The game jam movement:disruption, performance and artwork

This paper explores the current conventions and intentions of the game jam - contemporary events that encourage the rapid, collaborative creation of game design prototypes. Game jams are often renowned for their capacity to encourage creativity and the development of alternative, innovative game designs. However, there is a growing necessity for game jams to continue to challenge traditional development practices through evolving new formats and perspectives to maintain the game jam as a disruptive, refreshing aspect of game development culture. As in other creative jam style events, a game jam is not only a process but also, an outcome. Through a discussion of the literature this paper establishes a theoretical basis with which to analyse game jams as disruptive, performative processes that result in original creative artefacts. In support of this, case study analysis of Development Cultures: a series of workshops that centred on innovation and new forms of practice through play, chance, and experimentation, is presented. The findings indicate that game jams can be considered as processes that inspire creativity within a community and that the resulting performances can be considered as a form of creative artefact, thus parallels can be drawn between game jams and performative and interactive art

Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages, notations, patterns, and tools, can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development

Affective level design for a role-playing videogame evaluated by a brain\u2013computer interface and machine learning methods

Game science has become a research field, which attracts industry attention due to a worldwide rich sell-market. To understand the player experience, concepts like flow or boredom mental states require formalization and empirical investigation, taking advantage of the objective data that psychophysiological methods like electroencephalography (EEG) can provide. This work studies the affective ludology and shows two different game levels for Neverwinter Nights 2 developed with the aim to manipulate emotions; two sets of affective design guidelines are presented, with a rigorous formalization that considers the characteristics of role-playing genre and its specific gameplay. An empirical investigation with a brain\u2013computer interface headset has been conducted: by extracting numerical data features, machine learning techniques classify the different activities of the gaming sessions (task and events) to verify if their design differentiation coincides with the affective one. The observed results, also supported by subjective questionnaires data, confirm the goodness of the proposed guidelines, suggesting that this evaluation methodology could be extended to other evaluation tasks

STAK – Serendipitous tool for augmenting knowledge: A conceptual tool for bridging digital and physical resources

Humanities scholars have long claimed the importance of browsing in the library stacks as part of their research process. The digitization practices of libraries and archives, while meant to assist with preservation and access, make the physical browsing experience impossible. While there have been various attempts to recreate this experience online, none as yet has created a digital tool which users can interact with as they move through the physical material in the library. This paper aims to introduce the concept of the Serendipitous Tool for Augmenting Knowledge (STAK), a geolocative app that allows users to access material complementary to what they are looking at on library shelves. The authors outline the research behind STAK, the potential for locative media and augmented reality in libraries, and the design requirements for STAK. Finally, they outline two elements of serendipity that they hope to emulate in STAK: Noticing, and Capture and Recall. By enhancing the physical collection with digital information, STAK aims to bring scholars the best of both worlds, and to encourage them to return to the physical library to explore, learn, and browse. Depuis longtemps, les chercheurs des sciences humaines soulignent l’importance dans leur processus de recherche de parcourir des ouvrages dans les rayons des bibliothèques. Bien que les pratiques de numérisation des bibliothèques et des archives aient pour objet d’aider la préservation et l’accès, elles rendent aussi impossible l’expérience de la consultation physique sur place. Il y a bien eu diverses tentatives pour recréer cette expérience en ligne, mais aucune n’a jusqu’à présent créé un outil numérique avec lequel les usagers peuvent interagir alors qu’ils consultent physiquement la documentation dans la bibliothèque. Cet article vise à introduire le concept de Serendipitous Tool for Augmenting Knowledge (STAK) (Outil fortuit pour l’enrichissement de la connaissance), une application géo-locative qui permet aux usagers d’avoir accès à une documentation complémentaire à celle qu’ils recherchent dans les rayons de la bibliothèque. Les auteurs présentent la recherche motivant STAK, le potentiel des médias locatifs et de la réalité enrichie dans les bibliothèques, et les exigences de la conception de STAK. Enfin, ils soulignent deux éléments d’heureux hasard qu’ils espèrent imiter dans STAK: Constater, et Saisir et Rappeler. En optimisant la collection physique au moyen de l’information numérique, STAK vise à apporter aux chercheurs le meilleur des deux mondes, et à les encourager à retourner dans la bibliothèque physique pour explorer, apprendre et parcourir les ouvrages

Project knole: an autocosmic approach to authoring resonant computational characters

Project knole, consisting of this thesis and a mixed reality installation artwork centred around a computational simulation, is a practice-based response to the question of how a character in a work of computational narrative art might maintain their defining quality of dynamic agency within a system (arguably one of the key potentials of the form), while achieving the ‘resonant’ qualities of characters in more materially-static artforms. In all aspects of this project, I explore a new design philosophy for achieving this balance; between the authorship of a procedural computational system, and the ability of that system to ‘resonate’ with the imagination of an audience. This philosophy, which I term the ‘autocosmic’, seeks inspiration for the curation of audience response outside the obvious boundaries of artistic discipline, across the wider spectrum of human imaginative engagement; examples often drawn from mostly non-aesthetic domains. As well as defining the terms ‘resonance’ and ‘autocosmic’, and delineating my methodology more generally, this thesis demonstrates how the ‘autocosmic’ was employed within my creative work. In particular, it shows how some of the perennial problems of computational character development might be mediated by exploring other non-aesthetic examples of imaginative, narrative engagement with personified systems. In the context of this project, such examples come from the historio-cultural relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit, outside of formal artistic practice. From this ‘autocosmic’ launchpad, I have developed an artwork that starts to explore how this rich cultural and biological lineage of human social engagement with systemic place can be applied fruitfully to the development of a ‘resonant’ computational character

Playful Materialities

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization