A couple of recent articles at Gamasutra spoke to my desire for rigor in the design of user interfaces.
Mick West's experiments in correlating perceptual and absolute lag is a work of perceptual science.
Garreth Griffiths dissects usability issues in boundaries with poor affordances.
Their rigor transfers insight from games to most any interactive media.
An image from flOw was one of the 16 pieces of game art selected by a panel of jurors from hundreds of submissions around the world for the 2008 Into the Pixel exhibit. The collection was announced on Tuesday at an event hosted by Siren Studios.
If you going, come say hi, July 15-17th LA Convention Center
Happy Summer
Would you like to influence the design of a game in just 30 minutes? Runesinger, an advanced game and MFA thesis at USC is conducting a focus test. Do you have half an hour to look at a storyboard and prior language games, listen to original scores and reference songs? No experience required. Express yourself.
Korean and American snacks provided. This will be on campus, Wednesday July 16 and Thursday July 17, from 1 pm to 4 pm. The focus test will finish in 30 minutes. Is there a time that is good for you? Contact me to confirm: kennerly -AT- usc -DOT- edu
At 1up, is an articulate comment on the "best writing" in videogames and the state of writing in games, in general.
A question the author has (and I have) is: Why do you have to be a WGA member to have your writing in a game qualify for nomination? This criterion sounds like a marketing ploy for membership. If BioShock and Portal didn't make their cut due to lack of these qualifications, then their Best Writing is not the Best.
CTIN 492 Experimental Game Topics: Physical Games Workshop from Julian Bleecker on Vimeo.
CTIN492 Experimental Game Topics, Experiments in Physical Interfaces. School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division, University of Southern California. Video documentation from last semester's projects.
I've always wanted to do a game about the history of Hollywood stuntmen. In it you would play/recreate famous stunts in cinema. But I think this is even better. There is a game in the works about records featured in the Guinness World Records:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19187
Next month American McGee’s game Grimm comes out. The game itself certainly seems worth talking about, but here I’m interested in it’s delivery. A 30 minute episode will come out every week for 24 weeks. This model seems liberating for both designers and players. I’m guessing you can pick and choose which episodes you want to play (and pay accordingly). So you don't have to play episode 3 to understand number 4, etc. As an advocate of short games, I’ve always said that I’m happy to pay more money for quality of experience rather than quantity (of time). But if one plays all 24 episodes the experience is hardly short. So this satisfies both conditions.
http://www.gametap.com/grimm
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Separately, I found this on Ian Bogost’s blog. You have to try this game. (Yes, its controls are painful).
Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist
…and a review here: http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/800
Article on Gamasutra waxes nostalgically.
By the way, another decent read if you haven't tried agile development yet, is there, too.
USC has received a $200,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how interactive digital games could be designed to improve players’ health behaviors and outcomes.
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/15326.html
and here:
http://www.rwjf.org/newsroom/newsreleasesdetail.jsp?productid=21898
and here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16212
Super super extra thanks to Diana Hughes and Tracy Fullerton and some earlier brainstormings with Mike Stein and Jen Stein.
http://finegamedesign.com/wii
After reading, hopefully you have enough examples to start experimenting. I have a lot more to learn, and would enjoy learning from your experiments on the wii.
David Sushil on his site and at GameCareer Guide, says their number is three:
- Incompatible mechanics
- Ubitquitous interaction
- Story dependence
I wonder: What are other problems do designers commonly get stuck on? I've considered 69 professional mistakes that I've seen (and made) over the last decade.
Dan Fiden spoke during the business of interactivity class on casual game design. From recall, the "design traps" of casual games he cited are something like:
- Designing for your peers, instead of your audience.
- Overloading the simulation with too many mechanisms (the kitchen sink).
- Failing to accept and tune from user feedback.
- Losing track of the design decisions and revisions.
- Innovating design for peer reputation (from a GDC talk).
- Limiting the design to your prototyping skill set.
Compared to David Sushil's three, these traps focus on the process rather than the design itself. I'll boldly step forward to list one mistake that is the most common one that I still make. It is also the most common problem that I identify in the work of beginning game designers, writers, and filmmakers:
- Cognitive leap. Failing to cue the user to get what it is that they are supposed to be doing and how to do it. Oftentimes, in my rush to cover a lot of ground in a first-pass, I omit some critical steps of user cognition, that would leave breadcrumbs, a cognitive trail in which the steps are not too far apart or not suddenly shifting in another direction without obvious cues in the story, interface, and look and feel.
In a quest to make players happy, I'd like to learn: What mistakes do you frequently find when designing, or reviewing, a game?
Korean lunch will be served, including fresh sushi, vegetables, cookies, tea, and juice.
We are looking for players to influence the design of an MFA thesis and advanced game project that practices a foreign language through play. No gaming or language experience necessary.
In response to the thoughtful comments from the previous round of playtesting is a collection of prototypes of casual games: a meaningful introduction, a playful sandbox, and a series of interesting choices, none of which require use of a keyboard.
This playtest takes 30 minutes. It will be offered on Wednesday and Thursday (May 28, 29) in the early afternoon. Contact me to confirm a time (even on a different day).
This is at the interactive media lab (IML) at G142, the basement at the bottom of the stairs, below Carson Sound Stage, which is across the street from the Student Health Center on the north side of campus.
Contact: Ethan Kennerly (kennerly -AT- usc -DOT- edu)
Game: http://runesinger.com
In the last IGDA newsletter, you might have missed a link to a page with all of the talks from the IGDA Leadership Forum. It's completely justified my $50 by itself.
In particular, I wanted to share this talk, called "Working With Publishers as a Developer Producer". Chris Natsuume does a great job of detailing a approach to collaborating with your publisher, starting with how your company's goals contribute to a more positive relationship in the first place, and going all the way through development.
Normally I wouldn't post this to the main page, but I've been getting a couple disparate requests to cancel their Empireville memberships, and I wanted to put the information front and center:
For anybody here who'd like to know -
Call Empireville up ((206) 607-8073), and choose the cancel option from the main menu (Number 5, I believe). Follow the over-the-phone instructions, and that will take you right out.
Many of you asked about this semester's final projects from CTIN 484/489 after seeing them during seminar two weeks ago. They have just been added to the projects page, and Tracy and I are very proud. Direct link here:
http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/games/20080514-intermedia.php
A list of formerly commercial or shareware games now free to download
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_games_released_as_freeware
Check out GTA and GTA II as free downloads for some interesting historic perspective on the recently released GTA IV. The original multi player gameplay in GTA consumed many hours of my time in 1997 here at USC and is well worth checking out considering no multi player versions of the game have been released until recently.
Cuerpo y Luz (body & light) is a work in progress co-directed and designed by Veronica Paredes (iMAP) & Andrea "budafly" Rodriguez (IMD). This immersive/interactive dance installation was created in conjunction with the CTAN 495b Experimental Animation class taught by Michael Patterson & Perry Hoberman's CTIN 544 Experiments & Interactivity class.
Please join us TONIGHT for the CTAN 495b screening on in the RCZ Stage E and walk through demo from in the ZML 7pm-9pm. Hope to see you there!
Our MFA thesis and Advanced Game Project is recruiting. Runesinger is a videogame to practice Korean through play. We are seeking three creative coders and many more playtesters. Do you know someone interested?
