One of the reasons I have been rather blog-quite after GDC is that our GameSpace team has been responsible for organising our Game Research Lab annual spring seminar. This year’s topic was “Breaking the Magic Circle”; we received large amount abstracts, welcomed over 50 participants and enjoyed loads of discussion in the actual event ending today.
Interesting palette of 17 working paperswere presented during the two-day event including different theoretical approaches towards the very concept of ”magic circle” originated from Johan Huizingas Homo Ludens as well as more practical applications revolving around this notion. There was talk about fictionality, social play, evolution, serious games, apophenia, pervasive games, law, society, monkies, flickr games and even applying game design principles for designing organizational experiences just to name a few. Even more interesting discussions were done during the breaks, lunch, yesterdays evening venue at our lab and hopefully tonight as well after the sauna.
Our own paper was discussing the design process of our idea generation games and the usefulness of magic circle that games can provide for fostering the idea generation. Hopefully we get this paper published as soon as possible. There is still some work to do.
Frans Mäyrä, as being the chair, already managed to start the picture stream at Flickr. The first picture of the stream, which is also presented at Frans’ blog entry includes me too in my blueness. I am not sleeping… I was chatting at #breakingmagiccircle with my phone since my mac refused to continue without power.
I have been too busy after GDC (planning future project, preparing Breaking the Magic Circle Seminar, writing an article, finnishing my studies on philosophy etc.) to actually post on my blog, but I will in near future. In the meanwhile, check out the media coverage for my GDC presentation:
As the Game Developers Conference is approaching I want to show you the slides that I uploaded last week for the conference site.
I only wish that my flu would now lost its hold on me so that I could continue with my tentative analysis of idea generation study data and make some final touches on the slide set.
As GameReactor, the biggest Nordic free game magazine came to Finland, I made the decision to work as a volunteer and trying to experience how it feels like to be “on the popularistic side” of game analysis.
So far, I have realized that it is a hard work to produce an opinion and also mediate it in Finnish. As we are used to play games in English, and I read and write about games at my work primarily in English, Finnish words feels awkward. Try for example translating “gameplay” into something else than “pelattavuus” (playability) with just one word…
So far I have made reviews of Endless Ocean, Bee Movie Game and The Sims 2 Castaway (as a review of High School Musical Making the Cut! for Nintendo DS is for a reason still under construction). I have to say that it is not always that pleasant to find out that the game is boring and yet you have to write a relatively interesting article about it. If only the game would be boring enough to make me feel worth expressing it…
I seem to have some kind of perversion to transfer my love for games into suffering and misery… Ok, fare enough: I enjoyed playing Castaway and to some extent that bee-thingy and ocean-thingy as they had their strengths despite their weird weaknesses. Certainly, I would not have played these games that much without the pressure of writing a review of them. However, only true mistake I made was with the Disney Channel licence game of High School Musical. As dedicated to my deeds, I actually even watched the movie thinking that my limit for tolerating teenager/children movies is much higher than for others. So wrong was I. But I made the commitment, so I suffered my time.
The game itself is nothing truely enjoyable and it is not really about being a DS game with low resolution. We all have seen really good DS games. Game just sucks. Sucking happens particular with some cognitive aspects (for example providing understandable feedback to the player about their actions: somebody needs those design heuristics big time) and as a fan product (heuristics of casual game experiences or instrumental value of play, here). Well, ok, you can remember the songs till the end of times after playing the game. Maybe you are then a happy happy fan with the best game ever. Hard to say – we come in so many shapes and colors. But more about it, hopefully soon, in a review at GameReactor…
John Kirriemuir gave us a visiting lecture at Tampere at the end of the last November. He had an interesting and, as always, entertaining talk, this time exploring connections between library and games. He made such points as “librarians are cool people too” (he noticed that game researchers are cool folk last spring here in Tampere while giving a speech about his studies at Outer Hebrides). I learned that in U.K. they have cool stuff at libraries such as game evenings for kids. (I also learned that my hometown library lists games as non-fiction and only such titles as Moomins are available.) Nice perspective to games again, John! Check the slides of the presentation from Johns own blog.
Sometimes it can be rather funny to be a (Finnish) researcher. I have used word “ideating” and “ideation” in my presentations about creativity techniques in game design referring to the idea generation processes in general. This makes pretty funny faces in the audience from time to time and it is not rare to hear question: “Is it a real word?”. Even though we as researchers do have the priviledge to come up new and even awkward words suited to our purposes, it is not my invention or not even an adaptation from the Finnish word “ideointi”. This word DO exist outside my head as well.
