Misunderstanding Games Design
This is an interesting article and worth a read…
Like most things related to creativity, game design has always suffered from a lack of understanding. Most of the public thinks game designers just play games all day long. Executives tend to think they are the best game designers in the room or simply do not understand the designer role — besides the fact that they need some on the payroll. A game enthusiast even once asked me if I was designing clothing for characters in video games…
Designers or aspiring designers I have met and worked with are rarely at ease. Most of the time, they feel that they are not heard or taken seriously, that they don’t have the tools and support they need, that the complexity of their work is not acknowledged, nor the value of it understood.
Part of the problem is that the job of game design is generally not well defined in terms of skills and function. Game design is not as established as programming and art. Its academic status is in its infancy, which makes it difficult not only to execute, but also to discuss, since we lack a proper vocabulary to describe it.
This generally has two consequences. First, because no clear technical task is given to game designers, they tend to travel along the path of least resistance, as players also do in games, and try to do what they believe “being creative” is: coming up with ideas, and trying to have them accepted and put into the game. … But as ideas are being proposed without any technical backing in terms of feasibility or relevance, and consequently no established authority, the ensuing discussions are generally just exchanges of opinions in which a producer, as the higher hierarchical decision taker, usually has the final say.
…
Second, in some teams, game design and product vision can be merged into one single entity. Saying that they are the same thing is missing the point that the former is a means to the latter. As with any creation, the form has to be subordinated to the function. …
3D Mobiles Talk at PM Studio
There is a great talk at the PM Studio in Bristol coming up. Well worth attending if you can…
Monday Prod: Lunchtime Talk on 3D (including mobile platforms)
Friday, 28 Jan at 1pm:3D – the past, the future and what does it mean for mobile platformsMark Jacobs developed some of the first 3D documentary trials for the BBC and currently works for the BBC Academy producing 3D courses for the industry and innovation labs that bridge the editorial and technical divide. He has a background in both traditional and pervasive media and is a member of the AHRC steering group and commissioning panel Beyond Text.In his presentation, taken from the Edinburgh TV Festival, Mark describes how and why 3D has come back into fashion, where it is going and why it might also be relevant to mobile.
Make a Cool Game Mod, Get Offered at Job!
I like the story this article takes – and it shows that games development is still a meritoracy (I hope);
A lone StarCraft 2 modder has been courted by League of Legends developer Riot Games, following an apparent conflict with Activision-Blizzard over his creation.
‘Ryan’ was working on a home-made MMO using StarCraft II’s Galaxy Editor, which he bravely chose to title ‘World of StarCraft.’
Following the mod’s coverage on various websites, YouTube pulled his work in progress videos, claiming copyright infringement notices sent by ‘Activision Games Inc.’ So far, only the videos are affected; the mod’s forum and the project itself is yet to receive any such order.
Ryan claimed not to have been contacted by Blizzard directly, meaning the exact reason for the copyright notice was ambiguous. Some have speculated the take-down was purely to do with the inevitably troublesome name, and others the very nature of the project.
Following a public protestation and plea for clarification as to whether he could continue to work on the mod, he claimed last night that ” I just spoke with a Blizzard official, and the issue is being worked on.
“Because of the sensitive nature of what’s going on, I’m going to wait until the dust has settled to comment further.”
In the meantime, Riot Games design director Tom Cadwell, previously a World of Warcraft designer, contacted Ryan with a possible offer of employment.
“When I see a modder with a lot of drive that has done something cool, I tend to contact them,” he confirmed on Riot’s forums. “I shot him an email recently asking if he was interested in exploring an opportunity here. As to what comes of that, who knows — that depends on the mutual fit and his own goals.”
I’m published in Journal of e-Learning and Digital Media (woo!)
Woot! Woot! My contribution to the Journal of e-Learning & Digital Media is now out. Here is the abstract:
ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to explore the development of new methodologicalapproaches that draw on ideas and concepts from natural sciences and apply them within thehumanities. The main research example this article looks at is the re-application of a palaeontologicalprocess; it looks though the geological layers of sediment for fossilised remains from which it canattempt to reverse-engineer the process and forms of change from these finds. This research reengineersthis basic method by looking at the layers of software iteration to understand therelationships between media artefacts over time. This article uses as its test subject, peer-to-peersoftware (p2p). The method developed involved sifting though the layers of digital sediment usingchange-logs, release schedules, forms, mailing lists and release repositories to reconstruct a time-line ofchange. It then used this data to construct a proto-phylogenetic tree of familial relationships betweendifferent p2p software clients. The article examines these findings next to existing works on technologyevolution, suggests a mechanism by which these findings can be interpreted and then has suggestionsas to the possible implications of these findings for learning and educational technologies.
And here is the full contents of the issue:
E-LEARNING AND DIGITAL MEDIA
Volume 7 Number 4 2010 ISSN 2042-7530SPECIAL ISSUE
Peer-to-Peer Networking and Collaborative Learning
Guest Editors: DANIEL ARAYA & MICHAEL A. PETERSDaniel Araya & Michael A. Peters. Introduction
Chi-Kim Cheung. Web 2.0: challenges and opportunities for media education and beyond
Cynthia Carter Ching & Anthony W. Hursh. ‘This Site is Blocked’: K-12 teachers and the challenge of accessing peer-to-peer networks for education
Mark Pegrum. ‘I Link, Therefore I Am’: network literacy as a core digital literacy
Crystle Martin & Constance Steinkuehler. Collective Information Literacy in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Hartmut Giest. Reinventing Education: new technology does not guarantee a new learning culture
David J. Ondercin. The Opportunity in Higher Education: how open education and peer-to-peer networks are essential for higher education
Ilias Karasavvidis. Understanding Wikibook-based Tensions in Higher Education: an Activity Theory approach
Tomas Rawlings. Understanding the Evolution of Technology through P2P Systems and its Impact on Learning Environments
Chandler Armstrong. Catalyzing Collaborative Learning: how automated task distribution may prompt students to collaborate
Shwetha Kini. CoLab: a collaborative laboratory for facilitating code reviews through a peer-to-peer network
It’s not avalible for free at the moment, but I’m pleased that the journal will open it up at a later date. Plus if you do buy it now, it supports the journal to keep doing it’s thing.
