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This is the work from 541's skill-sharing. I learnt sound creating and mixing with Logan. He is a very patient and skilled teacher, helped me from basic principles to actual practice. With his help I got to know how to create sound in Max/msp, and how to combine different sound effects together in Final cut pro. In this piece, the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” as well as the heartbeats and the scary noises are made in Max/msp, then I combined them with several other sounds together in final cut and add some effects. The heartbeat sound is not loud enough, so please turn on your volume a little bit. Thank you.

Sorry for the delay. I should upload this one earlier. I was thinking made some changes to it, but couldn't find the original final cut pro file any more. So this one is still the one we heard from class. Many thanks to Logan, he is a great teacher. I appreciate his help a lot. And many thanks to Tracy for this fantastic idea of skill-sharing, I believe many people enjoyed it and would like this activity could continue and expand to the whole division.

Here is a really nice blog post by Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change asking whether or not Obama and his people understand the potential of videogames in the same way they have shown themselves to understand the nature of social networks. In the end, it is both an affirmation of Obama's track record with digital media, as well as a call to action regarding the power of games.

In reference to what Logan and I were babbling about in class last night, the following links explain further what Siftables are and how they work. David does a slightly better job explaining them than we did. Additionally, there's a link for Hiroshi Ishii's MIT profile page, if anyone wanted further reading.

Siftables Research Page: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/siftables.html

Siftables Video (about halfway in): http://admissions.media.mit.edu/admissions/lab-life/video/david-merrill

Hiroshi Ishii: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Undertow! is a mod of the popular family board game Up the River, with a grim slant. Instead of merrily rowing boats up the river, each player is responsible for a group of swimmers who are being pulled out to sea. We were aiming, in our design, to hit a particular emotional note: hopeless desperation, waxing panic. I believe we hit that mark.

Check it out.

Maybe it's a bit flashy. :)

Bill

Now you can read the entire paper! Hooray! Includes some awesome visual mock-ups. If you steal my idea, I will try to sue you and fail.

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Bill

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Overview

Butterfly Garden is a suite of thematically integrated casual games that are played in a highly social context, such as a preexisting social network like Facebook. The premise of Butterfly Garden is that players can design the wings of butterflies and share their designs anonymously. This design could be a simple pattern, like a real butterfly's wings, or it could be a drawing, a picture, or a poem. The player creates a butterfly with a design, and releases it into the wild. The butterfly will then find its way into the gardens of other players, who will be able to see and comment on the design.

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Overview

Scotland Yard is a strategic cat-and-mouse game in which one player takes on the role of a criminal and is pursued across the game board by the other players. The game board depicts a complicated network of numbered nodes that are connected by differently-colored lines: red, yellow, blue, combinations of those three colors, and black. The nodes represent locations in the city of London, and the lines represent routes between them. The colors indicated the modes of transportation that can access the route: taxi, bus, tube, and boat.

(For a CTIN541 assignment.)

Let us examine the system comprised of the tiles from a game of Scrabble, and consider how an analysis of their form, material properties, marked values, and especially the context implied by the alphabetic system relates to the way people play with the system.

The following seems an interesting response to two trends: 1) some people's predictions that "funware" -- applications that add a game component to a quotidian, (non-game) exchange -- will hold increasing importance in many markets in the near future; and 2) the fact that exergaming (ddr, etc) often seems the game world's dominant contribution to the fight against obesity.

A friend of mine recently slimmed down on Weight Watchers. She joined two months ago, and in just a couple of weeks, she'd shed 10 pounds. She'd been trying for a year to lose weight, but nothing worked -- until now.

Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.

It's an RPG.

The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That's why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life's drudgery more bearable.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2008/08/gamesfrontiers_0811