Becker Video Game Design

Abstract: "Commissioned by the campus Office of Admissions, we have built a series of three campus tour and orientation games over the past academic year with undergraduate student project teams. Based on well-established game industry practices we followed an iterative agile process with Scrum and managed to avoid many classical pitfalls in game development. While we achieved some measure of success, in post-project analysis, it becomes obvious that our process would have benefited from the heavy emphasis of "users" in the User-Centered Design (UCD) methods. In this position paper, we propose that the serious game development community continue to critically analyze the results from the UCD projects to benefit from its lessons, well-understood good practices, and development paradigms."

"Sam Anderson, critic at large for The Times Magazine, wrote this week's cover story on stupid digital games. He has most recently written for the magazine on Haruki Murakami and on the theme park called Dickens World. Some readers seemed irate that you described these games as "stupid.""

A short history of addictive games from Tetris to Angry Birds

"If you saw some odd costumes wandering the streets of Boston this past weekend, chances are they were en route to a games-related event (I'm talking about you, Anime aficionados). The one I attended, MIT's Business in Gaming conference, contained more suit-clad attendees than outlandish hairdos and capes (thank goodness)."

"The U.S. government has hired a California-based company to hack into video game consoles, such as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to watch criminals, especially child predators, and learn how to collect evidence against them."

Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog. Company in Waltham, Mass. developing Facebook and mobile games as well as for its own web site.

Invitation to list game development projects on International Game Developer's Association (IGDA) Kickstarter page, along with status of current projects.

"Mill Creek teen creates monorail video game Computer game lets players drive past major Seattle landmarks"

"As the third annual video gaming PAX East expo wrapped up its final day at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center yesterday, the president of its producer, Penny Arcade, said the event "has taken over the city like never before."

"If you're a fighting game fan, you'll have seen the videos. Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono and his Tekken equivalent, Katsuhiro Harada, at the San Diego Comic Con, battling it out over a series of ridiculous competitive tasks."

"we can highlight the relationships between the different motivational and value aspects associated with cool products. By understanding these factors, we can better design for cool,"

Abstract: "The purpose of this study aimed to construct an online competitive game-based learning system by using freeware for junior high school students and to assess its effectiveness. From the learning standpoints, game mechanisms including learning points, competition mechanism, training room mechanism, questioning & answering mechanism, tips, and feedback mechanism are taken into consideration while constructing the system. The system contains screens of Log-in, Game lobby, Waiting room, Player's room, Question & Answer, and Scoring. After the system was established, it was implemented in a 10 week teaching experiment. A total of 35 junior high school students participated in this teaching experiment. Both pre-test and post-test were administered and analyzed. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire, containing domains of system operation, learning effectiveness, competition and incentive, and training room learning was also included to assess user's satisfaction. Descriptive analysis and independent t test were used to analyze the collected data. The findings of the study show that most students are satisfied with the four domains of the freeware constructed online competitive game-based learning system. Meanwhile, the online competitive game-based learning system is effective for junior high school students' learning."

From the abstract: "Traditionally, the tasks associated with game AI revolved around non player character (NPC) behavior at dierent levels of control, varying from navigation and pathnding to decision making. Commercial-standard games developed over the last 15 years and current game productions, however, suggest that the traditional challenges of game AI have been well addressed via the use of sophisticated AI approaches, not necessarily following or inspired by advances in academic practices. The marginal penetration of traditional academic game AI methods in industrial productions has been mainly due to the lack of constructive communication between academia and industry in the early days of academic game AI, and the inability of academic game AI to propose methods that would signicantly advance existing development processes or provide scalable solutions to real world problems. Recently, however, there has been a shift of research focus as the current plethora of AI uses in games is breaking the non-player character AI tradition. A number of those alternative AI uses have already shown a signicant potential for the design of better games. This paper presents four key game AI research areas that are currently reshaping the research roadmap in the game AI eld and evidently put the game AI term under a new perspective. These game AI agship research areas include the computational modeling of player experience, the procedural generation of content, the mining of player data on massive-scale and the alternative AI research foci for enhancing NPC capabilities."

Considers the Google OS not worthwhile for commercial projects but for "hobby" development

Proposal to allow "experiment with AI bots," considering gaming competitions and Blizzard online games

"This is just a friendly reminder that early bird registration for the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference ends in 1.5 weeks. This year, we reduced the student and teacher rates significantly. Early bird regular registration is $350, while it is a mere $50 for students and PK-12 teachers." UW-Madison, June13-15, 2012

"The app world is becoming cluttered. The best launch initiatives are those that involve choosing strategic partners, creating clever story angles that dovetail with newsworthy occasions, and running a cause marketing campaign and contest. This case study will cover some of these tactics and offer some of the lessons we learned along the way."

Interview with Monty Sharma, managing director of MassDiGi

"Impact Game Launches to Find Solutions to Solve Global Poverty" designed by Jane McGonigal called "Catalysts for Change"