“Every form of media in some sense has [an] ability to displace people in their imagination into some other place … when we see our kids playing these games, we don’t really think of it as the same with reading, but in some sense, people get just as absorbed in books as they do in these games.”
– Will Wright
Via Rock Paper Shotgun.
“It seemed to me that what [players] wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine.”
… I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games.
The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective.
Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality.
Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine.
The real world had disappeared for them — it had completely lost its importance.
They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.
– William Gibson interview @ Paris Review
Gibson is speaking of the early 1980’s — the era leading up Neuromancer.
“A team of students and faculty from Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College is designing and building a groundbreaking computer game to help young people improve their everyday skills in self-control.”
“The use of physiological controllers in a personalized game platform allows us to help our patients help themselves in a new way,” says Dr. Laurence Sugarman, director of the Center for Applied Psychophysiology and Self-Regulation in RIT’s College of Health Sciences and Technology.
RIT game design and development students Ivy Ngo, Kenneth Stewart and John McDonald will work under the supervision of Sugarman; Stephen Jacobs, associate professor of RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media; and Robert Rice, assistant professor at St. John Fisher College’s Mental Health Counseling Program.
The game starts with assessments that help the players learn about and describe their anxieties and repetitive behavior by turning the players into game characters. Using physiological sensors that are built into the game hardware, players then learn how to monitor the physiological manifestations of anxiety and stress, or what is commonly called their fight or flight response. Finally, the players use those same sensors as controllers to move themselves through the game by monitoring and controlling their characters and the stress responses they represent.
“The game was inspired by clients and will involve client input and feedback throughout the development process,” says Rice.
Sugarman says games involving physiological health are newly emerging, yet none combines aspects of assessment, cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback in a creative and customizable setting. This game allows a unique extension of the therapist’s role that provides a fun, engaging platform for therapeutic change, while collecting data on psychophysiological change.
“Mind Media B.V. has also generously loaned, at no cost, the NeXus-10 Biofeedback hardware and Biotrace software used in this project,” says Sugarman.
Aug. 18, 2011
– Scott Bureau @ rit.edu
Dr. Scott Nicholson’s interests include libraries and games, and gaming as pedagogical tool. He is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade.
GAMBIT recently posted a podcast of Dr. Nicholson addressing the MIT Comparative Media Studies group:
Listeners will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so listeners will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work.
Darren Gendron, who had never designed a board game, has just designed Scurvy Dogs: Pirates and Privateers Sail the Seas.
Has the project got sea-legs? It probably does now, thanks to favorable coverage in The Washington Post:
Darren Gendron sees an opportunity — a niche, really — that he believes he can seize. It involves board games. It involves Gendron becoming a part of your Wednesday game night, entering the collective cultural consciousness through the living room. It involves pirates.
… Once the purview of larger game companies, such as Parker Brothers and Hasbro, game design is opening itself up to passionate, niche hobbyists.
Gendron wants to self-publish his game, and he estimates that he’ll need $20,000 to get it off the ground, through a microinvesting site called Kickstarter.
He has one week left to raise the money that might allow him to achieve the dream.
From a Seattle Times editorial:
For-profit colleges have successfully marketed a compelling story in which they star front and center as benevolent purveyors of the American dream through education and gainful employment.
The reality is the complete opposite. Former students testified before a U.S. Senate oversight committee this month about exorbitant tuition costs and unfulfilled promises of good jobs. One student spoke of completing a program in video-game design and ending up in the video games section of a Toys R Us.
– Seattle Times: March 27, 2011
Jeff Koons Must Die!!! The Video Game from Hunter Jonakin.
– Tip of the hat to Agent 99 for the link
Very intriguing … I’ll bet people do some cool stuff with this technology!
Gameduino connects your Arduino to a VGA monitor and speakers, so anyone who can write an Arduino sketch can create video games. It’s packed full of 8-bit game goodness: hundreds of sprites, smooth scrolling, multi-channel stereo sound.
Gameduino is designed, tested, documented and the prototype is built. The videos were all taken from the real hardware — all the demos are on the Gameduino project page.
What needs to happen next is a manufacturing run. Because the board uses a fairly fancy chip, a short production run is the only way to keep the cost reasonable. Your pledge gets you a Gameduino from this first run.
With a horde of Gameduinos in kitchens, garages and classrooms, the resulting old-school 2D mayhem should be considerable.
Gameduino is open-source hardware (BSD license) and all its code is GPL licensed.
So are you that kind of person? Does the Gameduino look insanely cool, and you’re already daydreaming about the games you’ll create? Then go make a pledge!
Via Slashdot.
Synergon: “Where dreams come to die”
Synergon was conceived as a satire of office culture and corporate-speak, but expressed in the language of a D&D-style role playing game. What originally started as a joke among employees quickly expanded to include basic rules and longer lists of abilities and skills. Pretty soon it became apparent that it could be made into a fully playable table-top RPG.
Synergon is supposed to simulate BLARPing. LARPers (or Live Action Role Players) are a group of people who get together to act out roles, usually in a vaguely medieval or fantasy setting. You may know them as those-guys-that-hit-each-other-with-foam-swords. BLARPers, on the other hand, are Business Live Action Role Players, and they play make believe every day in the office.
The comparison between LARPers and business people quickly becomes apparent when considering how many people in the business world are just making things up as they go along.
Via BoingBoing.
I believe it’s time for the obligatory Dilbert reference. Let’s see … yes, this will do nicely:
“Digital historian Jason Scott has an eclectic portfolio. At Textfiles.com, he collects files and related materials from the era of dial-up bulletin-board systems. That work led him to create BBS: The Documentary, an eight-episode miniseries about the early history of online culture. His second documentary, Get Lamp … 
examines text adventure games through interviews with developers, designers and players.”
– Computerworld
From an interview with Jason Scott:
Computerworld: Text adventures are no longer a financially viable form of entertainment. What caused them to fade into history?
Jason Scott: The idea of exploring a world, trying to figure out the meaning of that world, pull out answers from it and solve a quest was readily taken over by graphic adventures. These companies didn’t ask how they could improve text adventures, so they lost money and got bought out.
Via BoingBoing.
I played text adventures, back in the day … I have fond memories of Zork.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Game Types category.