What I did on my wnter break

I'm preparing 2 new classes - Fun & Games (a seminar discussion class for 18 senor undergrad students) and Critical Analysis of games (for 30 undergrads) - trying to find readings, think of assignments, and read a lot of extra stuff to add to the lectures to help make sense of all the new material (new to me and them)

I"m also determined to play a lot of videogames. I checked a lot out from our collection at school - i bought them but never had time to play them over the semester. I checked out a lot for hte DS - I like the 2 screens and the different input options. I also took a couple for the XBox360 and the Wii Image via Wikipediaand one for the PSP. I have a couple PSP games at home already that I need to play. I figure I"ll blog some little summaries/reactions to the games and ideas I have about using them in assignments. We bought a lot of the games used and many don't have instructions which is a pain for me. I discovered tho that hte students don't read the videogame instructions (and were ticked that they had to read and understand the instructions for the board games we played. I have found good guides and instructions on the IGN site and have put links to them on our website

Reviews
Image via WikipediaMeteos (for the DS) - a puzzle game. I bought it used and it didn't have the instructions. I think I need to read the guide I found on IGN - there are things going on on the screen that I had no understanding of even after playing for 2 hours and sometimes winning. As a puzzle game tho it's kind of typical - match the tiles up in groups of three to have them blast off. Things happen really fast tho - I'd concentrate on the right side of the screen and before I knew it I had lost because of something on teh left hand side. There's some kind of outer space theming - the falling tiles are takng place on different planets. I can see assigning students a group of puzzle games to compare or compare puzzle games on different platforms or different kinds of puzzles. And in the fun class we're going to talk about puzzles so it might be interesting to have them play puzzle games and see what the fun is. Someone I follow on Twitter recommended I check out the Disney verson of Meteos - I'm a big fan of all things Disney so I will look for it when I go shopping later.

Image via WikipediaLumines II (PSP) - another puzzle game - kind of like Tetris with the falling tiles but the tiles are made up of 4 smaller blocks and each block can be one of 2 colors. You have to maneuver the tile so that you get 4 smaller blocks of the same color in a 2 x 2 arrangement (not a 1 x 4 unfortunately - those I seem to be able to build with no problem). Themusic (in my opinion) is annoying. And some of the flashing skins are hard on my old eyes. The 2 x 2 squares don't disappear immediately - only when the timeline (that maybe is moving in time with the music, I can't tell because the music irritated me and I turned it off) crosses over it. The timeline is a neat feature they added to the tile matching puzzle. if you can work it right, you can stack up 2 x 3 or 3 x 3 (or bigger theoretically) and get more points. You can save at the end of each game. There are 22 levels as a beginner, another 22 for the A level and a third set of 22 levels for the S level. And then lot of other ways to play including competing against the cmoputer. Assignment possibiities: It might be interesting to try and lay out historically the feature development in the puzzle genre - any of the genres probably. Same with some of the euro games (like from carcassone to settlers to stone age). Another assignment - compare puzzle games on the different platforms - how do they take advantage of the strengths of each platform/how are they different from platform to platform.Another assignment - take the timeline feature and work it into another genre - and think how you'd have to change the win/lose conditions and the rules.

Image via WikipediaAnother puzzle game I have been playing is Boom Blox on the Wii. You knock down these stacks of blocks with baseballs and ray guns and bowling balls. Some of the blocks are bombs. Others are filed with explosive gas. It's good destructive fun. There's a big training set of lessons, then 3 areas of quests. As you finish the tutorials and quests you win stuff like castles and ray guns of your own to use in the third section - an area wher eyou can builid your own stack of blox for others to knock down - tho the backgrounds and decorations are limited to what you see in the regular game so no outer space blox. I like the destructive aspect. There are little creatures - cows and dogs and penquins - in the background. If ya toss the ball just right you can bean them in the head and make them disappear; you don't get any extra points (and you really should) but it's still fun. It seems less repetitive than the other puzzle games. And there are lots of ways thru the tutorials so you dont' get stuck having to do the same skill ove rand ovr and over till you accidentally do it correctly or in a timely fashion. And no mind-numbing droney music. Maybe that's one of the adantages of hte console - more space on teh dvd for content and better sound on the tv. I'd like to have the students make their own stack of blocks and decorate it for others to play and evaluate but not sure how to share it. Another assignment possibility migight be to look at how games incorporate avatars or characters representing hte palyer - in this game you pick your avatar out at the beginning but the only time you see that character again is when you restart the game. You don't see him throw the baseball or chase the cows. Kind of irritating that they made me pick him out and then I don't get to play as him.

