May 2007 – AaKoo’s Game Lab

NG 2007: LocoRoco and the Singing Aibo

Two weeks after Nordic Game 2007 conference, I am already looking forward the next year. What a nice event it was indeed! Meanwhile being too busy to publish my own entry, I have been enjoying the notes and pictures of other NG07 participants, such as Sonja Kangas, Tanja Sihvonen and Jason Della Rocca. Finally, here comes my personal overview for the conference:

The mixture of industry and scholars was rather refreshing to me since I have not attended this kind of events before. Presentations gave nice overview on perspectives that people can have to games. Paulina Bozek introduced the MyEverything -thinking behind the new Singstar game for Playstation 3, Papermint guys were citing Nietzsche (or other famous philosopher) and wearing wigs, T.L. Taylor talked convincingly about modding using example of World of Warcraft like many others and Jesper Juul recommended punishments for casual gamers. Alessandro Canossa was concerned about the still on-going “mastrubative nature” of game design while presenting linguistic approach to creating different player experiences and despite the great videos in his presentation, the Eve online dude lost my attention by noting that “girls don’t like spaceships”, since I realized that I don’t and continued texting with my phone. Even though the fabulous collection of these presentations already gave me a lot, the two Japanese ones remained my definite favourites.

Tsutomu Kouno is known from his PS2 title ICO and PSP title LocoRoco. He gave an interesting overview of the design process of this “happy game” that he described being “something interesting for women and children”. The presentation was held in English and I must say that it was a brave and admirable thing to do even though he consistently was seeking words for his thoughts without any given success (it is not easy to be Japanese). The interesting part in his presentation was that he made the entire concept work for Locoroco in transitional spaces, such as in the train with his PDA since there were no time or permission to use time from the ongoing project. Concept drawings were rather simple and motivating to see and even one of the earliest demo already looked like the finished game. Unfortunately even the greatest ideas are hard to push thru, LocoRoco being no exception. In the interview of GamesIndustry.biz from Nordic Game he is actually phrasing this despair followingly: “I have many ideas, but I can’t make them all because I am only one person.” How is this possible? Please hire more dudes to help this lonely guy to produce us more LocoRoco (or RaparperiKukkakaali, as Suvi Latva from Elvi would propose)!

The most “entertaining” performance was held by the famous Masaya Matsuura, the maker of Parappa the Rapper (1996) (that evidently emptied audience from the other tracks as my colleague Aki Järvinen from Veikkaus, the Finnish National Lottery got to find out). First part of Matsuura’s performance was hmm… rather interesting, and I have to say that even though nothing really clung to my mind (other than “games… are… somethingsomething.. human soul”) the presentation was enjoyable. This was largely due to the fact that after the talk we saw him singing with Aibo, the robot dog that participated rather successfully: only half way thru I realized that he was actually “singing on the go” and not pre-programmed.

Admittedly, the conference provided lots to take back to Finland. Additionally to refreshing presentations I got to talk with many interesting people and realized that even though I play a lot, I don’t play enough. Still, I wouldn’t play Eve Online.

Here is a pic of me posing like a Japanese tourist at the NG07:

Nordic Game 2007, Malmö: Talking Casual

I gave a presentation entitled “Talking Casual” today at the Nordic Game conference at Malmö, Sweden. In this talk I tried to expand the views we presented at the Gamers in Society seminar few weeks ago about casual games discussion.

Main addition to the previous presentation is the preview of Expanded Game Experience (EGE) model, that tries to bring together inner processes and outer effects that are affecting the game experience in wider sense: outer game experiences such as social context and other media environments have relevancies to game experiences of different levels. The model provides theoretical framework to analyze and design games that are not heavily gameplay-centric in a more holistic way without being too broad, such as concept of “culture” can be. Naturally this brings some limitations to the applicability of the model, but suits well at least on getting further with mapping out “casual in games phenomenon”.

Game Research Lab goes GroupMindMapping

Last Wednesday we did some group midmapping to get an overview of the individual interests and connections of our multidisciplinary research group at our regular Game Research Lab monthly meeting (before heading to play Poker at Ollis place). One big sheet of paper was laid on the table and everybody draw bubbles of their interests and connections between interests of others while explaining them in turns.

The exercise was surprisingly fun. We did talk about interests that have never come up in regular meetings and found new connections between projects. Not that surprising, but nice fact was that almost all of our individual interests seemed to be connected to the others. Time and paper was limited (there were about 15 of us) and there were evidentally much more to discuss about (at least I had about 5 more bubbles in my mind ready to draw on the sheet). Hopefully we continue this every now and then to build even stronger basis for synergy… Go Game Research Lab!

Here some pics (check it out how BEAUTIFULL the mindmap is.. ;)):

First meeting of Digra Finland

Finnish chapter of Digra was established recently. New mailing list has been filled with people interested in local game research all around Finland. Our first physical meeting took place at the Assembly Winter 2007 event at Tampere couple of weeks ago. Finnish game reserachers from Tampere, Oulu, Rovaniemi, Turku, Jyväskylä and Helsinki (at least) were present. Koopee Hiltunen from Neogames gave us a presentation about the Finnish game-related organisations and Olli Sotamaa some words about Digras Finnish chapter. Other presentations were held by Frans Mäyrä, Jussi Holopainen and Jaakko Suominen to get some overview on Finnish game research. Discussion of different forms of co-operation between Finnish researchers catalysed a development blog at http://pelitutkimusfi.wordpress.com/. Let’s see how far we can get!

At the end of our meeting we had a public panel discussion for the Assembly audience with a topic of “How did I became a game researcher”. Olli posed questions to Elina, Aki and Tony and some interesting questions arised also from the audience. There seems to be need for more game research popularization in the Finnish media, which was also stated by the editor-in-chief Tuija Lindén from Finnish game magazine Pelit. She stated that “Our editorial staff gets still regularly questions of games and violence like there is nothing more to it” and asked for us to take more active role towards media.

Here is some pictures from the event: