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Here are my notes from Practice 2014 (at the NYU Gamecenter):

Holly Gramazio

Johnathan Blow

Sal Garozzo and Shawn Snelling

David Kanaga

John Papadiuk

Jake Elliot & Tamas Kemenczy

Dierdre "Squinky" Kiai

Samantha Kalman

Lukas Litzsinger

Zach Gage

Drew Murray

Asher Vollmer

Colleen Macklin

#PRACTICE2014

Here are all my notes from Meaningful Play 2014. Includes notes from keynotes by Erin Hoffman, Jan Sircus, Colleen Macklin and Jesse Schell.

#mplay

Mary Poppins, Game Designer

Watching Mary Poppins the other night with my kids, I was struck by a line from one of the songs:

In every job that must be done, There is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job's a game.

Is this the origin of "find the fun?" Did this game design chestnut originate from Mary Poppins?

Certainly, in designing learning games, I find this to be a pretty good description of what I do. I'm constantly looking for the fun in mundane, everyday tasks (and some not-so-everyday tasks that still count as work).

Here are my notes from the final day of the conference!

GDC Microtalks 2014: One Hour, Ten Speakers, a Panoply of Game Thinking! [Richard Lemarchand, et al]

Child's Play: Playtesting with Children in the World of Skylanders [Gareth Griffiths]

Experimental Gameplay Workshop

#gdc 2014

Here are my notes from Day 4:

Why is Gone Home a Game? [Steve Gaynor]

A Study in Transparency: How Board Games Matter [Soren Johnson]

Hearts and Minds [Frank Lantz]

#gdc 2014

Whew. Long day. But here's my notes from today's talks:

What Modern Interior Design Teaches Us About Environment Art [Dan Cox]

The Art of The Witness [Luis Antonio]

Scenography of Kentucky Route Zero [Tamas Kemenczy]

My Year at OUYA: The Ups, Downs and Future of a New Content Platform [Kellee Santiago]

Misogyny, Racism and Homophobia: Where Do Video Games Stand? [Manveer Heir]

Make Things Worse: Enabling Setbacks for Consequential Play [Patrick Redding]

#gdc 2014

And now here are my notes from GDC Day 2. Including the following talks:

The Four Emotions That Monetize Free-to-Play Games [Nicole Lazzaro]

500 Nights of Failure: Designing Republique's "One Touch" Gameplay [Ryan Payton, Greg Raab]

The Sandbox Postmortem: Crafting Your Success in World Building Games [Sebastien Borget]

The New Mobile Gaming Players: Chris DeWolfe on the New App Economy [Chris DeWolfe, Dean Takahashi]

Meaningful Companion Apps for AAA Console Titles [Andree-Anne Boisvert, Marie Eve Vignola]

Empathy for Octopodes: How Octodad Helped Young Horses Grow Up [John Murphy]

1979 Revolution: A Case Study in Bringing Real Stories to Gaming [Navid Khonsari]

Empathetic Games Are Here to Stay! What's Next? [Vander Caballero]

#gdc 2014

Trying something new here. Posting a bundle of notes from yesterday’s talks at GDC 2014. Now with talk listing:

The Rituals of Mobile Gaming: Understanding the True Building Blocks of Customer Value [Scott Rigby, Troy Skinner]

Using User Research to Improve Game Narratives [Deborah Hendersen]

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine - Interpreting Feedback and Maintaining Your Vision [Andy Nguyen]

Reaching Color Zen: From Prototype to Chart Topper in Three Weeks [Robert Meyer]

Rogue Legacy Design Postmortem: Budget Development [Teddy Lee, Kenny Lee]

Player-Centric Design: A High School Story Postmortem [Andrew Shvarts]

Extrasolar Postmortem: Game Design at 0.0003 FPS [Rob Jagnow]

Microtalks: Retention Tips for Free-to-Play Genres [Steve Meretzky, John Welch, Kenny Dinkin, Raph Koster, Teut Weidemann]

Pursuing Interactive Suspension of Disbelief [Sean Vanaman]

#gdc 2014

jesseschell

Recently I was asked to give a talk about why it is that young children can learn touch interfaces so easily. The obvious answer is “because they are intuitive.” But that’s really a pretty vaporous answer, since the definition of “intuitive” is “easy to understand.” So the question becomes “why...

ebenmyers

Interesting angle on the underlying meaning of "intuitive"; comes with a good rule of thumb (Lens).

Those are aesthetics [the computational nature of machines] that interest me deeply, and the comparisons between formal limitation in more traditional forms like trochaic or iambic meter, syllabic rule, or semantic efficiency feel like birds of a feather with the strange and sometimes challenging constraints of the 6502 microprocessor or the Television Interface Adapter.