Image via WikipediaSid Meier's Civilization (DS) - ok - i really don't like this kind of game - build units, place units, move units - turn based strategy. You go from the stone age to space age. There are several ways to win - that I like. It had a consistent use of the keys but i couldn't always figure out what triggered the end of my turn and it wasn't always clear to which units I'd already given a destination. It's a good example of in game tutorial level tho. Comparing the content of the tutorials with the directions for the board games we play might be interesting. Or examining the tutorial to see how they teach a variety of skills - what order does the tutorial put things in and is that the optimum pattern. This is definintely one I want to compare across platforms - what did they have to sacrifice to get it on the DS for instance. This isn't a picture of the DS version - it's just the only one I can find at the moment; I'll replace it when I can.

Image via WikipediaAssassin's Creed for the DS - just started this one (I have to play it on the xbox360 too). It's a platformer - run,jump, climb walls, run along rails. I think there's fighting - i saw a tutorial with some wicked sword moves and stabby combinations. No massive blood spurts like Mortal Kombat, but that's ok. There are some mini-puzzles. You use the ABXY keys and the LR trigger instead of the stylus. That was kind of irritating. I want to point with the stylus and have the little guy move there. There are spots where you can't see very good - seemed like my little assassin was around the corner from the camera. And now my little assassin is caught in some kind of dumb loop - i keep following hte arrows but there's nothing to do and it just keeps sending me around. Time to check for a hint online I guess (man how lame is that - but hey, this is for educational purposes, not fun!)

N+ (on the PSP) - IT's a good intro the the button mashing type of videogame - one button with the left hand (directions) and one with the right (jump). Except even that is giving me fits. I'd like to blame it on the fact that I"m left handed so i keep trying to jump with the left hand, but mostly don't think that's it. I need more practice. I am going to play the game on the DS too. I think it would be a good first psp game for the students - use a few buttons. Not much story or character development, just action. You could build a story around it I think to give the little ninja some back story.

Text Twist - a casual game - I played it on Yahoo Games - URL: http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=texttwist. I'm a big fan of Book Worm - maybe it's clear I like puzzle games. I like casual games because you can play them for hours but if you only have a few minutes you can still get in a couple of rounds. This one is a little tougher because you only have 6 letters to work with at a time. I like the twist feature which rearranges the letters because it's hard to rearrange them mentally. There is a timer to compete against. If you ahve the right kind of browser it keeps track of high scores (I was on Firefox and it didn't track them). It's an example of a game with very few rules up front (or maybe very few rules overall). It's on a lot of sites - an example of portal distribution. I can't figure out how they're making money but I enjoyed the game.

Shape Inlay - another casual game on Yahoo Games - URL: http://games.yahoo.com/free-games/shape-inlay - a stream of tiles scrolls across the bottom. You have to drag the pieces up into the puzzle shape, trying to fill it in with the shapes. The drag and drop interface is pretty slick. There's time pressure because if the shape tile area fills up you lose. I can't imagine how you could use up all the tiles so I figure you play to get the most points - you're always going to run out of time/tile space - the trick is to play as long as possible. So you maybe can't win but can delay losing as long as possible. I just noticed - there is no credit for the game creator

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Another TED video - this one on creativity and play

Tim Brown, CEA of design firm Ideo, gave a talk on creativity and play at TED. It was part of the Serious Play conference that focused on the same topics.

