Talking to Students

I've been invited to give a talk in November to students in the computer science program at ITESCA in Sonora, Mexico. There's no game-focused program there so this will be a pretty basic talk, and as some friends of mine have already pointed out, students seem to *always* want to know how to get into the industry. I figure I'll give a broad overview of the industry in terms of how production is generally divided between skills, what the impact of casual games/iPhone/downloadable console games has been for independent game developers, then give them a massive amount of resources -- books and websites, mostly -- so they can do their own research. And then, of course, Q&A. My Spanish is non-existent so I'll have a translator, too. Haha.

Any other tips? Or, if you know of good books/websites that I might not be aware of, please pass them along to me. Thanks!

Quick Philosophical Grammar Question...

Should game titles be italicized?

I'd been trained by some press outlets not to italicize them; but lately I have been thinking we ought to treat them the same was as films, TV shows, and books. Makes sense, right?

Poems about a Freshly-Picked Peach

Are games trapped by math?

I just learned that all of the peach orchards between Parmer and 35 and Round Rock are gone. Which sucks. ["It’s all WalMarts now." "It's the pits." Laughter] Yeah... and why is there no game about the taste of a freshly picked peach, straight from the tree, with the smells and dust of the working orchard? How do you make a game about that?

["Because my monitor tastes like crap." "It's a human interface problem."]

It isn’t just an interface problem! It isn’t just an interface problem! There are probably poems about the taste of a fresh peach.

Raph Koster, at Project Horseshoe.

Game Career Seminar

So what have I been working on in my new job as Conference Manager? I'll tell you - the Game Career Seminar, happening next weekend October 28th and 29th at the VGXPO.

If you were like me two months ago, you'll say, what is the VGXPO? It's a new consumer videogame event - this is the second one - in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. You know, where George Washington's men froze their feet off in the winter of 1777.

The event is aimed at high school and pre-major college students, and it's full of practical information and advice - not just about choosing a school and trying the get a job, but also about how to think long-term about a career in the game biz. It's rewarding as hell, but it ain't easy.

If you're a young whippersnapper (or know someone who is) and you want to know more about the game industry and where you might find a place for your talents, I encourage you to check it out.

But, bring an extra pair of boots. Just in case.

MacArthur Open Forum

Hey big thinkers and wranglers of ideas, the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning has a series of discussions planned for the next month, all centered around interactive entertainment and its impact on our world.

The discussion is happening online: http://community.macfound.org/openforum

So, take a look and chime in with your ideas! I'm already in there - but I feel I didn't say enough!

GameJew Takes on Education

My favorite internet star of the moment, GameJew (AKA Jonathan Mann), takes on education in the latest episode: GameJew Episode 7. He visits a videogame class at a technical college, then talks to a professor of interface design at an arts school, and finally ends by driving around a videogame bus to teach kids how to play co-operatively.

There's a wealth of interesting insights here - like the fact that the kids value winning over challenge, something that a lot of hardcore gamers may not understant, since one common critique that can lower a review score is that the game is "too easy."

The 3D interfaces designed by the teacher Jonathan interviews are also beautiful and inspire new possibilities for videogame controls.

GameJew is one of the smartest, funniest, most creative commentators on the culture of videogames today, and I urge anyone interested in that to check out his work. It's not always perfect, but I would argue that it never fails to engage.

Better Game Characters By Design by Katherine Isbister

I've known Katherine Isbister for quite a while now; she wrote the excellent piece on Becky Schaefer's Lara Croft-inspired needlepoint art a few years ago. Katherine has a background in the social sciences which served her well when she moved over into game design. She now has a book out -- Better Game Characters By Design: A Psychological Approach.

One of the first times I met her was when she was working at a lab in Kyoto developing an effective virtual tour guide to the city. We had interesting conversations over ramen about how information can be packaged in an emotionally charged character. She then went on to teach a course at Stanford University, where I helped judge a contest among her students for best game character design (Tim Schafer was co-judge, and that's where I met him for the first time.)

Then she moved away to upstate New York to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she founded a Games research Lab. Sounds like she is doing well!