Please note that all articles published within Symposium journals automatically become open access 18 months after publication. .. The journal really DOES need those paying subscribers if it is to continue to expand and improve. Full information about Personal and Library subscriptions can be found at www.wwwords.co.uk/subscribeELEA.asp
Kinect Hacking Grows Motion Gaming
I was pleased to hear the Kinect is getting lots of interesting ideas added to it, not from official development but from hacking it:
Games designers have built sports, fitness and dance games where gestures decide what happens, but it’s the “hacks”, not the games, that have people like Baker so excited. The open-source software developed to interpret Kinect output – to a standard USB plug – has already been used for dozens of projects: a team at a US university has created a miniature helicopter that flies itself and avoids obstacles; another has made a “virtual piano” on the floor (you play it with your feet); the multiplayer role-playing game World of Warcraft can now be playedsimply by using gestures, thanks to the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, which has written a special software “toolkit”. The institute has bigger plans for the future: medical games to help people regain the use of their limbs after a stroke, indoor exercise games and so on.
Even more impressive is the work done by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which amplified the hand detection to recognise hands and fingers and then linked it to a program for scrolling pictures, giving something of the feeling of Minority Report, the film in which Tom Cruise waved computer files and videos around in his search for crime suspects. Watching the MIT video is eerie if you have seen the film – it’s as though the future is unfolding before your eyes.
Yet at first Microsoft seemed unwilling to let people dig under the surface of its software. At the launch on 4 November, it told the news site CNet: “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products… with Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”
That didn’t prevent two developers and a Google engineer putting up a $4,000 bounty for anyone who could write software that would work independently of the Xbox and so let it be used for more than just games. As they pointed out, people had done much the same with Nintendo’s Wii, which uses the widely available Bluetooth communications standard, to create some interesting hacks.
Within a fortnight, Alex Kipman, the Xbox’s “director of incubation”, was insisting the Kinect was open by design and that Microsoft was excited about the idea of people designing new applications for it; the company seems to have initially misunderstood what sort of hacking was going on and thought that people were opening up the innards of the machine to get at its proprietary (and highly valuable) chips and software, rather than simply playing around with its output.
This is a bit of a welcome U-Turn. Microsoft’s people have in the past been very disparaging about open-source. It seems that they now “get” why this is not a threat, but a boon to innovation.
Cthulhu Thursday: I, Cthulhu by Neil Gaiman
This is a great short story by one of the best writers around IMHO. Fun, inventive and horror in a mashup!
Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu.
Nobody can pronounce it right.
Are you writing this down? Every word? Good. Where shall I start — mm?
Very well, then. The beginning. Write this down, Whateley.
I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.
Those were the days.
image from summeroflovecraft.com
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Android Starts to Take Upper Hand…
In the battle for the future soul smart phones, the Observer is suggesting that Google is taking the upper hand, though the battle is far from over. At talks I’ve done in 2009 and 2010 I said that, based on my PhD research the open-source nature of Android gave it a longer term advantage over the iPhone. It appears this predicted gap is now opening up…
“Android has taken over from what I can see,” said Will Sullivan, founder of the website Journerdism, which is studying the mobile technology industry. Some commercial statistics bear that out. Android phones are now outselling iPhones in the US. Latest figures from the US show the Android and iPhone neck and neck in market share – but with 40.8% of new smart phone sales in the six months to November going to Android and 26.9% to iPhones.
That is important. For one of the great ironies of the development of the smart phone market is that making phone calls on the devices has been supplanted by email, instant message and chat. A vast business ecology of “apps” has also grown up allowing smart phones to do anything from checking the weather to picking out a local restaurant. In this new world of mobile communications many think it would be foolish to make firm predictions. “So much can change again in five years that I just don’t know what will happen,” [Rob Jackson, editor of Phandroid] said.
Though I’d echo this caution. We’ve not yet had much data from Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 and RIM (makers of Blackberry) have been busy with new devices of late. Changes comes and it comes fast, but I still think for the longer term, Android is best positioned to make it.
Game of Heaven and Hell (Jnana Bagi)
This amazing image is from a proto-version of Snakes and Ladders which was shown to us as this week’s Crossover Labs (from Wellcome Images, ref L0035004):
Game of Heaven and Hell (Jnana Bagi). This old Indian game, known to us as ‘Snakes and Ladders’, was originally a vehicle for teaching ethics. Each square has not only a number but a legend which comprises the names of various virtues and vices. The longest ladder reaches from square 17 ‘Compassionate Love’ to 69 ‘The World of the Absolute’. Late 18th Century.
Heaven and Hell (Jnana Bagi)
Little Big Computer – A Modern Day Difference Engine
This is an amazing level from Little Big Planet. Inside the digital platform the designer has created a calculator..
So what is so great about that? Well Little Big Planet 1 has no logic gates and the like, so to make a computer you need to to it old-school – very old school – like Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. This is a computer powered on 19th Century analogue principles built in a 21st Century networked digital machine… amazing! Here’s a view into it’s creation…
Wellcome Crossover
I’m at the Wellcome-Crossover event all this week with lots of interesting people. Sadly this means I’m busy and so will not end up blogging as much… 😦
Here’s a lol cat till normal service is resumed…
A Great Becoming... 