I have spent the last week since GDC visitng Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin in the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UCSC. I am considering attending UCSC as a student in the DANM Master of Fine Arts program, and I felt quite at home. The UCSC campus is huge and mostly open land. Most of the buildings are hidden up above the tree-line among the glorious redwoods. (more…)
Visiting UC Santa Cruz
GDC: Day 5
Friday was the last day of GDC and my body clock had finally adjusted (more or less) to California time. Which means that I actually made it to a morning session (although not the 9am session). The talks I attended were:
- The last minute or so of Emil Pagliarulo’s keynote for the Game Careers Seminar
- The Game Critics Rant
- The Dating Game
- Real Time Research
- Games Have Feelings Too!
It’s amazing how much more content you get when you arrive before lunchtime. I should remember that for the future.
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GDC Day 3
Things have been a bit of a blur, so I’ll just mention a couple of the highlights of day 3 of GDC.
Wednesday morning I slept late, after staying up all hours at the IGDA party. When I did finally wake up, I wasted what was left of the morning looking for a laundromat, since the hotel wanted to charge me per item for laundry, meaning that it would cost $108 to wash 4 days worth of clothes, which includes $3 per sock. For that kind of money I could burn my socks and buy twice as many replacements! But you’re not here to read about my socks. (more…)
GDC: Day 2 continued
After our presentation, the rest of the day for me consisted of the IGDA ‘working lunch’ for academics and industry people, followed by Jesse Schells talk about his book and finishing with the IGDA party which continued into the wee hours.
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GDC: Day 2, MDA presentation
Day 2 of GDC is over. This was the day of my MDA workshop with Robin Hunicke, Ethan Kennerly and Ben Smith. For a presentation that we kind of (ahem) put together at the last minute, it all went surprisingly well. (more…)
GDC: Day 1
Yesterday and today I attended the pre-conference workshops at GDC. I’ve mostly been attending the Education Summit (at which I presented) but I also took the chance to hear some other talks. In this post I’ll concentrate on yesterday’s talks. Hopefully I’ll have time to write up today’s events later.
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Words on Tour
Words on Play is hitting the road – or rather the airways – for a six week tour around the US. First stop is the Game Developers Conference to present at the IGDA Education Summit. Then I’m travelling to UCSC, MIT, SCAD and NCSU before finishing off with a cruise on the nerd boat (aka the Foundations of Digital Games conference).
If anyone is interested in catching up along the way, drop me a line!
GDC Education Summit
Every year I like to try to turn my experiences in running my game design subject into some kind of conference paper. I find it useful to reflect on my teaching processes and game design is such a young discipline, I think it is very valuable for us academics to discuss the different ways of teaching it.
When I heard that there was going to be an Education Summit at this year’s GDC, I approached Susan Gold, the organiser, about the possibility of giving a short presentation. She told me that they weren’t planning to hold a papers session, but instead invited me to run a two hour workshop instead.
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AIIDE 08 Post-mortem
The best thing about AIIDE has to be the industry participation. In my experience, AI researchers are prone to a kind of hubris that expresses itself as “Here is a problem (in games or engineering or medicene) that could be solved using AI. I know all about AI. Therefore, I can solve this problem.” The ‘solutions’ that are thus produced are often laughably innapropriate or otherwise bad when examined by someone who actually works in the field.
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