users. This thesis research will tend to examine a variety of video games from 3 perspectives: space, structure and interactivity, with a view to understanding and exploring the behaviour of players in video games, as known as, virtual stages. In recognizing and articulating such behaviour, followed by exploring the relationship between architects, users and spaces, the interpretation of architectural languages can then be translated into physical spatial form. This research then questions the possibilities of promoting the gaming industry in South Africa. In the current digital era, the IT (information and technology) industry is a main stream profession that helps with the growth of a country as a whole. The role of the gaming industry therefore cannot be ignored in this instance. The gaming industry is a rapid growing profession that comprises a lot of speci c professionals. SA does not offer nor focus on the video game eld and as a result, we are experiencing a shortage of professionals in this eld. This thesis proposes a facility to facilitate current and future game industry related professionals, on the same time, providing a playful environment that integrates the building and local context, allowing deeper engagement for those who haven t been exposed to the real meaning behind video games.
Garrett Eastman

PLOS ONE: Teaching the Blind to Find Their Way by Playing Video Games - 0 views

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    Abstract: "Computer based video games are receiving great interest as a means to learn and acquire new skills. As a novel approach to teaching navigation skills in the blind, we have developed Audio-based Environment Simulator (AbES); a virtual reality environment set within the context of a video game metaphor. Despite the fact that participants were naïve to the overall purpose of the software, we found that early blind users were able to acquire relevant information regarding the spatial layout of a previously unfamiliar building using audio based cues alone. This was confirmed by a series of behavioral performance tests designed to assess the transfer of acquired spatial information to a large-scale, real-world indoor navigation task. Furthermore, learning the spatial layout through a goal directed gaming strategy allowed for the mental manipulation of spatial information as evidenced by enhanced navigation performance when compared to an explicit route learning strategy. We conclude that the immersive and highly interactive nature of the software greatly engages the blind user to actively explore the virtual environment. This in turn generates an accurate sense of a large-scale three-dimensional space and facilitates the learning and transfer of navigation skills to the physical world."
Garrett Eastman

Defining Gamification - A Service Marketing Perspective - 0 views

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    "During recent years "gamification" has gained significant attention among practitioners and game scholars. However, the current understanding of gamification has been solely based on the act of adding systemic game elements into services. In this paper, we propose a new definition for gamification, which emphases the experiential nature of games and gamification, instead of the systemic understanding. Furthermore, we tie this definition to theory from service marketing because majority of gamification implementations aim towards goals of marketing, which brings to the discussion the notion of how customer / user is always ultimately the creator of value. Since now, the main venue for academic discussion on gamification has mainly been the HCI community. We find it relevant both for industry practitioners as well as for academics to study how gamification can fit in the body of knowledge of existing service literature because the goals and the means of gamification and marketing have a significant overlap."
Garrett Eastman

Guess Who?: A game to crowdsource the labeling of affective facial expressions is compa... - 0 views

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    Abstract: "This paper demonstrates the use of a crowdsourced human computation game to accumulate annotations from non-experts as a means to provide labels for an affective facial expression database. To do so, a human computation game is played, in which players are encouraged to ask each other related facial expression questions. These questions are based on the Facial Action Coding System. Emphasis is placed on the participant's overall understanding of the task and on the ease-of-use of the game so that labeling accuracy is reinforced. Additional game mechanics can be used in future work to encourage players to keep playing the game. This crowdsourced labeling of an affective facial expressions database is important because the manual labeling of an affective database can be relatively expensive and time consuming. Our game shows that non-experts are comparable in labeling our affective database based on the ground truth."
Garrett Eastman

Inspiring Creativity through a Creativity Game of Players as Game Story Designers: A Me... - 0 views

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    Abstract: "There have been tremendous ways of developing creativity, yet instead of traditionally formal instruction, games are the best media to spur creativity, as creativity can easily and spontaneously be evoked through games. On the other hand, metacognition is a good way to promote creative thinking, as metacognition which contains the abilities such as self-planning, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation can foster creative-relevant cognitive processes. Games are exactly the ideal platform that provides a playful context for metacognitive awareness prompting creative processes. Based on the advantages of games and that design is a creativity-relevant cognitive and constructive process, this research adopts the means of digital game-based learning (DGBL) to propose a metacognitive approach to inspiring creativity through a creativity game of players as game story designers."
Garrett Eastman

Scaling Online Collaborative Games to Urban Level - 0 views

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    Abstract: "With the growing availability of personal communication devices we are witnessing a tremendous increase in the demand for mobile services based on location and context. Mobile gaming is, of course, following this same trend. Unfortunately, differently from other services, location- and context-based gaming strictly requires near-field communication to interact with nearby players in order to create teams and arenas. Since currently adopted technologies suffer from scalability (Bluetooth) or energy (WiFi) constraints, Opportunistic Networks (ONs) have already been addressed as a viable solution to involve a considerable number of players on a wider area. While massive multiplayer games are commonplace on wired networks, it is not yet clear how player experience is affected by the increased delay and probabilistic message forwarding introduced by a huge population over an ON. In this paper we address this problem by proposing an opportunistic collaborative game, which is meaningful for the category of collaborative puzzle games, and evaluating its playability and scalability by means of simulations on a real city topology."
Garrett Eastman

