Becker Video Game Design

Employees from Curt Schilling's failed game company pursuing new opportunities

"In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles - also the first in years - though neither have confirmed it."

"In the world of video games and entertainment any kind of publicity is often seen as a boon. But it was publicity that ultimately prevented New York-based game developer Navid Khonsari from returning to his homeland. Late one night last year, the Iranian-born game developer received an unexpected call from an uncle who had just returned from Iran."

abstract: "We present the second iteration of the Family Hedge, a tangible digital artifact that was re-designed to elicit enjoyment using principles of game design. The initial aim was to create a device crafted for a family to explore the rich social and relational aspects of their lives by making connections between people, objects and stories. The second iteration facilitated more open interaction and playfulness in its role as an artifact for school children. We examine the key role a game design approach played in its iterative development and a key element in this was ensuring any user, or "gamer", could appropriate the device for personal expressive use."

"We present the second iteration of the Family Hedge, a tangible digital artifact that was re-designed to elicit enjoyment using principles of game design. The initial aim was to create a device crafted for a family to explore the rich social and relational aspects of their lives by making connections between people, objects and stories. The second iteration facilitated more open interaction and playfulness in its role as an artifact for school children. We examine the key role a game design approach played in its iterative development and a key element in this was ensuring any user, or "gamer", could appropriate the device for personal expressive use."

"The Becker College Department of Design announced the winning teams in the seventh bi-annual 24-Hour Game Jam, held from 5:00 p.m. on October 19 to 5:00 p.m. on October 20. The submissions were judged by a panel of Becker College faculty, advisors, and student representation, basing their ratings on each team's ability to represent the theme/object they received, the creativity of the game design, the quality of gameplay, overall appearance, and the fun factor."

"Gaming has proven to be successful in K12... can it work for undergraduates as well?"

"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. "

"Email management made fun," application of game mechanics to alleviating email overload

"A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience."

Abstract: "Preparing medical students for the takeover or the start-up of a medical practice is an important challenge in Germany today. Therefore, this paper presents a computer-aided serious game (eMedOffice) developed and currently in use at the RWTH Aachen University Medical School. The game is part of the attempt to teach medical students the organizational and conceptual basics of the medical practice of a general practitioner in a problem-based learning environment. This paper introduces methods and concepts used to develop the serious game and describes the results of an evaluation of the game's application in curricular courses at the Medical School."

abstract: "This work focuses on the design and implementation of an educational game for deployment on the Xbox 360 commercial game console. Video games can be extremely powerful and effective learning tools when deployed with methodical precision. Currently, no learning tools are available for commercial consoles that focus on teaching core concepts in Engineering. This work presents an overall design for an educational game to address Number Systems in the scope of the Electrical and Computer Engineering curricula. BINX is an educational adventure game designed to address Number Systems and their arithmetic operations in Digital Logic Design, a core course is Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. Object Oriented Design Principles were used in the development of this game. This work presents one sublevel implemented using the XNA framework - a Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK).The BINX gameplay takes place inside a computer where a malicious virus is threatening the computer's operability. The player has to find the virus and eradicate it by disconnecting the terminals of the graphics processor. The player has the opportunity to practice before taking on the Boss Challenge. In the practice phase, the player practices number conversions without fear of penalties. In the Challenge phase, the player is timed and has to perform the number conversions before the allotted time expires. The combination of practice and challenge provides players with the ability to practice number conversions and, when ready, to take on the challenge task where assessment is conducted to provide the player with the knowledge of how well he/she has performed on the challenge. The number conversion level of BINX was implemented and formally evaluated showing improvement in student scores after using BINX."

Abstract: "This thesis explores role-playing games, an existing genre within the current game industry. Role-playing games have many different parts which together create the whole game experience for the user. However, this research has focused on what arguably can be said to be the core gameplay feature of role-playing games: The battle system. This was mainly conducted by analyzing existing games using different methods, primarily by identifying gameplay design patterns in the games, and comparing them using a cluster method. The use of patterns allowed basic elements for observing and analyzing the relation between different role-playing games while the clusters provide overviews of the subcategories of the role-playing genre. This thesis presents view of the role-playing genre from the perspective of combat systems through two main results. The first result is the trees created by the clusters which explain subgenres through the presence of specific gameplay design patterns. The second result is four categories of patterns: those which illustrate patterns found in nearly all role-playing games; those that define the tree result; those that can have strong impact on gameplay but without affecting subgenre membership; and those that link combat system to other parts of the gameplay. Through this, the research has established a view on the design space of role-playing games and created visualizations of how different role-playing games relate to each other. From this relation a designer can further understand how to design for different gameplay experiences for the user."

