Game Development at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Here’s a photo from the podium of the “Global Game Jam Blasts.” Sean Duncan is in the glasses.
I presented my take on UMBC’s jams. Some people just presented their own games. Link to slides later, but know that if you submitted a game at UMBC GJ, your name has now been up in lights.
“Using Cognitive Task Analysis as a Tool to Make Serious Games More Serious”
CTA is set of analysis tools for expertise. Expertise (in this framework) is knowledge that can be applied to a problem. CTA provides methodology for describing and classifying problems and how easily a particular expertise can be applied to them.
The talk was about applying CTA to games along with playability considerations. The game is always “how to apply expertise X”, and you make a bunch of problem scenarios into which the expertise is more-or-less-successfully applied. If the game gets boring, make the problem not fit the expertise as well (“well-formed problems” vs “poorly-formed problems”).
Jargon note: “Serious Games” at GDC embraces both “Art Games” and “Simulation Games.” The former are made to be presented to boutique or gallery audiences as content, and the latter are a form of training exercise. That is an enormous scope, and I have been confused by it.
Art games go back at least to Dada, but they tend to be in service to polemics or process– Duchamp, Dada, Fluxxus– good art making a point, but not play-tested, not playable, and very unsatisfying as games.
Simulation games are a billion-dollar industry that go back to the Franco-Prussian war– think tank battalion training exercises.
Strange two things to lump together– art and war. But they are certainly serious.
Steps for development via Lex van den Berg, Utrect School of the Arts
1 build a good education
2 align with industry – teach their tools, know their processes
3 recruit partners to fill in holes in your capabilities — for them, it was comp sci capabilities
4 acquire funding partners – one partner per employee; it’s time-consuming
5 build a lot of big labs
Analysis? sitting in the pixar presentation; maybe more later.
1 hold events
2 stand for something & articulate it
3 start small & keep on going
4 analyze the events afterwards & refine (“stay learning”)
5 repeat often — meet regularly
6 be inclusive– don’t turn people away; help them grow. If you want to have a certain crowd, control that with invitatons
7 ID core values (see also 2)
8 design the experience- schedule, topic sequence, activities, room layout
9 teach participants how to control the event
10 help people duplicate your event in other venues
— Jeff Lindsay , Glider Lab
Jim Munroe also gave an excellent presentation, but it was more anecdotal/ less pithy.
From “Serious Games Summit,” Borut Pfeifer:
“The Unconcerned”– a game about trying to find your daughter, who is lost in the post-election riots in Tehran.
Ideas:
Consider the conceptual axes of your prototype: mechanics, rules, and aesthetics
Use a thematic statement, in which you clarify what your goals are.
Metaphor mechanics fail when they are too simple, overgeneralized, mismatched (conveys additional content you don’t want), or when they’re too repetitive.
Just checked in. Already seen Ian Bogost and the Crayon Physics guy.
Brian Reynolds has a long history in Baltimore area game companies, from the beginnings in MicroProse, to Firaxis to co-founder of Big Huge games. These days he’s Chief Designer at Zynga. He’ll be talking at the Baltimore IGDA meeting tomorrow (Thursday, 2/25) at 7pm at the Greystone Grill in Hunt Valley. Check it out.
Well, my intention to have an update of favorites every day clearly didn’t last past the first day. So, of two more days of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, here’s what stood out to me…
So, I’m reading A Gamut of Games (Sid Sackson), and it mentions in passing that thousands of board games were patented in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
And child-of-the-80’s Neal’s subconscious pipes up with, “too bad; it would cost a mint to track through all that microfilm to find the good stuff.”
Waitaminute! The internets! Is there a way to find expired game patents from 100 years ago? Why, yes, and its URL is:
http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search
As Mr Sackson noted, many of these games stink, are racist, or are about baseball. Also, these are legal documents, so making the rules clear is not their primary goal.
Gamut includes “Blue and Grey”, a nice checkers variant, that Mr. Sackson found in a patent search, in the seventies. He lived in NYC, so he had access to the patent library via the public library there. They were probably on microfilm reels– here’s the process: look through the (30-pound book of) title lists and keywords, jotting down reel reference numbers, then check out (one at a time) reels with possible matches, then use a Xerox kinda thing to get prints of good ones ($.15 a page), then go home and figure out that they’re all crappy games– repeat twice a week for your whole life, get 20 games.
The graphic from this post is from a 1902 patent awarded to L. B. Gaylor.
The age of original documents is upon us. When I was in school, you acquired expertise in an area by finding books that anthologized the best books in the field. Usually, the books you found did a their jobs poorly, or only in service to the editor’s agenda, or were limited by the editors’ own poor document access.
Now, most original documents are available to everyone with a computer. That’s not everyone, but it’s a billion more than it was. Usually, it’s via Google, and that will eventually be a problem.
Gamut also mentions the Young Folks’ Cyclopaedia of Games and Sports, a long-out-of-print treasure trove of games and rules– again, at the time, available only to book collectors or scholars with crazy library privileges. Here’s the link to the PDF:
http://books.google.com/books?id=sysqAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Young+Folks+Cyclopaedia+of+Games&cd=1#v=onepage&q=Young%20Folks%20Cyclopaedia%20of%20Games&f=false
This book, and all these patents, and all their games, belong to everyone– they are in the public domain. All we need to do is find them.
I intend to find a lot of them.
(Microfilm? Really, subconscious? When did we become a geezer?)
My first app is available in the app store! ClimberMan is for sale- internationally– for 99 cents. Buy 1,000 copies please! ; )
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