Democracy has arrived! A Model for Ethical Decision Making of Players in MMOs - 1 views

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    Abstract: "In digital games and virtual worlds, like in other digital media, the structure of the medium, its code, influences the emerging interaction and culture. A deliberate modification of this code to facilitate democratic decision making might thus lead to more meaningful interaction in games. If we see virtual worlds as learning environments this might even help players to understand and question real-world power structures. A way to modify the code of a virtual world is by extending its interface with an add-on that interacts with the application programming interface of the game. In this paper we present the design vision and theoretical framework of a digital tool for ethical decision making that will be implemented in the virtual world World of Warcraft. Its purpose will be to supply players with means to modify the power structure built into the code of this virtual world and to support more ethical and democratic decision making in the game."
Garrett Eastman

ARTigo: an Art Tagging Ecosystem - 0 views

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    Abstract: "ARTigo is a Game with a Purpose platform whose goal is to collect tags for artworks, which can be used for retrieval. The ARTigo gam es form a tagging ecosystem, where the games cooperate in order to gather a wide range of information. Description games create initial tags, in order to enable other games to be played and collect semantically shallow surface tags. Dissemination games sp read existing data to other artworks or languages, and do not create new information. Diversification games feed on data produced by other games and guide the players to entering more specific tags. Finally, integration games create higher - order tags with deep semantic meanings, describing emotions for example. All these different types of tags have different semantic depths, and are present in different quantities. Together, they create a pool of complementary tags accurately describing artworks, which can be processed for data mining."
Garrett Eastman

Influencing Player Emotions Using Colors - 0 views

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    Abstract: "People experience emotions when playing videogames. It can be argued that these emotions are their main reason for playing. In this paper, we investigate whether colors can be used in videogames to elicit specific emotions. We ran an experiment with a videogame in which four different colors, associated with four specific emotions, were used in four different conditions (in this case, four different rooms in the game). After each condition we measured the players' emotional responses by means of a Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) questionnaire. Our analysis revealed that the color red evoked a highly-aroused, negative emotional response, while the color yellow evoked a positive emotional response. These results were significantly different from the emotional responses measured for other colors. Furthermore, we found that inexperienced players showed much more explicit reactions to colors than experienced players. We conclude that the use of colors is a suitable method for game designers to elicit specific emotional responses from the players, in particular from novice players."
Garrett Eastman

Visual Communicators Made Through Play: A Game for Learning in Graphic Design - 0 views

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    Abstract: "This paper explores the possibilities of game-based learning within the context of a graphic design education. A global network now exists that puts all professionals in competition with one-another, and in order to stay competitive as educators, we must be able to produce professionals that can solve problems creatively. However, traditional teaching methods may in some contexts be unable to provide the kind of education students need, and initial research suggests that game-based learning may be a viable solution. This study establishes a framework of good game-based learning principles and a design for a video game to be used in a teaching environment. Primarily target audiences are teenage students, roughly ages 10 - 14, and college level undergraduate students, ages 18 - 25, of all genders. This video game is intended to teach players situated meanings for key visual communication concepts of grid and modularity, in a way that allows them to create high level relationships between these and their creative work."
Garrett Eastman

A Survey of Final Project Courses in Game Programs: Considerations for Teaching Capstone - 0 views

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    "Game design and development programs often include a final project or capstone course as a means of assessing the cumulative theory, processes and techniques learned by students through the program or department's curriculum. While these courses are prevalent in programs around the world, there has yet to be a study of how, why, and to what end these courses are designed and run. We review the literature on capstone courses, discuss the findings of a long-form survey administered in early 2011, and propose a set of framing questions for the design and implementation of capstone courses. Survey findings include common goals of capstone courses, make-up of faculty teaching these courses, the support obtained and desired for the courses, the technologies used to create capstone projects, the methods of project management used in the courses and the expectations of faculty teaching the courses. These results can serve as a baseline for faculty and administrators looking to develop or improve their game design and development curricula."
Garrett Eastman

Kamloops This Week - Video-game design taken to next level - 0 views

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    "The Kamloops-Thompson school district is taking its video-game design curriculum to the next level. What started as a summer-camp program in 2007 and grew into a limited course offering last year is set to assume full-course status - meaning area high school students will have the opportunity to spend an entire semester studying nothing but video-game design."
Garrett Eastman

Fictional emotions within emotion driven design - 0 views

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    Abstract: "The aim of this paper is to address imaginative experiences of emotions by drawing Kendall Walton's theory of make-believe. Moreover, we use a design case as means for investigating how a child's felt emotions towards a hospital situation relates to his or her imaginative experiences of emotions towards a !ctive character in a computer game simulating the real-world situation. In so doing, we contribute with new insights to existing theories of emotions in design, which tend to focus narrowly on felt and measurable emotions."
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