Women Like to Talk About Sex More Than Men

The popular belief is that men think about sex once every seven seconds, but when you look at who actually talks publicly about sex, women are overrepresented. Women are the ones who write the sex columns in magazines, the ones who study pornography academically (the leading researchers of which are women), the ones who spearhead discussion on sex in videogames - which brings me to the conference on the subject that is starting tomorrow in San Francisco.

The truth is, women are just as obsessed with sex as men, and may be more willing to admit it!

Perhaps men find it a wee bit embarrassing to spend so much time discussing sex because for them it's so obvious - boom, it's right there, no mystery about it. Or perhaps they feel there shouldn't be a mystery, and when there is, it feels like a lack of manliness. Thus we have tons of articles in popular press about how women can and should reach orgasm, but if you're a dude and can't get it up, you confide in no one but your doctor.

Women also seem more willing to investigate the effect sex has on other aspects of life, and from an early age. Popular reading material for young girls almost always deal with a sexual coming of age; boys seem to be more into books and comics full of superpowerful men who band together to overcome adversity, sometimes gorily. So maybe it's not too surprising that the keynote speakers for the Sex in Videogames conference are women: Sheri Graner Ray and Regina Lynn. Looking over the list of speakers, also, I see that this the most gender balanced videogame conference I've ever attended: a third of the invited speakers and panelists are female (compare that to less than a quarter for the Game Developer's Conference).

In any case, I'll be going to hear Sheri and Regina and Brenda Brathwaite and many others talk on Thursday and Friday, and it should be very interesting.

GAM3R 7H30RY

MacKenzie Wark, professor at the New School and author of A Hacker Manifesto (in book form here), has launched a new project called GAM3R 7H30RY which is at once notes for a future book as well as a unique platform for discussion and contribution.

I haven't had much chance to poke around myself, but the interface is simple and elegant and its goal is intriguing: open an author's draft for inspection, critique, comment... I don't know that I would have the courage to do that!

How to Prototype a Game in Just 7 Days!

The four students who pioneered the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (where I got my master's degree) have written an article for Gamasutra of best practices and lessons learned. You should read it.

The Experimental Gameplay Project is active again, by the way, with the same faculty advisor and four new students each making one prototype per week. You can see their products for yourself on their site.

Game Design Summer Session Scholarships for Girls

USC and EA are partnering to offer female students a scholarship to attend the Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp during the USC's Summer Seminars program.
From the press release:

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp is a 4-week program designed to help students pursue their dream of working in the video game industry. The single scholarship in the 2005 summer seasons will represent the first female registered student in the program, as the 2004 inaugural year featured an exclusively male student body. The scholarship includes free admission to the camp, room and board at USC, and three college credits for successfully completing the program.

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp runs from July 3rd to July 30th. Deadline to apply for the scholarship is May 15th. It is open to any female high school junior or senior with a GPA of at least 3.5 and who submit both a written recommendation from a teacher and a 250-word essay on why they are passionate about video games. Applications should be sent to: ea-usc-scholarship@ea.com.

"We hope this scholarship not only provides an exciting opportunity for an inspired girl, but sends a broader message. EA wants to encourage girls to aspire for a career building games...and we hope the best and brightest continue their studies and find a future home in the industry," said Steve Seabolt, Vice President at EA.

Representing 39% of the gaming population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, women players are a growing force within the gaming community. EA is responding to this demand by encouraging and empowering young women to take the industry seriously and consider it for a future career. This scholarship is the first step in a larger program designed to encourage women to pursue their passion for gaming and enter the industry as professionals.

EA and USC have been working together in a number of different ways to ensure students are ready to enter the games industry with the knowledge and power to make a difference. "EA continues to support our engineering program at USC," said Dr. Anthony Borquez, Director of the Information Technology Program, which offers numerous courses on gaming. "Not only does EA provide us with game resources and guest speakers for our classes, but we also staff animators and engineers from EALA who teach classes in my program."

Applicants must have a cumulative B average, submit a letter of recommendation from a high school teacher and submit a 250 word essay "Why I want to grow up and make games." More information about the USC interactive entertainment summer camp program and EA scholarship can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/dept/admissions/programs/summer/seminars.shtml.

Calling Women in Games!

What are you doing this weekend? Helping the cause by answering a few simple questions, my friend! A researcher in Austria is writing a dissertation on gender stereotyping in games and how it may affect attitudes. She needs your data!

