Becker Video Game Design

"The high cost of launching resources from the Earth's surface is a significant barrier to future long- duration human space exploration. A future resource economy in space may allow resource production, processing, storage, and transportation at distributed locations, but will have many stakeholders with var- ied and potentially competing objectives. Simulation games provide a medium for communication and learning richer than papers or linear presentations by combining the technical capabilities of simulation models with human interaction. Building on technology powering military wargames, federated simulation architectures such as HLA-Evolved use independently-developed simulation models connected over a dis- tributed network of computers. This paper presents an approach for developing a multi-player simulation gaming environment where human players take on roles of organizations or government agencies within scenarios designed to address the design and operation of a resource economy in space. The game design addresses the number of players, time advancement, level of abstraction, scenario selection, and other de- cisions based on past simulation games in the domains of military-political, educational, disaster response, and business-management games. Future research will focus on evaluating game executions to analyze human decision-making under various scenarios. Quantitative analysis of decisions using game logs com- bined with qualitative analysis of interviews and surveys will contribute to strategies for a future resource economy in space."

"This study applied the concept of closed chain exercise to WaterBall, which combines rehabilitation exercises with a digital game. By using WaterBall, the elderly can enjoy the benefits of both entertainment and rehabilitation. In addition, WaterBall provides multi-touch control, is easy to use, and have the potential to improve physical activity in older adults The elderly can play the game intuitively. WaterBall Exergaming was used by 52 residents of an elderly community, and they reported that WaterBall offers exercise and fitness, enhances the efficiency of exercises, and provides entertainment and interaction."

"This paper presents the theoretical foundations of and the research methodologies for designing, developing, and evaluating stealth assessments in digital games. ... There are four main sections in this paper. First, we discuss problems with existing traditional assessments. Second, we review evidence relating to digital games and learning. Third, we define and then illustrate our stealth assessment approach with a set of assessments we are currently developing and embedding in a digital game (Newton's Playground). The stealth assessments are intended to measure levels of creativity, persistence, and conceptual understanding of Newtonian physics during game play. Finally, we discuss future research and issues related to stealth assessment in education."

Poster presented at Society for Study of Motivation Meeting in conjunction with Association for Psychological Science 5/24/12

"A CTG is a game that combines elements of ARGs and casual gaming, another gaming genre that Schluckebier | Senior Communication Thesis 2012 | 4 is increasing in popularity with the rising rate of smartphones (Chau 2006). In combining these elements in a CTG, a game can be designed that caters both to hardcore gamers, to casual gamers and to those who have no gaming experience "

"Objects in 3D games are typically shell models, a polygon mesh representing the shell or skin of the object. While emulation of the behaviour of shell models under combustion is sucient for many game applications and is fairly well studied, solid objects do in fact burn rather dierently than shell objects. We show how to manipulate shell models so that they appear to burn as solid models. Since our burning objects will be only a small part of a video game, computation speed is of the essence. We demonstrate that our method uses only a fraction of the computational power available by implementing the computation on a modest GPU using CUDA."

"In a recent class, Austin Community College student Richard Moss showed off his group's project: a demo of a submarine video game called "Treasures of Atlantis." It was the end of the semester for a combined class of about 14 game designers and as many artists enrolled in ACC's Game Development Institute."

Excerpted in Google Books: "Learn to design games for tablets from a renowned game designer!Eager to start designing games for tablets but not sure where to start? Look no further! Gaming guru Scott Rogers has his finger on the pulse of tablet game design and is willing to impart his wisdom and secrets for designing exciting and successful games."

Using social media, hashtags and collaboration to find employment for recently laid-off game company employees.

More depth, more detail, and more nuance for game scenes urged in this opinion piece

A great selection of gaming articles including one on digital-only games, bringing creativity back to role-playing games, "social networking's connection with gaming," and 38 studios failure and its implications for the gaming industry.

Abstract: "Mobile gaming is a big driver of app marketplaces. However, few mobile games deliver truly distinctive gameplay experi- ences for ad hoc collocated users. As an example of such an experience, consider a sword ght dual between two users facing each other where each user's phone simulates a sword. With phone in hand, the users' thrusts and blocks translate to attacks and counterattacks in the game. Such Phone-to- Phone Mobile Motion Games (MMG) represent interesting and novel gameplay for ad hoc users in the same location. One enabler for anMMG game like sword ght is continuous, accurate distance ranging. Existing ranging schemes cannot meet the stringent requirements of MMG games: speed, ac- curacy and noise robustness. In this work, we design FAR, a new ranging scheme that can localize at 12Hz with 2cm median error while withstanding up to 0dB noise, multipath and Doppler eect issues. Our implementation runs on com- modity smartphones and does not require any external in- frastructure. Moreover, distance measurement accuracy is comparable to that of Kinect, a xed-infrastructure motion capture system. Evaluation on users playing two prototype games indicate that FAR can fully support dynamic game motion in real-time."

Abstract: "Combiform is a novel digital gaming console featuring four combinable handheld controllers. It is a new and unique tangible gaming interface that stresses the importance of co-located, co-attentive social interactions among players. In particular, multiple players may freely combine and lock together their handheld game controllers, thereby creating a very flexible collective and transformable tangible interface. Combiform emphasizes social interaction through controller-to-controller contact. The platform and its 10 games introduce novel, tangible and physical co-attentive experiences that are not found in traditional co-located gaming platforms using mimetic interfaces (e.g. Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect). The project is the first game console especially designed for a new emerging digital game genre - Communal Casual Game. The new game genre captures a perspective of integrating classical folk game design approach with digital elements"

"Move over Kickstarter. Gambitious is launching a crowdfunding platform to allow game developers to raise money from fans to create ambitious indie games. The Amsterdam-based Gambitious team includes the founders of Gathering of Developers, the head of Mastertronic, and a Dutch equity-based crowdfunding platform."

16-year-old winner of National STEM Video Game Challenge profiled.

Feminist critique of representation of female game characters and gamers

"visualizing the 48 hour game making challenge"

"Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design." (published 2012, excerpts in Google Books)

"Kim Swift has built a name fohttp://groups.diigo.com/group/becker-video-game-designr herself as a creative indie game developer. She was the lead designer of Valve's highly original Portal game. While a student at Digipen, she co-created a project dubbed Narbacular Drop, which served as the inspiration for Portal."

"Players who became anonymous dictators in a simple online game showed unexpected benevolence toward their subjects, giving away more of their own money than previous, real-life experiments predicted. "This was supposed to be a simple replication, where we backed up the results of previous experiments, just in an online setting," said biologist Nichola Raihani of University College London."