January 30, 2006
Darwin Island Prototypes
"IK creatures"
Dec05, 2005
"eat & grow"
Dec07, 2005
"catch the dragon tail..."
Dec14, 2005
Visual Concept Sketch
"Sound and Animation Prototype"
Dec30, 2005
Dec31, 2005
"Fighting, growing system Draft"
Jan30,2006
Banned XBox 360 Ad
A very good one:
http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/22/banned-xbox-360-ad-best-ad-ever/
January 26, 2006
On going Thesis Bibliography
Articles
GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games
A paper on Computers in Entertainment (CIE) thoroughly developed a evaluation model based on the 8 elements of enjoyment from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory. It also has a nice analysis between Warcraft 3 and Lords of the Everquest based on flow experience.
If you are not an ACM member, here's the link for the PDF.
Flow & Coliberation from Bernie Dekoven
One of the creator for new games movement, who spent his entire career in researching fun and game design. He has great experience in studying fun and social game-play.
Learning by Design: Games as Learning Machines
Well done article about learning systems in good games. It supported the flow theory from all different aspects and also pointed that to change player's attitude from passive consumer to active agents is the key for a fluent learning experience.
The Psychology Behind Games
One very decent article talking about game design with pyschology concerns.
Researchs
Information Processign Technology Office
Researches to create interface that helps people to manage mass information based on cognitive feedback.
Robin Huncke
AI for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games
Artificial Intelligence Phd. at northwestern university whose thesis is very close to what I'm doing. She is creating a FPS system that continually examines player progress, modifying the difficulty and pacing of in-game challenges to adjust the player's overall experience of "flow".
http://info200.infc.ulst.ac.uk/~darryl/Papers/Digra05/digra05.pdf
January 15, 2006
We are in IGF again!!
With the former success of Dyadin. Much discussed Cloud is going to be in Independent Game Festival at San Jose this year. USC IMD's second punch at the IGF.
January 6, 2006
If video game is a Media
After days and nights thinking, I suddenly realized what is missing in our current video game industry.
Media is defined as a medium to realize communications. If you see video game as a media, it has to have two components:
One is the interactive system which is the thing to realize communication, it is designed to serve specific needs, for example, generating fun experience. Then the other part is the content that system will communicate, it is the specific need, the specific message, the specific experience game designers want to communicate to the players.
Sadly when I tried to dig the messages from today's games, most games don't have a message or have a very shallow message. And most game system is not even designed based on the message, instead, they are all the believer of "fun, cool, and addicting" which makes most games feel the same today, though they have different skins.
If you ignore the importance of the message, just want to focus on an addictive interactive system, please check out Vegas. Slaughter machine is not a media. Why are there millions of people look down at video games? What kind of messages have we been making in the past twenty years?
Beyond fun, addicting, cool, think about messages like love, evoking, humanity, nature and Zen. If a video game is made to communicate Zen, then staying still and not touching the controller will be the right action a player should do. Will any blockbuster game designer today design a game that player will have to stay in meditation for 3 min? Probably not. Will that be a great experience? I'll say very likely YES!
Fortunately, we have seen games that tried to deliver deep messages here and there in the recent five years. For example, as the creator of Katamari Damacy claimed, he made that game with the intention to communicate "Love". And people loved the game and learned to love more in "We love Katamari"...
In my opinion, the new era is coming, the Citizen Kane of video game as a true media is near, the future of this media is bright and shining...
What do you think?
Can't resist to put this up...
You can purchase this with 9 yuan(around $1) at China...