If you are a woman and you play videogames, please fill out Survey Number One. It's available as a downloadable Word doc:

GirlGamer Survey.

If you are a woman and you work on developing games, we have another survey just for you:

Gamemaker Survey.

When you're done, please email them to Barbara Lippe: babsi at lippe.at. If you have any questions, you can email her, too. And in return, she's promised to share her thesis with us when it's done. Good luck, Babsi! See you at GDC.

Wish They had This When I was a Kid

GameCamp is a summer camp for teenagers interested in pursuing careers in game development. If that's not cool enough, they also offer two full scholarships. Sure, you'll have to suffer through the humid heat of an Austin summer, but that is a small price to pay for playing videoagames - legitimately - for two solid weeks.

Ubisoft: Fullsail ahead!

Gamespot is reporting that Ubisoft has teamed up with the Canadian government to launch a training school, known as the Ubisoft Campus, where the future developers will go to learn the skills of the trade. After 3 fifteen-week terms, students will be granted a degree accredited by the Quebec Ministry of Education. This appears to be mostly undergrad-level work, although there is mention of masters-level software engineering classes that will also be available.

As technological progress demands larger development teams just to keep pace, many large game companies will face problems down the road if they remain unable to find freshly graduated people with the proper training required to jump in to the game industry with no previous work experience. EA's involvement with the University of Southern California last year, and Ubisoft's latest announcement seem to be saying, "If you want it done right, gotta do it yourself."

Will students with specialized training in game development instead of a traditional degree make better game developers? Will these programs simply stamp out the future rank & file? Stay tuned...

New York University Videogames Explorations Floor

One of the many hats I wear is working as a Resident Assistant at New York University. In the past few months, I’ve been pushing the university to accept a videogames floor to their Explorations program. The Explorations program gives students a wide variety of themed living options based on their interest. The programs, which encompass entire themed floors, range from movies to leadership to bohemian lifestyles. It’s a very good program, especially when students get involved.

The good news is that most indications point towards a videogame floor happening. The bad news is that there has been some concern expressed over a lack of “female interest” in the program. I want to prove them wrong.

Here’s what I need you to do: if you happen to know of any women entering New York University and are interested in videogames for the 2005-2006 school year, please tell them about the Explorations program. It’s fun. It’s well funded. And the more diversity you can bring to the floor, the better experience everyone will have. There will be museum trips, conversations with professors, and the works. Almost everyone in the other Explorations programs fall head over heels in love with it.

And the floors for Explorations in my residence hall are by gender, so don’t be concerned you’ll have your privacy violated by us seedy gamer guy types.

Harvard Psychology Professor on Gender Differences

The New Republic Online is carrying an article by Steven Pinker, a Harvard Psychology Professor, on the reality and myths of gender differences. Related very much to Harvard President Lawrence Summers' comments on the subject that he has appologized for since.

A Brief History of Gaming & Academia

Lauren Gonzalez over at Gamespot has put together a lengthy feature on the history of the relationship between gaming and academia. If you've only recently discovered GGA, you might find the article useful as a condensed version of the sorts of things we seem to talk about often here.

Many of the big names of game academia pop up in the feature. Janet Murray, Michael Mateas, and Gonzalo Frasca each get significant coverage, and Gamespot provides a good selection of quality links to gaming-theory-related websites (including us). Among the more unusual sources Gamespot talks to is Paul Miller (DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid), due to his recently published book Rhythm Science, who claims that modern youth culture is based around the idea of "replication," although exactly what that means, Gamespot never reveals.

The main shortcoming of the article is that when it discusses the relationship between game academics and game developers, it only gets the opinions of academics. Perhaps this is warranted by the academics, who readily admit that few decision makers in development pay them much serious attention, but as somebody with a foot in each world, I'd really like to see somebody delve into the nature of this relationship a bit more studiously.

A Video Game About Video Games? Madness.

Recently I’ve been engrossed in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Although I’ve actually owned the book for a good two years, it took me a drive to Disney World to actually pick it up. It’s a great combination of text book and essay on sequential art. As McCloud writes early on, it’s a comic book about, uh, comics.

What makes this so great is that you can see what McCloud is talking about immediately. No wordy explanations of the "gutter" or other comic tools, devices or styles. Since the work is a comic itself, McCloud can just say ‘hey, this is what I’m talking about’ and then discuss its significance.