Ian Bogost again

I’ve always been confused at attempts to compare videogames to narrative forms like the novel or the cinema when poetic aesthetics like condensation, metaphor, and structure present themselves as alternatives.

Ian Bogost in The Journal of Electronic Publishing

The Role of the Coach

I've been thinking a lot about coaches and their role in relation to athletes (maybe the saturation of Olympics coverage has seeped into my head). Coaching in the broader sense (life coaching, performance coaching, etc) is an enabling activity, intended to help an individual meet a goal. The coach is a support, a sounding board, a motivator, someone to provide accountability, but they are subservient to the goal of the individual. This doesn't seem to always be true in sports and athletics.

Coaches (I'm primarily talking about head coaches, here) for competitive team sports (football, basketball, etc) function much more as active leaders. They are invested in the growth of the players, but only as it relates to the team excelling/winning. They are, in a sense, playing a strategy game against the other coach with their players as game pieces or units.

In baseball, the head coach is called the manager, which is more accurate. Managers are like the players of a "turn-based tactical role-playing game" to borrow a description from Brainy Gamer; they are invested in their players as units that can be deployed strategically towards winning the game. This is the same (to varying degrees) in football, basketball, etc. Coaching for the growth of an individual player may be part of their job (and, in fact, as you go down the coaching staff hierarchy to the position coaches, player growth becomes a larger and more primary coaching goal), but it’s not the driving force behind the head coach's or manager's actions.

In contrast, coaches in individual sports (tennis, gymnastics, boxing, etc) are enablers of the athlete, concerned only with the growth and improvement of the athlete. They are not playing a game themselves. Atul Gawande even notes that "in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach." They may think through strategic issues surrounding a given match, but the ultimate control of performance and execution lies with the athlete. They are the ones playing the game.

This gets interesting when looking at videogames. A cursory Googling for "eSports coaching" turns up a pittance of obvious resources, but searching for "StarCraft coach" returns a host of options, such as StarCraft Lesson. I am curious to explore these offerings to see if these tend toward experienced players seeking to impart their wisdom or expert coaches looking to guide others to greater success.

Then, there are efforts to embed the coach in the game. We have FPS Trainer (by Play2Improve) which seeks to programmatically embody coaching smarts directly into a game, but is that really aimed at peak performance or is it more of a tutorial, aimed at getting newbs up to speed? Not that either one is right or wrong, but they could be seen as very different coaching functions.

Then you have games that look a little more like baseball, in the sense that there are different types of players (just as the manager and the players on the baseball team are playing two "different" games). Savage and Savage 2 by S2 Games are prime examples; they even call out the two types: action players and commanders. Commanders (like head coaches) are playing an RTS, using units made up of action players, who are playing in an FPS mode. In other games, this distinction isn't as clear (or may even be emergent), but I believe it happens. I wonder how much coaching for individual improvement happens in the Savage player community...

In conclusion, it seems there are some areas in videogames ripe for tools and supports that enable coaching of both varieties. Coach as manager/leader is more readily supported by existing structures (though even those could be enhanced). However, coach as growth enabler seems like a role that could be amplified. In Halo multiplayer, the match review tools allow the possibility for real coaching to take place, but are there structures that could take that further? Or is it already there, and I'm just missing it?

Do we need that?

Thought Experiment: School as Game

This all started when I was reading this article. I got to thinking about school (K-12, public school) and how it's like a game (not original thoughts, for sure). Here's what came spewing out of my head:

Public school is a game. Well, actually, it's not, but the only thing that makes it NOT a game is the fact that it's not really optional. School is not a magic circle that we, as players/students, opt into. There may be many reasons (maybe even good ones) for this. That said, if school was optional, it would be a game (with grades as levels, the diploma as the ultimate prize, scores, intermediate goals, etc). That said, school would be a bad game... a bad game that many people would stop playing (even sooner than they already do - or in greater numbers).

Or perhaps, more correctly, it would be a niche game targeting the narrow demographic of players who have the requisite skill to keep up with the challenge (or whose skills aren't so above and beyond that they get bored). Soooo... what games have broad demographics and what can we learn from them? Farmville is pretty popular, but I'm not sure people will want to hear "make school more like Farmville." (Although, that might be worth investigating further.) Maybe, just maybe, this is a question that game designers haven't answered yet. I can't come up with a game that is both broad in demographic reach and deep/engaging to many different types of players (this needs more thought, too). But that's what school should be - broadly appealing, deeply engaging.

Maybe we should just ask the Q2L folks how they're doing it...

Whoa. Tumblr.

Just trying out this Tumblr thing. It might be just what I need for some lite blogging-style stuff, things that don't fit on Twitter...

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