Mirjam's blog

Half way through GDIII and Richard Evans giving invited talk today

2013-02-28T09:47:00.000+01:00

We are half-way through the Game Design III course in the Masters of Digital Games at Malta University. In this course we look at AI and computational intelligence approaches useful for game design. We also look tools for, and ways to conceptualize, game design, doing some hands-on work in workshops trying out tools and methods. Last Seminar was about Interactive Narrative, so we looked at

Disk management is Datorhantering in a Swedish OS

2013-01-10T11:56:00.001+01:00

diskmanagement-is-datorhantering-in-swedish, a photo by mimmi on Flickr. Not to self and others that might save time>in Swedish, "Disk management" is "Datorhantering" in a windowsbased OS.This is good to know when a hard drive doesn't show up in explorer, and one needs to format the whole thing. diskmanagement-is-datorhantering-in-swedish

Teaching Game Design at the Masters of Digital Games at the University of Malta.

2012-11-26T17:19:00.000+01:00

This fall I have been teaching a study unit on Game Design at our Masters in Digital Game at the University of Malta. This is the first year we teach the course, and we are starting with a small group of students. We can be flexible and find individual solutions in case our structure isn't optimal this first time around. Except me teaching at the masters' there is Rilla Khaled who teaches

ICIDS Photo Diary Tuesday

2012-11-20T19:35:00.001+01:00

Tuesday morning: Michael, David and Federico initialize the conference. I was first out giving an invited talk, and I could start before schedule given that everyone was in place - that was great, I didn't have to feel pressed for time and talk quickly in order to get to say everything I want to say. I started my talk by telling about a letter I got this summer from a Masters'

ICIDS Diary, Monday

2012-11-20T19:33:00.001+01:00

I run into Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Richard Evans at the hotel, and it turns out that all three of us still need to work some more on our talks. We have a working session in the lobby, before joining the others for dinner. I have this idea to try to use less walls of text and more illustrations than I normally do. But I'm afraid that I'll forget what to say unless I have the text available,

A prototype from WRPG'12

2012-06-15T15:21:00.001+02:00

In the afternoon of the WRPG workshop (see previous post) we sat down to do some prototyping. Anne had brought lots of colorful prototype materials, such as glass tokens and modeling clay. We started with throwing out ideas for questions to explore. Some of the ones I remember were: Use Mark's general proposal for how to first think about a concept, and see how it can be represented as a

Workshop on Research Prototyping in Games - Morning sessions

2012-06-14T15:39:00.001+02:00

In the end of May Elina Ollila, Anne Sullivan and I held the Workshop on Research Prototyping in Games [http://wrpg.fdg2012.org/], in Raleigh, NC in junction with the FDG conference. I started out in the morning with the welcome speech, presenting the scope for the workshop, as well as the schedule. We also did a short presentation round gauging what expectations everyone had for the day.

Dagstuhl seminar on Artificial and Computational Intelligence and Games

2012-05-13T12:49:00.001+02:00

I spent last week at Schloss Dagstuhl together with some 40 other AI researchers, talking about AI and games. It was awesome. This is the doodle i made the last day, I think that can serve as an evaluation: The seminar was started by a series of short talks on different topics that could be interesting to discuss at the seminar. Here is the agenda for talks: Then, we divided ourselves

Malta Digital Games Forum 2012

2012-04-27T15:50:00.001+02:00

Minister of Finance, Malta, a photo by mimmi on Flickr. The government of Malta launched a strategy for digital games today. It felt amazing to be present when first the prime minister of Malta, and then the minister of Finance, declared that they will put substantial effort into helping a budding games industry to grow. This really is the place to be.

A visit to ITU in Copenhagen

2012-04-27T15:46:00.001+02:00

Copenhagen, a photo by mimmi on Flickr. I was at ITU in Copenhagen on Tuesday this week to give a talk and to hang out with the great people that ITU consists of. The visit was organised by Sebastian Möring who is looking at metaphores in computer games. It is interesting to consider games and simulations as metaphors - they are so much more far reaching in terms of being complete systems than

We don't have to be alone together

2012-04-18T16:49:00.001+02:00

I listened to Sherry Turkle’s TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html) on the bus on my way to work this morning. I have immensely enjoyed Turkle’s books Life on the Screen and The Second Self She, so I was very curious about her talk. She spoke about how we use our cellphones, how we during the past fifteen years have become increasingly alone together. (

GDC 2012

2012-03-14T12:15:00.001+01:00

This year at GDC i tried a new approach. Previous years I have been so greedy to not miss anything that I have been severely sleep deprived. Being up late talking, but still bouncing up early in the mornings in order to catch the morning talks. My memories became fragmented at best. So this year I only went for three days instead of five, and I made sure to sleep a bit later if it had been a

At the supermarket in Siggiewi, Malta

2012-03-05T11:42:00.001+01:00

At the supermarket in Siggiewi, Malta, a photo by mimmi on Flickr. at JJ's in Siggiewi Malta, learning the basics about Maltese living. This is the fruit-and vegetable section. There are also vans at some places that one can buy fresh vegetables from. An attendat was ready to weigh and mark the fruits I selected, and then he put them all in the same bag. Impressive from a sustainability