So what does this have to do with games?

I’ve also been reading books like The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf. It’s a well written book, sure. And all the writers really care about their subject, naturally.

But it’s still a prose book.

Even McCloud himself created a series of comics for Computer Gaming World that commented on games. It was intelligent, informative, and even fun. But again. It was still a comic book trying to describe games.

As silly as it may sound, I believe we need a video game that works as a text on video games. Would it be a difficult game to create, write, and execute? Well, hell yeah. But a game that could help sum up the history of games, put games and their styles in context and do it all by showing rather than telling would be an incredible tool for those people like myself who are trying to be "ludologists."

Games are now culturally locked in for us in the West. On the subway I see old men, young women, and children playing Game Boy to pass the time. At dinner I overhear a group of friends describing the merits of the running play in Madden. In class I see people waste time getting in a little Tetris while the professor describes media ethics.

Maybe it should take a game to describe why.

Then again, if there’s already a game on the subject I’m unaware of, I’d be willing to pay my weight in quarters for it. And I’m a heavy man.

EA Funds New Videogame School

The Wall Street Journal has this article (link via Evil Avatar) reporting that Electronic Arts is donating $8M to the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. This money will be used to create a 3-year master's degree in "videogame design," and fund an endowed faculty chair. The program is set to begin in August, accepting fewer than 15 students.

EA rarely hires more than one graduate of any school's graduating class per year, and thus probably has a vested interest generating more low-cost entry level employees who are better prepared for the sort of working environment found in the game industry. USC's proximity to the new EALA studio probably also factors in.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate any information on the content of the program, but I'd wager that EA would be looking to focus more on the ability to work long hours on hard deadlines for extended periods of time, and how to deal with group projects using many different skill sets, rather than ludology theory. EA's own private Digipen? My gut tells me otherwise, but we'll have to wait and see.

A quick peek over at the USC STC site shows that EA will be joining a very distinguished board of councilors, which includes George Lucas and Steven Spielberg among many other media bigwigs.

Game Design Test

We've seen schools develop courses in gaming. Growing evidence that games are something to study, and something to teach.

Of course game designers have always known that. Within the industry there is a body of knowledge valued for game designers. Not simply a long list of historical recitations, what's valued is the ability to synthesize and solve problems based on your experience.

Brian Yeung has posted questions from a test he took for a position as a level designer:

1. Describe the relevant differences between a PC gaming experience and a console gaming experience. How do these differences, if any, affect how you would design a game?
2. What do most people mean when they mention or ask for non-linear missions, and what are the best ways to provide this?
3. Halo, GTA3, and Battlefield 1942 are all examples of games with multi-modal gameplay, whereas Quake, Project Gotham Racing, and MechWarrior are not. What does multi-modal gameplay mean? What design considerations do you need to make to incorporate multi-modal gameplay in your game or mission?
4. What are the design considerations between single-player and multiplayer levels/maps?
5. Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) are 2 very PC-centric game genres with extremely successful games. Describe how you would redesign the controls and interface for one of these popular games (Age of Empires, StarCraft, WarCraft, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, etc.) and make it usable and fun using the Xbox controller, and discuss the considerations that would have to be made to redesign the game.
6. What mission/level design considerations do you need to keep in mind when designing a 3-D flying game? What is unique about them from a design perspective (for example, as opposed to a First Person Shooter)?

Brian shared his answers on his site: Cranky User: Game Design Test, along with other critical thoughts on video games, culture and usability.

Who Puts the "Design" Into "Game Design"?

Friday was the fall open house for Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. My project group is working on an open-source game/simulation engine that will be making its official public debut shortly, and one particular item of feedback we got struck me as possibly being of interest to GGA readers.

We were told that potential customers for this product were the assorted "game design" classes that have been popping up at universities around the country in recent years. Usually these classes are offered only in the Computer Science department, and taken only be computer science majors. These "game design" courses could probably be better titled as "game programming" courses for this reason, as students probably do not have access to tools, time or talent needed to create real 3D models, and usually resort to whatever they can steal, or simply create games with a lot of cones and cubes and a particle system. Aside from having very little to do with "design" in the sense that a designer would use it, these courses also fail to prepare students for the very interdisciplinary world of actual game development.

