My Games Design

Very nice new movie from the Xonotic community: It gives a pretty good idea about the vanilla game mode, although the very popular (some say too popular) "Minstagib" (one shot kills) and the total conversion mod Overkill (All new player-models and weapons, with team-spawn etc.) are also shortly shown. Not shown are the popular vehicle mod and the recently added lightning gun (still WIP), but you can try everything yourself easily by getting the auto-downloader of the latest development build here . As with most FOSS games, they are looking for more developers (& players) and if you have some cash to spare you can currently also pledge for the creation of some NPC characters for a single-player or COOP-mode here . Speaking of FOSS crowd-funding, another great FOSS arena shooter, Red Eclipse this currently preparing a campaign for porting their somewhat aging Cube2 engine to the much nicer Tesseract (which is technically something like Cube3). Oh and a new version (1.5

Last month I went to the first CHI Play conference in Toronto - and it was fun :-) The full papers from the conference are openly available for a short time only so make sure to check them out here . On the Sunday I took part in the somewhat provocatively titled "Participatory Design for Serious Game Design: Truth and Lies" workshop organised by Rilla Khaled, Mina Vasalou, Vero Vanden Abeele, and Maarten Van Mechelen. Participatory design (PD) is something I've recently become more interested in and our submission " Designing Persuasive Games through Competition " was about how PD influenced the organisation of the competition I ran at UCL earlier this year and some of the tensions that arose during the whole process. The workshop was a great experience as I got to meet a load of interesting people and to hear about different types of PD game research . And I learnt that defining PD, while a good learning experience, isn't particularly easy! On the followin

To celebrate tomorrow's big movie launch, I am nicknaming it Interstellar edition :D Get the all the details and download links here !

This post has been in my draft folder for ages - I actually forgot it was there for a while but I finally came back and finished it off.   So, I've been thinking more and more lately about game-play that is engaging but not exactly your traditional idea of "fun". Tim Marsh calls this sort of thing " serious experience " and points out it can be quite a good way of raising awareness and getting people to think about various topics. In terms of the recent competition that I organised for CHI+MED , I was hoping that some of the entries would go in this direction, and it was something I think the winner - Nurse's Dilemma - managed to achieve. I'm probably going to say a bit more about the competition and the judging process at some point but for now I want to focus more on the commercial games I've been playing and how they've been able to provide compelling game-play that deals with serious topics in different ways. Possibly the first example I cam