Workshop on Research Prototyping in Games (WRPG 2012)

2012-03-04T12:10:00.002+01:00

At this year's FDG Conference we are organizing a workshop on research prototyping in games. Have you used game prototyping as a way to find answers? If so, send a few pages (4 - 6) to us by the 12th of March explaining what the question was, what type of prototype you build (or are building or plan to build), and what results you got! Read more here: http://wrpg.fdg2012.org/

Borut Pfeifer on accessibility of game AI by design

2011-12-04T23:53:00.001+01:00

Borut Pfeifer came to UC Santa Cruz last Wednesday (30th of November) and gave a talk about how to make sure that all the cool AI made for a game is made accessible to the players. The key factors that Borut identified for making the AI accessible to players are - the complexity of the input that players can make to the game - the feedback from the game to the player - the pacing of the

Clint Hocking on dynamics and meaning in games

2011-11-24T01:10:00.001+01:00

Clint Hocking, Creative Director at LucasArts, gave a talk at UCSC last week about meaning, dynamics and games. He took a stance in asking HOW games mean (following Chris Hecker) rather than WHAT they mean. "When we know how they mean, maybe then we can speculate on what a specific game might mean." Clint explained the Kuleshov effect to us, showing how the exact same image takes on

Lemarchand gave a talk at EIS about the beaty of systems and of risk-taking

2011-11-24T00:05:00.003+01:00

Richard Lemarchand, lead game designer at NaughtyDog, just gave a wonderfully inspiring talk at UCSC. (Talk-description here.) Richard spoke about the beauty of systems and about creative risk-taking, illustrating with evokative pictures and music from games. He referred to two talks that I'll want to check up on, Jonathan Blows talk from GDCE this year about truth and game design (available

An evening with Brenda and John

2011-10-19T05:07:00.001+02:00

Yesterday evening Brenda Garno Brathwaite and John Romero were speaking at the IGDA Silicon Valley chapter. I got a ride with Chris Lewis from the EIS lab over the hill to Mountainview to listen. These are my main take-aways:Brenda: “The rule-set is what separates games from all other art.” Although I have read Brenda’s great book and heard her speak several times i don’t tire of hearing her say

Digra 2011 Diary Day 1

2011-09-20T17:23:00.001+02:00

Eric Zimmerman was the first key-note.My jotted words: We are not just researchers, we are also educators.We are still justifying game research. Danger of becoming irrelevant. Gamification, instrumentalization. Entering the ludic century: The necessity of understanding complex systems (gaming literacy).Jon Manker and I were matched, so we presented in the same session. Jon has interviewed 27 game

IRSGD day 1

2011-09-13T08:05:00.001+02:00

Yesterday we had our first symposion of the International Research School of Game Design (IRSGD). In the morning we met in the mocap studio. Steven Bachelder, (he is our über-chair) had made sure that Richard Bartle, Mike Sellers, Ernest Adams, Pär Ågerfalk and Masayuki Nakajima and myself were all in place. Our first task is to work out how we see the subject of game design and game design

GDCE’11 highlights

2011-08-21T21:45:00.002+02:00

I saw tons of talks at this GDC, and scribbled piles of notes. But ignoring notes, to-do exclamations and note-to-selfs these talks stand out in my memory: - Dean Tate’s talk on Dance Central - Carl Callewaert’s hands on demonstrations of Unity - Richard Garriotts keynote on the three eras of gaming Break it Down! How Harmonix and Kinect Taught the World to Dance; The Design Process and

GAME-blob goes to GDCE'11

2011-08-20T13:35:00.000+02:00

We travelled from Gotland to GDCE and Gamescom in Cologne like a big (pretty cosy) blob. We joked about how we’d need vests that would blink or make sounds whenever any of us 19 people got too far away from a dynamically updated centre-point of our blob. Here is the blob negotiating a ticket-machine as we are arriving to Cologne. The Blob by our booth: Blob got lost in the parking lot (

Violet

2011-08-07T14:17:00.002+02:00

I just played/read/interacted with the interactive fiction piece "Violet" by Jeremy Freese. The protagonist is a PhD student who needs to write a thousand words for his thesis on his birthday otherwise his fiance will leave him. Oh, how I can relate to the procastrination for writing, to what desperate means can be necessary for concentration. How there can be no distractions, and how he threaten

Lost Garden: Game Design Logs

2011-07-06T12:12:00.000+02:00

Dan Cook has written a post on how to document game design work. No wiki, no GDD design-bible, no blogs, but instead using logs. A high level concept description holding the vision and short daily progress notes documenting design decisions. To each his/her own, but i really like the format Danc uses for the log-notes. Good stuff! Lost Garden: Game Design Logs

Player Character with Maslovian needs 1999

2011-05-19T07:12:00.001+02:00

Player Character with Maslovian needs 1999, a photo by mimmi on Flickr.At work we are moving to another building. I found this diagram in my office while putting stuff in moving-boxes. The diagram shows the architecture for the player character with maslovian(-ish) needs. I built this in 1999 when Patricia, Fia, me and a couple of others where doing a game called IO city. We built a simple java