The Flow Guy

Here's a video of a talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at TED (tech, education, entertainment conference with lots of speakers over the years. He's talking about flow which is an idea we're going to discuss in game design class and in the fun and games senior seminar.

ideas for the Fun & Games senior seminar - Spring 2009

So there was a less-relevant-to-me speaker during the conference and I used the time to make some notes about the upcoming senior seminar. This isn't the final set of ideas - nothing is set in stone yet. I haven't played with the concepts on the concept map yet. These are just a string of random ideas I had - topics, questions to answer, possible projects

The idea for the seminar came from a conversation I had with someone from Microsoft - I think it was John Nordlinger who's the program director for research and helps organize Microsoft's cruise for computer scientists interested in videogames. He mentioned that the games industry was really interested in creating fun products but didn't have the time or resources to study the concept of fun. He thought that colleges, students and professors would have the time and skills. Sounded fun to me. I want to get some professors together to talk about how fun plays out in their field, even if professors have fun. I might still try that out - but figured it was easier to get a seminar going so going to start with that. Hopefully the students will be able to deal with a really open structure class - there's no right answer, there's no one answer. We may go round and round and the picture may still be murky when we get done - gota figure out how to let them know that's normal in research and in a lot of projects they'll do in real life. We gotta be happy with baby steps.

here's some needs

• Image via Wikipedianeed readings about fun, entertainment, humor, media psych, media entertainment, effects of personality/demographics, characteristics of media, context variables, player reasons for playing - right now leaning towards reading Raph Koster's A theory of fun for game design
  
• need interviews with different kinds of people to see what they say about fun
• need articles about definitions and the process of defining things, how to figure out what's important

students divided into research teams - collect some data using different methods, present that to class, write that part of the reportsome questions we could try to answer - give each group a question to answer, they have to find readings, lead discussions, each group gets a question, has to do something in class a couple of times on their topic

• what's fun
• how do we recognize it
• how can we measure it
• how can we increase the chances of people having fun?
• how can we imporve the fun people are having
• do different people experience fun differently
• is fun experience differently depending on teh medium being used
• can work be fun
• can work be made fun
• does fun change as we add other activities in the game, as we add multiplayer
• what role does flow play in fun
  

things I want to do in class

• list and organize words and phrases that you associate with fun - probably use the mindmeister or draw on paper - somehow we have to get the ideas together on one map
• interview people (video, audio) - how do they define fun (in general, not with regard to videogames specifically) - they might give you examples which is ok but you have to try and bring them around to a definition
• look at picture tagged fun in flickr/facebook - what do they have in common?
• different teams collect different info about fun and create initial understanding of definition
• then do a round of projects/readings/discussion looking at how we measure fun, how we know when someone is having fun
• end of the semester is a round of how we can make games fun, what developers should do - this part of the class is explicitly about videogames, goal is to combo the general research into something useful for the industry
• students create report at 3 time points - collect data, analyze, write - we need a report format
• do focus group with the guys from qual about games, fun
• for each group's time leading class (1 week per topic or multiple weeks for a bigger set of topics

1. 1st day - tell us what we know already, present results of lit review, written review goes into the final report, in class give us the highlights
2. 2nd day - discuss the problems, what we don't know
3. 3rd day - get class to discuss how we find out more

can we involve other classes - get them to take our survey, participate in our wiki description; can we invite people from SL, watch people play all kinds of games - what evidence do we see of fun?

