Becker Video Game Design

"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."

"SmartGlass, a software-based application that extends Xbox 360 experiences onto smartphones and tablets, does shine best when paired with television or movie entertainment. That's where programmers have fleshed out the most whiz-bang features at this time, but game designers have clever plans for this tech, too."

"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)

"visualizing the 48 hour game making challenge"

Feminist critique of representation of female game characters and gamers

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

"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."

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"

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."

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.

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

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

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."

"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."

"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."

"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 "

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

"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."