Developers and Theorists

Raph Koster is clearly an important person, especially because of his work on Ultima Online. He takes issue with Jepser Juul and the comments reported at the gamespot website, where there is some discussion on this. Juul's argument is that games like GTA and The Sims (also demonstrated by its popularity for mobile gamers as, I guess, its something that can be dipped in and out of quite easily) are more rewarding than games that are just goal orientated as they allow for more exploration and less failure, thereby appealing to a wider audience. His main point being that

Successful games without goals tend to be deeply expressive.

This means a higher level of engagement and involvement than with games that are more narrowly aimed at just achieving goals.Koster just clears up his own view of 'fun and flow', how he doesn't see them as the same thing - that you can be in flow without having fun, and have fun without being in that flow state. (Donald Norman?)

Scandinavia is clearly the centre of games theory at the moment. Along with Juul and others mentioned in a previous post, there are others, such as Lisbeth Klastrup who is also at the Center for Computer Game Research in Copenhagen. Klastrup also has a blog.

The memex engine is something I have recently been reading about, and must get to spend some proper time exploring, so I'll come back to it later. I also discovered that there has recently been set up the rather exclusive Hip Hop Gaming League. I bet Snoop Dogg is getting well paid by Microsoft for this. Vivendi have also started a mobile phone gaming division. Content will be the thing. There's lots of development of 'casual games' too, with Gamezebo a good site for reviews.

Games Designers

Where to start? Well, Shigeru Miyamoto seems to be revered as somewhat of a god at Nintendo, as many consider him to be the greatest video games designer, with Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Zelda. There is even an online shrine to him! There are interviews with him on this site, dating from 1991.

Grand Theft Auto (as, indeed, with most games) owes its existence to a number of designers, and there's a good interview here, at the Design Museum website. Dan Houser explains that:

We felt that video games, interactive entertainment or whatever you wanted to call it could also appeal to a bigger, wider audience - older people who enjoyed playing games, but did not do so to the exclusion of everything else. People with an interest in film, music, books and a broader sense of popular culture.

My interests are not only in popular culture (although my game will be influenced heavily by it), but also history, art and literature.

More on the history of video games and designers here, at wikipedia.

Conferences and more links

A couple of relevant conferences coming up:
Matt Adams of Blast Theory will be speaking on The Social Dimensions of Digital Gaming at The Game Developers' Conference in Calilfornia later in March. Plus SICS have another 'Open House' in April.

The Hypermedia lab at the University of Tampere, Finland (Finland being the land of Nokia) have specific work on Games and Storytelling. They have a lecture on developing mobile games that can be downloaded/streamed.

Nokia also have info and demos and research they are undertaking in future technologies.

Pervasive Gaming

A link from the Blast Theory website to IPerG, looks perfect a research source. They describe themselves as a 'pervasive gaming' consortium intended to explore the

new technologies to support the creation of new compelling forms of content.

Pervasive games are:

a radically new game form that extends gaing experiences out into the physical world.

Perfect.

The Swedish Institute of Computer Science ran the IPerG Open House Day last September, with a number of interesting sounding contributions.

The website also has some links on the project highlights, including a brief description of a thesis on emotional communication in the digital world. This was based on a project called eMoto, which is

a mobile messaging service for sending and receiving affective messages.

Their work includes looking both at the expression of emotion through body language, and theory on colour and emotion.
Anna Ståhl states that,

from the design process and the user studied we have extracted four desirable qualities when designing for emotional expressivity: to consider the media specific qualities, to provide cues of emotional expressivity building on familiarity, to be aware of contradictions between the modalities, and to open for personal expressivity.

It seems to me that these things are essential in engaging people in an outdoors interactive game.

eMoto runs on sony Ericsson's Symbian mobile phones, the P800s and P900s, which have a stylus used with their touchscreens. The stylus has had an accelerometer an a pressure sensor added to capture gestures of the user. This technology is discussed more here. But the stylus and phone cummunicate via Bluetooth. Their full presentation is accessible from the publication link here. Look at the bottom of the page.

Bluetooth

Despite what I said earlier, it seems Baracoda are one company that have invested heavily in this technology for its products (which are compatible with Mobile Bristol. They give some good reasons. Namely, its interoperability (having a standardised protocol) and the possibility of creating ad hoc networks. Seems I shouldn't rule out Bluetooth (Wikipedia info here).

Futurology

I've also been looking at this curious topic - futurology. BT's Foresight and Futurology Unit looks at

how technology will change the way we live our lives in the future.

Their Technology Timeline is worth a look, for their predictions.

One of their main areas of interest seems to be 'active skin', looking at a point in the future when chips are the same size as skin cells. Skin could then be a communications medium, linking various mobile devices, or a 'video tattoo' (extremely thin screen) could be stuck on one's arm. I know that 'content distribution is an area that BT is moving into (with TV over broadband arriving sometime this year), having suffered from the vast increase in competition in telecommunications.

They also seem to be applying Donald Norman's ideas about usability to mobile phones at last, and have a page dedicated to devices. They state that with new devices

spending time setting [them] up is a huge barrier to getting people to use new services
and that they
should do something useful straight out of the box.

They also need to be able to communicate effectively with each other, and this is hindered by havign such different operating systems - it is a competitive model, where a different approach might be more effective for all. If every car had a different operating system, life would be very difficult, as you would have to learn a new one if you wanted to buy a different car.

Bluetooth is not the best means of communicating as it's not entirely reliable, and requires lots of steps to set up a connection. Overall, though, these kind of things are relevant to the type of technology that would be essential to the kind of games I'm thinking of.

Other Bits of Interest

At-Bristol are looking at commissioning art to link the open spaces around their building, on the themes of reflection and exploration: everythingwaswonderful

Site specific art in urban spaces is something that interests me and is relevant to my current thinking. Context is important, and can make work more interesting and thought provoking.