I'd like to set up a youtube channel and invite people to post their video responses/reactions - people could use VidNik - makes uploading to Youtube easy
want to create a site for ongoing conversation ouside class, maybe a wiki page or a forums page, some place to put in raw data, links to videos, transcripts, initital analysis, our sketches, our more finished reports, other people's conversatins, interim findings

Here are some readings suggested by folks from the IGDA Game Education SIG and the Women in Gaming SIG. I need to organize and put some topic labels on (probably get to that over the Thanksgiving break)

• Pierre-Alexandre Garneau. "Fourteen Forms of Fun" - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011012/garneau_01.htm
• Anders Hejdenberg. "The Psychology Behind Games" - http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050426/hejdenberg_01.shtml
• Jonathan Frome. "Eight Ways Videogames Generate Emotion" - http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07311.25139.pdf
• Image of Nicole Lazzaro. "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" http://www.xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf
• D. E. Berlyne. "Curiosity and Exploration" Science, July 1966
• Rowan Hooper. "Just How Exciting Is It?" http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/02/66598
• Various usability engineering presentations: http://mgsuserresearch.com/publications/ (They used to have video presentations online; I'm not seeing it today...)
• Marc LeBlanc. "Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics" The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology
• Katherine Isbister. Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience
• Joseph W Kable & Paul W Glimcher. "The neural correlates of subjective value during intertemporal choice" Nature Neuroscience, December 2007
• Michael C. Dorris and Paul W. Glimcher. "Activity in Posterior Parietal Cortex Is Correlated with the Relative Subjective Desirability of Action" Neuron, October 2004
• Costikyan's "I Have No Words and I Must Design": www.costik.com/nowords.html - this is one of the first writings on what makes games fun, so it's a great place to start. It also begins the all-important process of building a critical vocabulary to talk about games, something that is sorely lacking in our field (though not for lack of trying).
• Church's "Formal Abstract Design Tools": www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design_tools_01.htm - Building on Costikyan's work, Doug Church introduces the important concepts of player intention and feedback(among other things).
• LeBlanc et al's "MDA Framework": www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf - one of the most influential papers dealing with the concept of "fun" that I know of. If you read nothing else, read this. I'd even put this ahead of Koster, seriously.
• Falstein's "Natural Funativity": www.gamasutra.com/features/20041110/falstein_01.shtml - Most writings in the field try to identify what kinds of things we find fun. This article gives a great theory for WHY we find them fun in the first place.
• If you want to talk about Flow states (a la Koster), you could always assign some readings from Csikszentmihalyi's original work. - we have a video in the library of hte flow stuff - video 7521
  
• "Design Elements in Contemporary Strategy Games" and "Contemporary Perspectives in Game Design" - game design books written by George Phillies and Tom Vassal - these are available as PDF's, ebooks, and as paperback trade books
  
• The Origin of Myth by Joseph Campbell
• Jesper Juul's "half-real"
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs - some basic psych explanations for motivations
• Chris Crawford's article "The Core Argument" at http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/History%20of%20Thinking/CoreArgument.html
  
• Sutton-Smith trips through the topic in "The Ambiguity of Play"
• Jesse Schell's new book "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" - the part about harnessing your creative subconscious has been especially recommended, along with the design lenses - this book is great overall and for my fun class. The first few lenses involve fun.
• an out of print bookd by Elliot Avedon The Study of Games from the 1970's - here's the amazon.com link. It's an anthropology of play - and the author makes the case that games are a culture's way of making sense of the world they experience. I like that take on it. Jesse Schell uses Avedon's definition of games too.
• I have been trying to find some older articles about games and leisure activities. Here are a few that I've found and read so far: Leisure Time Activities of Economically Privileged Children by Cramer from Sociology and Social Research journal in the 50s, Games in Culture by Roberts, Arth, and Bush from American Anthropologist from 1959, and The Social Significance of Card Playing as a Leisure Time Activity by Crespi from American Sociological Review in the 50s

I found some interesting videos on YouTube too - I put them on a play list under my account (kgregson) called fun and games. I found one on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Flow. Notice I found a couple about architecture. Someone suggested having the students do a project where they look at lots of other fields and see how fun plays out there. The videos are a way to intro the idea of fun.