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This was posted on March 12 and yet no more than 22,000 people know about it by now. So, I figured that I’d better mention: Home Taping is Killing Music. (Thanks to Allen on ifmud.) And remember … whenever you violate copyright, God kills a kitten.
It doesn't look like the apocolypse
The title: Farmville Killed Gaming, V-Worlds, And Your Dog (tongue-in-cheek)
The premise: “…it seems the talk of GDC 2010 was… Farmville. Specifically, how metrics-driven game design (such as what Farmville uses) will destroy fun as we know it.”
The response: “i take particular exception to your statements about killing dogs. zynga is a dog loving company named after my dearly departed dog zinga.” (Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga)
Other luminaries, such as Raph Koster, wade into the discussion at the comments thread at Broken Toys.
Who would have guessed that an incredible (and very brief, and very well-illustrated) talk on poetry, videogames, and the relation of the reader/player to the poet/designer’s making would be delivered at GDC by my collaborator Ian Bogost?
Race in videogames is not an entirely overlooked topic, but mainstreams games, at their best, tend to play, strech, and poke up against stereotypes rather than offering affirming visions of our identities and communities and how they interrelate. So, I was glad read that discussion of this topic “found its way to GDC ‘10,” as noted in the post “What Color is Your Avatar?” in Brainy Gamer. The writeup covers a industry/academic panel at GDC with Manveer Heir, Leigh Alexander, and my colleague here at MIT, Mia Consalvo. Although I wasn’t there, it seems to relate their important points well, and it certainly offers some food for thought.
I developed a version of EISBot that plays a specific strategy, known as a 10-15 gate rush. The build was recently made famous by Nony. It is a Protoss build with the goal of harassing your opponent with ranged units as fast as possible and is most commonly used against Terran opponents. This strategy requires a large number of micro-management actions to maximize the efficiency of each unit. This is achieved by attacking enemy units and then backing off.
I tested the bot against several human players on the International Cyber Cup and was surprised to discover that the bot achieved a win rate of over 30% when tested in 40 matches.
Ken Perlin, Professor of Computer Science, New York University
Ken is giving a talk titled:
“Graphics, Games, Characters and Touchpads — a tour of recent research”
Date: Tuesday, March 16
Time: 11:00am
Place: E2-180 (The Simularium)
Abstract
This talk will provide an overview of various recent
research,mincluding Games for Learning, pressure sensitive touch
devices, emotively expressive procedurally animated characters,
intuitive 3D modeling, and ideas about bridging the divide between
programmers and non-programmers.
Ken Perlin's Responsive Face demo.
Bio
Two quick interruptions to our unscheduled blog hiatus:
Francisco J. Ricardo of RISD’s Digital+Media Department has written a deep and detailed blog post, “From Objecthood to Processhood.” In it, he defends artists, their work, and their discourse about the digital, responding to Henry Jenkins’s 2000 article “Games, the New Lively Art,” which celebrates video games but isn’t as keen on the work of artists. He also describes the transition from a focus on the artwork, an object, to consideration of art as process, concluding with reference to my ppg256 series.
One of Kevin Dill's game credits: Master of Orion 3
“The Art of Game AI: Sculpting Behavior with Data, Formulas, and Finesse”
Kevin Dill, Lockheed Martin
Date: Monday, March 15
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Place: E2-180 Simularium
Hosted By: Michael Mateas
Abstract
This lecture will explore the challenges that are involved in constructing believable AI behavior, the mindset that one must adopt to accurately model these behaviors, and the techniques that can be used to construct them. The attendee will leave with a broad summary of how to approach the artistry of constructing artificial behaviors – and will likely have adopted the annoying habit of assigning values and formulas to everything they see around them.
The CNET News article, GDC: What’s next for video game AI?, features demos of EIS research projects delivered at the AI Summit at GDC along with the latest AI demos from Richard Evans and Ian Holmes. The AI Summit session, Experimental Game AI: Live Demos of Innovation, included demos of EIS’s Starcraft agent and The Prom, a system featuring play in social space.
A demo of The Prom, or Promacolypse, was given by Michael Mateas at GDC's AI Summit.
A demo of the Starcraft bot was given at GDC's AI Summit.
This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know someone who is very serious about games but is a little too attached to their fanboyism to see the bigger picture. Tell them to skip past the first two minutes of class business and jump right into the real intellectual meat.
The Global Game Jam 2010 concluded over 30 days ago, but the treasure trove of indy creations it left behind remains largely unexplored. Then again, how is anyone supposed to review some 1000 games created specifically for an event that shuns any global judging? Who has that kind of time anyway? Certainly not overworked grad students!
But I’m here to tell you, you should try! Among these games you can find some of the most innovative zero-budget designs ever devised in the span of 48 hours and you can see the source code that produced them. I’m writing this review partly in hope of inspiring similar reflections from GGJ enthusiasts and partly in anticipation of our upcoming talk at the GDC Education Summit on this year’s Global Game Jam.
AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010.
This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!
Intro: "When I was 5 years old, I had a crush on Super Mario"
EIS was featured on current.com
Intro: "When I was 5 years old, I had a crush on Super Mario"
EIS was featured on current.com
The clustering of WoW Feral Druid forms (Bear on top, Cat on bottom)
Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note that this is inferred from statistics choices, it is not a simple flag that is set in the data itself.
The group (Copyright Robinson Kuntz/Santa Cruz Sentinel)
EIS is now able to claim “big in Santa Cruz” after being featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper (I’ve also heard reports of the story being syndicated to the San Jose Mercury News for the wider Bay Area).
If you never found the five minutes to play Jason Rohrer’s Passage, previously discussed, you can now play Passage in 10 Seconds as interpreted by Marcus Richert. Thanks to Jason Scott for the link.
We need to tag 64,000 photographs with expert data.
Thousands of people are going to come and help us, some for hours at a time, and we will attract them through the pleasure of play. How can tagging an archive of old photographs ever be an enjoyable experience?
Contemporary designers are more and more mixing play with work, and at Tiltfactor, we’re interested in how this happens, and how one can foster expertise in the process. We’re also interested in how values manifest in these data-driven systems. In making games for the social good, and games that result in real-world contributions, the designer must rely on ideas beyond innovative game mechanics and good old-fashioned playtesting. The data entry system for repositories such as databases need to be so enjoyable, well-organized, and instantly rewarding that people approach the tasks with motivation playfully like… a game.
Here’s an interview with me, on YouTube, focusing on ppg256.
“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?
“Developing Games for 2020″
Bob Mitchell, ohai
Date: Thursday, February 25th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Abstract
Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the possibilities in 2020. The most obvious changes will be in the hardware our games run on. The more difficult predictions will be figuring out what our players want from their games.
I’m here in Banff (in Alberta, Canada) at the cutting edge, or maybe the precipitous edge, or, as I’d prefer to think, the connecting edge. The occasion is In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, organized by Steven Ross Smith.
The presenters include: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah.
John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)
“The breadth of video game development” (working title)
John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro
Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.
John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)
“The breadth of video game development” (working title)
John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro
Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.
Some of the Tiltfactor team members are attending Toyfair this week researching product development and educational toys. We especially enjoyed meeting folks at Rubbing Hands, a small company in Connecticut. They showed us their games including Fred and Capture the Gag, which were very well designed with interesting play dynamics.
We in turn shared Vexata,
our awesome board game that manifests in the rules various human values. Aimed for the middle school market, it is informed by our work on Grow-a-Game!
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