from the abstract: "This paper investigates how real life goals may add benefits to games much like when contemporary games offer an alternative of monetary payment, to unlock novel features and facilitate progression in the game. For such an optional currency to be meaningful, there is a need for a discussion on how to determine, assign value of and validate these real life achievements. This paper aims to discuss the use of known activities from social media and ubiquitous gaming to evaluate and describe the value for real life activities and provide a balanced discernible outcome that can be used as an alternative to payment or mundane tasks which has to be performed in order to progress in games."

"The swift migration of gamers such as Ingegneri from costly consoles to smartphones and tablets, where games are often free or 99 cents, is causing a tectonic shift in the video game industry that has hit a burgeoning sector of the Massachusetts economy especially hard. Two Massachusetts game makers abruptly closed in October, sales of console-based games are plummeting, and game makers are struggling to resize games designed for large screens so they will perform as well on a smaller window. "

abstract: "This paper discusses a scenario in which human computation is used to segment timestamped fashion images for mining trends based on visual features of garments (e.g., color and texture) and attributes of portrayed subjects (e.g., gender and age). State-of-the-art algorithms for body part detection and feature extraction can produce low quality results when parts of the body are occluded and when dealing with complex human poses. In such cases, these algorithms could benefit from the assistance of human agents. In order to jointly leverage the potential of crowds and image analysis algorithms, a game with a purpose (GWAP) is proposed, whereby players can help segment images for which specialized algorithms have failed, so as to improve the extraction of color and texture features of garments and their association with the features of the subject wearing them."

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."

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."

Abstract: "We present a case study in the design of an educational video game about collecting, curating, and museum operations. A five-step cyclic design thinking framework was used by the studio during the design and development of the game, and the team was simultaneously the subject of a rigorous and detailed ethnographic study. Three stages of the game's design evolution are presented through the lens of the design thinking framework. The team's practice-based research is tri- angulated with our empirical data to produce four key findings: (a) that empathy for learning context is critical in aligning designs with learning objectives; (b) that meeting with stakeholders spurs empathy-building; (c) that there is a tension between horizontal and vertical slicing that is revealed by design thinking processes; and (d) that iterative design processes challenge conventions of higher education."

Abstract: "This paper describes the design and evaluation of Zoo U, a novel computer game to assess children's social skills development. Zoo U is an innovative product that combines theory-driven content and customized game mechanics. The game-like play creates the opportunity for stealth assessment, in which dynamic evidence of social skills is collected in real time and players' choices during gameplay provide the needed data. To ensure the development of an engaging and valid game, we utilized an iterative datadriven validation process in which the game was created, tested, revised based on student performance and feedback, and retested until game play was statistically matched to independent ratings of social skills. We first investigated whether the data collected through extensive logging of student actions provided information that could be used to improve the assessment. We found that detailed game logs of socially relevant player behavior combined with external measures of player social skills provided an efficient vector to incrementally improve the accuracy of the embedded assessments. Next, we investigated whether the game performance correlated with teachers' assessments of students' social skills competencies. An evaluation of the final game showed (a) significant correlations between in-game social skills assessments and independently obtained standard psychological assessments of the same students and (b) high levels of engagement and likeability for students. These findings support the use of the interactive and engaging computer game format for the stealth assessment of children's social skills. The created innovative design methodologies should prove useful in the design and improvement of computer games in education."

Abstract: "This paper explores the consequences of using the game engine Unity to construct 3-D models of Pompeian houses, linked to art and spatial databases, as an ongoing research colloquium for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities. Rather than serving as a neutral piece of visualization software, the game engine functions as critical tool because, more than any other visualization platform, it permits real time, embodied movement through the houses. One outcome of such embodied movement has been the recognition that the traditional vocabulary for describing space in Pompeii is inadequate, and a much more careful methodology is required, using network topology and visibility graph analysis to establish spatial profiles for the rooms. As they construct the models in Unity, students also encounter the contradiction between the texture pipeline used to produce immersion in games and the emphasis on accuracy and scientific objectivity found in cultural heritage discourse, a discourse which paradoxically also stresses immersion. Finally, the game engine encourages students to consider the rhetoric of embodied play in the Pompeian decorative ensembles themselves."