I'm curious if any readers are aware of universities that are aware of or addressing this issue, or if there are any with "game design" courses that accurately try to work cross-discipline. Bonus points if you know one available at the undergraduate level.

Jealousy Sets In

I've fantasized for months now about starting or joining a videogames research institute. My peers and I banter about hyper-media over the bleeps and bangs of a handful of machines in a well-lit room with high ceilings, while someone in an adjoining office packages and sells our expertise and suppositions.

So it is with a mixture of absolute enthusiasm and a wee bit of envy that I pass along a link to the newly formed Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen. Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Susana Tosca; many of these folks will be familiar to the regular readers of Game Studies. They're hard-working pioneers of game research and it's good to see that they have a home. For those of us who aspire to think for a living, we can follow their progress and papers on this new site.

Ludology.org's Gonzalo Frasca writes about the people involved, and the reasons ludology has flourished in the Scandinavian countries.

Brenda Laurel at Stanford

Last week Brenda Laurel gave a talk to Katherine Isbister's CS class (where Justin and I also spoke a couple weeks ago). Brenda is a co-founder of Interval Research in Palo Alto, and founder of Purple Moon, a spinoff of Interval Research Corporation, focused on making technology for girls. She's written several books, including the ground-breaking Computers as Theatre (she has a PhD in Theatre) and The Utopian Entrepreneur. She's worked at several leading companies in the industry, including Apple, Activision, and Atari. She currently serves as the Chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design.

She's been an inspiration to many people in the way she combines geek knowledge with humanist values. She is also an amazing speaker - funny, passionate, and absolutely thoroughly steeped in professional research. A real rabble-rousing shit-kicker, with a mane of strawberry blond hair and tatoos on her arm and peeking out over the collar of her purple tank top on her upper back. She spoke to the students about doing good design research, using her own experiences at Purple Moon as a test example. I'll attempt to paraphrase her remarks from my notes.

MORE...

The GDC Academic Summit

The IGDA posted its official summary of notes from this year's GDC Academic Summit. There's a lot of material there to go through, and it's worth it!

More Game Research Coming - With Strings Attached

Did you ever wonder how video games effect you? Well, there could be more research coming, this time from a U.S. Government mandate, proposed by senators biased against "sick and indefensible" games like Grand Theft Auto 3.

Senator Joe Leiberman, former VP candidate with Al Gore and long-time anti-game-violence crusader, has partnered with Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback to propose this legislation: a new Federal Research Program on Media and Children within the National Institutes of Health. I covered these two when they were working to legislate advertising video games to kids. They have some important points to make, amidst a lot of misinformation and grandstanding over violence and immoral content in video games. Lieberman, in his statement talks of closing the "research gap" that prevents people from agreeing that violent media teaches violence. He does mention an opposition to censorship, but I think he hopes to lay a sort of moral pressure on game makers to help them see that they are polluting young minds. I wonder if Rockstar is listening.

The research they are proposing might develop some useful data along the lines of Mark Prensky's work on "Digital Game-Based Learning" which I have on order from Amazon. Hopefully, the researchers will start their research into games with an open mind, and a sense of context and history of other "violence in media" campaigns. Anyone fancy a Dime Novel?

(Seen on CNET News.com coverage: "Senators target video violence" from Ben at Serious Games)

Game Studies 02 02

The folks at Game Studies have posted their third issue, further developing academic discourse on games:

• Jonathan Dovey: Guest Editorial.
  
• Helen W. Kennedy: Lara Croft - Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis.
  
• Jairo Lugo, Tony Sampsom and Merlyn Lossada: Latin America's New Cultural Industries still Play Old Games - From the Banana Republic to Donkey Kong.
  
• Celia Pearce: The Player with Many Faces - A Conversation with Louis Castle.
  
• Greg M. Smith: Computer Games Have Words, Too- Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy.
  
• Talmadge Wright, Eric Boria and Paul Breidenbach: Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games - Playing Counter-Strike.

I rapped on them a bit in a review for HyperText Kitchen; I thought they were reading too much and not playing enough games. But their pieces over time have evinced more grounding in actual gameplay, with increased examples and citations from within games, and relatively fewer citations from texts on narratology. Either way, I'm glad to see they are actively publishing, thought I do wish they saw fit to include email addresses or web page links for their authors.