My Games Design

 Last month I was invited to present at the Aarhus University's Interacting Minds mini-conference on "Failing and Confusion in Games and Gaming" along with Jesper Juul , Dennis Ramirez and Charlotte Janasson . Thanks to Andreas Lieberoth for the invite and organising a seriously interesting day :-) Mine was the final talk of the day, where I presented some of my PhD research on Investigating Game-play: Are Breakdowns in Action and Understanding Detrimental to Involvement? (see pic below). You can find my slides here . I'm waiting to hear back about a journal paper we put together on the findings but in the meantime you can check out my DiGRA paper on why I did not find physiological data to be useful for identifying breakdowns and breakthroughs in game-play. My main argument was that action and understanding breakdowns will contribute to involvement when the player feels responsible for overcoming them but that they will decrease involvement if they take too long ...

Last week I went to CHI in Paris - it's been a while since I've been to a major academic conference and I seem to have gotten out of the habit of blogging so I thought I would use this as an excuse to get back into it :-) Plus there was a lot of game sessions that have got me thinking. It all started last Sunday with the MediCHI workshop . This was a good opportunity to talk to about the work I'm doing on CHI+MED , with respect to medical device safety, and to meet others in the field. The main conference started on Monday with a keynote from Paola Antonelli from MOMA . She gave us an overview of lots of intriguing design projects that MOMA has exhibited and while no specific HCI challenges were made explicit during the talk, I was reminded about how technology, including games, can make people think. Particularly interesting examples include PIG 05049 (Christien Meindertsma) and the Menstruation Machine (Hiromi Ozaki/Sputniko!). She also mentioned their recent games col...

This Guardian article on a school founded on the principles of game-based learning claims this is also "proof that games are educational". I think it's going to take more than just the school opening to support this claim though. They are starting with just the sixth grade right now but you can check out the school website to find out more. I'm intrigued but not sure I'm a fan of the school being called "Quest to learn" - too many images of warriors, Elves and magic coming to mind...

I was going to write a single blog post titled "Conference season" since that is what the last two weeks have felt like, but I think it might get a stupidly long so I've decided to do two separate ones. I know I've been slack with the posting, especially about the games I've been playing, but now that I'm actually going to be in one place for more than a few days at a time I should be getting back into more regular posts. So, first off, was EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Amsterdam where I presented a roundtable discussion at the JURE (Junior researchers of EARLI ) preconference . I'm glad the other presenter at the session was doing games related research ( Jantina Huizenga who is working on the Game Atelier project) and though it may not have been the main area of everyone who attended, it was useful to get some different perspectives on my work. I also somehow managed to win an award for "Best roundt...

I was in Barcelona last week for ECGBL. This was my first proper conference and though I wasn't presenting it was pretty cool to be able to get a feel for what other people are doing in the area. In general, I enjoyed the whole thing as I got to hear from different perspectives and meet some interesting people along the way. But it was almost as people were a little too nice - there was little picking apart of ideas or applications, and I didn't hear any particularly difficult questions at the talks I went to. I'm not an advocate of being difficult just for the sake of it, but in line with Ben Sawyer's keynote where he talked about the need for constructive criticism and how the discipline needs to move on from arguments about fun and learning, it was like people were a bit too eager to pat each other on the back. I think I was expecting a little more debate but perhaps I wouldn't feel the same if I had been one of the ones presenting. That doesn't mean there w...

I was in London last week for NMK's Writing for Games Event and while the event was interesting in and of itself, it's also got me thinking about the relationship between narrative and game play. The panel was pretty cool, consisting of Katie Ellwood, (who worked on Getaway franchise), Steve Ince (who worked on the BAFTA nominated Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon ), Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman (who were both involved in Perplex City , an ARG , with Adrian as designer and producer and Naomi as a writer) and it was fascinating to hear about their different experiences. It did seem like the event was aimed more at people who were looking to break into the games industry as writers, such as Justin who I sat next too and had quite an interesting chat with afterwards. While becoming a games writer is not something I've ever really considered, I do feel I came away with a better idea about the part writing plays in the game design process. There were a couple of things that s...