Tracy Fullerton provides a helpful overview and in-depth suggestions about how to set up, run, and make use of playtesting sessions as a designer. I plan to adapt these methods into the playtesting sessions of the games made during my doctorate. I strongly believe in the process of iterative game design, as supported by Zimmerman, [...]
Archive for the ‘Readings’ Category
On Playtesting
Posted in Indigenous, Investigating, Readings on April 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Serious Games Front
Posted in Designing, Indigenous, Readings on March 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m glad to hear from Simon that SeriousGamesSource.com is making a comeback soon. On that note, the field of educational games is growing past its phase as “edutainment” (please, please, would people stop making up silly merged words that date us?). James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy [...]
On Characters
Posted in Designing, Readings on March 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Very often, centering believable characters in the context of artificial intelligence or architectures for agents goes right over my head (the work of Bates, Kopp, and Perlin). At the heart of it, AI often intersects with emergent play and enriching player to non-player character conversations. I feel as though much of this work is preliminary, [...]
On Interactive Drama
Posted in Indigenous, Readings on February 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Based on, admittedly little, of what I have read so far concerning AI perspectives of interactive storytelling and interactive drama as it relates to games, many researchers follow the Hero’s Journey, the Three Act Structure, and the rising action/climax/denouement forms of story. They often divide this structure into a series of beats to program out [...]
Touching on Methods
Posted in Indigenous, Readings on February 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In my own research, I am designing Indigenous games and exploring the process and results of these designs. Game mechanics are emphasized, posing: What mechanics would be unique to an Indigenous game design? The motivating question for me is: how can video games be used for Indigenous sovereignty?
Brenda Laurel’s compilation in Design Methods gives several [...]
Thief: Deadly Shadows
Posted in Play Critique, Readings on February 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Now, I can’t remember which game it was, but I remember a presentation years ago that described the revolutionary change in level design brought about by being able to place groups of pre-rendered trees. No longer did each tree have to be created on the spot. Wow, what a far way things have come, and [...]
Framing and Playing
Posted in Readings on January 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
“The cake is a lie.” This reminds me of the use of “(All statements within this frame are untrue. I love you. I hate you.)” in Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” The cake is not a lie! Or is it? You never actually get the cake… Was the cake for you? Is the [...]
Glimmers of Narrative
Posted in Readings on January 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
So here we go, banging out a few points of perspective on narrative from various game scholars. Now, I’ll start with Jenkins, for the sake that I too have been accused of being a “narratologist” for using Jenkins as a reference in papers. Accused, I say, because that’s how it feels—you dirty, dirty narrative person [...]
