My Games Design

On Sunday I went to a talk organised by the School of Life . They called it a sermon, it also took place in a what I think what used to be a church hall, and there were hymns. One of the hymns was Video killed the Radio Star, but we did actually have to stand up and sing along. It was all a bit random really in quite an enjoyable way and the reason I went was so I could hear Jane McGonigal talk about Productivity and games.  She started off by talking about how a lot of our ideas about what it means to be a productive member of society are based on a combination of protestant work ethic (God wants us to be busy) and the rise of capitalism. Which seems to ultilmately lead to a lot of guilt when we end up doing things that don't seem to produce anything. So in this light, playing games for hours on end is really just a colossal waste of time, right? Well, maybe not. After getting to write down a to-do list and then make it into a paper plane to throw into the audience, she went on ...

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court in London. Here's a photo of me trying out Fallout: New Vegas . As I just picked up from where someone else left off, I had no idea what I was doing so ended up shooting randomly at some people I think I was probably supposed to help. I didn't play for long as the people weren't very happy with me shooting at them and I died pretty soon after, so I'm not sure what to say about it. It felt a lot like the previous Fallout I guess, though the colours were less grey and more orange this time. Hmm, I'm thinking whatever happens after this PhD, I'm probably not going to get paid for writing game reviews... I know these events are supposed to give you a chance to try new releases, but I'm not sure how comfortable I feel playing in public. It seems a little too close to performing, even though I'm pretty sure no one is actually judging how well I'm doing. Plus, I think when it comes to ne...

Again, it's been a while. I have the excuse of spending the last few months running my main data collection study, though I have also been playing games throughout. Maybe I've been quite busy, but maybe I also haven't felt like I've had a lot to say. Recently though, I've been thinking more and more about one particular series I've been playing and how I got back into it after being convinced to give it another go as a result of one of my data collection sessions. Over the past few months, I've been asking participants to keep a set of gaming diaries and to come into the lab we've set up in the department to play games. They had to keep the diary for three weeks and come in on three seperate occassions so I could hook them up to various physiological equipment (to measure changes in muscle tension, galvanic skin response and heart rate) and observe them playing games. The sessions lasted about 2-3hours so all in all it was quite an investement from them....

The governement has decided not to go through with the pledge to provide tax relief to the games industry. This worries me. In my last post on the Game-based learning conference I mentioned Richard Wilson from TIGA talking about how important it was for the industry to receive tax breaks to encourage business to grow and expand. The parties seemed to be behind it initially - so what's changed? I can see how removing tax incentives might save money in the short term but surely it makes more sense to encourage local talent and industry to grow to create more jobs and make more money in the long term?

On Monday and Tuesday I was Game-based learning 2010 at the Brewery in London. It was a really good couple of days - think I still need time to recover from it! Apart from the talks and meeting new people it was also good to catch up with fellow PhD student Wee-Hoe Tan from Warwick and to bump into Jeremiah Alexander from Ideonic again. For a broad overview of the conference experience, Terry Freedman provides quite a good account of what the event was like. It's impossible to reccount everything here so I'm just going to talk about some of the highlights for me. The conference started with a couple of politicians who I don't remember having anything massively interesting to say (though I now know there is an All party video games group !) but I think I was reassured that whichever party wins the next election they'll be supportive of the video game industry. You see the recession did come up a bit but it looks like video games will save the day! Well maybe not sin...

It's been longer than I thought since I last wrote but since then I bought myself a PS3 and have been playing lots of games :-) One of which is Heavy Rain. I really enjoyed this game. Actually, enjoyed might be the wrong word, as I'm not sure I've played anything that's made me feel the way Heavy Rain has, especially in terms of experiencing guilt. I should probably post the obligatory SPOILER ALERT here as I will be discussing what happened when I played the game, though I won't reveal the identity of the Origami Killer. I don't want to spend half this post telling you about the game itself though, as this is less of a review and more a way to document my own response to it. For those who know little about the game though and don't plan on playing it go here for a synopsis. So first off, it's probably worth knowing that I didn't play the game on my own. My friend Paul came round and we took turns playing (on three seperate session). I'm not su...

First off, I need to say thanks to my mate Paul for sharing his PS3 with me over the last couple of weeks - I promise I will get one myself but it's going to have to wait till after Christmas... So first, we played Trine (from Finnish developers Frozenbyte and you can also get it on PC ) And it was good. A physics based action/platformer/puzzle game? That you can play with up to two other players?! Awesome!!! It looked pretty too (see video above). I have to admit not really caring about the storyline so much, but I did love the gameplay. Especially when we had to stop and think about what we needed to do next. I seemed to gravitate towards the thief most - I liked the fact she used arrows (so I didn't have to get too close to enemies) and I guess I just like jumping! I kind of left the wizardy stuff to the more experienced player as he seemed to have a good handle on when to do what but we would sometimes switch depending on what was going on. All in all, Trine did a brillian...