A Brief History of Video Games. Playful Design Book Site. Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces Published: May 2012 Paperback: 245 pages, ISBN 1-933820-14-4 Digital: ISBN 1-933820-99-3 by John Ferrara The hype around games and gamification for learning, social change, and impact has hit warp speed. Playful Design is a brilliant beyond-the-hype book that truly sifts the gold from the dross. It is a must read for anyone interested not just in games, but in designing engaging and meaningful human experiences. " Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. “Playful Design” Blog Why should UX designers care about games? Last week I tweeted this question out to the world. A note to the Gamification Summit: Surviving the backlash This week, scores of designers, developers, marketers, and venture capitalists are meeting up at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco.
Can exergames increase physical activity? When it started, I have to admit that I was really excited. The Elements of Player Experience. Video games are breaking out of the roles they've traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important.
Since both UX and game design are forms of human-computer interaction, they inherently share some common theory, objectives, and practices. A Playful Model One of the most familiar and useful frameworks in UX design is Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience, but that model is specific to the Web. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture. Prom Week is the creation of a group at UC Santa Cruz that includes Michael Matteas, one of the people involved with the creation of Facade. Like Facade, Prom Week is an attempt to create interactive drama, a sort of theatrical story with multiple characters and some agency by the player to shape the path and outcome of the story. True interactive storytelling is, of course, an enormously difficult technical problem that many have attempted to solve without great success, despite the efforts of some of our most creative designers.
Facade succeeded, in a limited way, its success and also its limitation dependent on the fact that it did not try to solve the general problem, and instead create a single, hard-coded, and specific work. Prom Week is an ambitious attempt to solve the problem more generally. In a fashion reminiscent of Crawford's Trust & Betrayal, it tracks the social graph among a handful of characters, particularly how much they like or dislike each other. Playtime | Ali Carr-Chellman: Gaming to re-engage boys in learning. What is a Game Engine? If you follow the game industry, you'll hear the term "game engine" thrown around a lot.
And I bet sometimes, late at night when everyone else has gone to sleep, you sit and wonder, "What is this nebulous thing I keep hearing about? " You would expect that the answer would be as simple as being shown a car's engine: "Yeup, thar she is. " After all, the game engine, much like a car's engine, is what makes the game go. Unfortunately, sometimes there's a fuzzy line between where a game's engine ends and where the content of a game begins, as if there were a fuzzy line between whether a car's air conditioner is part of its engine. Generally though, the concept of a game engine is fairly simple: it exists to abstract the (sometime platform-dependent) details of doing common game-related tasks, like rendering, physics, and input, so that developers (artists, designers, scripters and, yes, even other programmers) can focus on the details that make their games unique.
20+ Tools For Creating Your Own Games. We all play games, but not many of us have tried to actually create games. Have you been scared due to all the programming knowledge you think it takes? Well, thanks to the wonders of the web, now there are numerous tools that enable almost anyone to create a video game. You can give it a try using the 20+ tools we gathered! Flash Based AlbinoBlackSheep.com - Hosts lots of games and videos, features tutorials on working with Flash. FlashKit.com - Numerous tutorials for working with Flash including step-by-step guides for certain types of games. Kirupa.com - Extensive collection of tutorials for Flash including guides for specific types of games such as shooters. Lassie Adventure Studio - A 2d creation image with the feel of the old style Lucasarts games. Sploder.com - Create a Flash game from a wide range of objects and then embed it into your MySpace, Blogger, and more sites.
General Sites & Resources Anim8or.com - A 3d modeling animation system. RPG Makers See also: The Culture of Game Jams [Games] - What's your experience? /by @andreaszecher. Game jams here in Europe are this weird thing. You meet up with people to develop a game in a really short time, usually something between 24 and 72 hours. Most jams have a theme that the games should be about. It’s either something very open or something very silly. I attended three game jams so far, the last one being at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlshamn, Sweden.
You can download the games from the jam here – there’s some quirky, funny stuff in there. I had a really good time at every one of the jams – it’s a great way to meet people. I’m never really happy with the games I (co)-create at a game jam though and I usually don’t want to publish them. In North America it seems to be much more common to have jams without any fixed theme or competition. Photo above by Roger Skogh. Cow Clicker. I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here's the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre. You get a cow. The way the game came into being is somewhat convoluted, and I want to try to explain it. At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, a schism seemed to erupt between "traditional" game developers, who make the sorts of console and casual games we've come to know well, and "social" game developers, who make games for Facebook and other networks.
The ire isn't without rationale: these challenge-free games demand little more than clicking on farms and restaurants and cities and things at regular intervals. Most will consider Cow Clicker to be satire, and that's true in part at least. 1. 2. 3. 4. What is a social game? – Games Brief. Social games were the flavour of 2010 and look likely to continue to be the flavour of 2011. But what exactly is a social game, and why is it so special?.
To answer this question, I asked more than two dozen gaming luminaries. Here are their definitions of a social game. John Romero, game designer My definition of a social game is a game that has a very gentle learning curve, easy-to-understand UI, and lives on a social network, taking advantage of your friendships in meaningful ways within the game. We’re at the beginning of this style of game, and we’re learning so much at a breakneck pace about the play patterns and desires of the largest gaming segment any game designers have addressed, and it’s very exciting. John Romero is the Chief Creative Officer of Loot Drop and father of Doom. Heiko Hubertz, CEO, Bigpoint A social game is one that is most fun when you play with your friends. You can choose to play with them or against them. Ian Livingstone, industry luminary It’s not that simple.