Serious references could be found in the creativity literature, for example in the article of Maria M. Clapham “The Development of Innovative Ideas Through Creativity Training” from the International Handbook on Innovation (2003, Elsevier), which is actually nice overview of the effects of different creativity training approaches. Clapham says: “A critical component of innovation is idea generation, or ideation“.
More entertaining reference we found at the Future Play 2007 conference. One of the presentations was about prototyping and the presentators made some points on idea phase of game design on the way. There were three of us, Finnish researchers, taking photos of their slides when the word “Ideation” appeared as a title of one slide… Funny. It IS a word for others as well! For what comes to the quality of this presentation, I would not dare to say anything… But at lest we got entertained by one slide. It is a happy discipline, after all!
Ok, it seems that “ideation” is covered, but I am still lacking the coverage for the word “ideating”. For those who are still suspicious, check it for example here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ideating.
Now, I have done it. Stop complaining or I really start to invent my own words.. ;P
After discussing, tossing and turning, analysing, wiriting, preaching and presenting GameSpace views of casual in several different occasions, we finally made it as a paper called “Casual Games Discussion“. The paper was presented at Future Play conference, Toronto, where we also presented a poster on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design”.
The conference itself was quite fine, except for scheduling. There was no proper time slots for discussion and some keynotes were scheduled as “lunch keynotes” (poor Espen, for example). Organiser really did not want us speak to each others and socialise. As some of the “official” supporters (which name I cannot recollect) phrased game studies as a “happy discipline”, I started to think, if we were nonetheless mistaken as “listening discipline” from the “ADHD discipline” that I would find more descriptive…
Our Gamelab was rather well represented: Frans Mäyrä gave a keynote at Saturday, Jaakko Stenros paper presentation about pervasive games on Thursday and me and JannePaavilainen about casual games on Friday. Because of the schedule (or other possible reasons that we also acknowledge), we did not manage to get any comments. Poster presentation on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design” was much more discussive success. That was my first academical poster (ever) and I enjoyd it much more than the traditional presentations, I have to say. Only thing that I did not got was that posters were not set all through the conference, instead of few hours (after that we had to remove them). I did not even have time to check posters of others.
Ok, I could say more: there is some stuff about karaoke, sushi, Scandinavian bunch backed with one American, sugar, margaritas, brownies, smokey salt, missing a stop on the subway, and couple of things alike. But to keep it short I end this post here and give you some pictorial material (much more you can find with a search word “futureplay2007″ at Flickr, check also Jenny Brusk writing about the presentations of the conference).
The University of Oulu and Elvi project organised a game conference in Oulu, titled as Northern Game Conference (NGC) last November. The two-day event included presentations from speakers such as Ernest Adams, Chris McDonough, Erik Robertson and Ilari Kuittinen. Speaches emphasising different parts of game development provided interesting take-outs for GameSpace project as well.
The conference was organized in a very professional manner. The stage looked like a talk-show setting and speakers walked in with their own theme music (Isn’t that cool!?). For example, Ernest Adams was introduced with the Hurriganes tune Get on and Tony Manninen with Guns N’ Roses tune Welcome to the jungle. The whole event was also streamed online.
But even more important: the Thursday party was excellent! We were provided with different sets of entertainment including, booze (of course), rock band playing retro game tunes and Pacman performance. This all happened as a private party in a nice and famous Oulu bar called 45 Special. I have to say that I enjoyed the party, the people and the whole event into the extent that I am really looking forward to the next year. Next time, however, i hope to see also broader “Northern” aspect, not only Oulu game industry. Isn’t the whole Finland north enough?
We initiated our game idea generation study in October by pre-interviewing game designers and alike staff from our industry partner companies. Before the period of travelling between Tampere and Helsinki, interviewing people and presenting the package, I had to finish the final touches on the package. It was important to give the package a touch and feel of a real product to increase the appeal for use and to reduce the threshold for use, so I worked on a coherent visual layout with all the six techniques, instruction book, feedback cards and even the bag itself. The polishing phase took more time than I was expecting and the last piece, the instruction book, was actually delivered to press after staying up from 1pm to 1pm next day. Still a lot of typos and other mistakes were left in the book. One can do only so much.
The Package includes 1001 Game Ideas book, GameSpace feedback cards, materials for five techniques (one technique, Mecano, is only with instructions): VNA, MorF, GameSeekers, GameBoard and PieceBox. Also one commercial technique (Thinkpak) was included into the package.
In between my Seattle trip, I visited Canada for one day to give a workshop for Play New team at Nokia, Vancouver led by very nice dude, Dan Scott.
Play New team is divided to Vancouver and Espoo, so I started with the same presentation that I gave to Espoo Play New team earlier in September. After the basic info on our techniques, the team was divided into smaller groups and we started to play the GameSpace idea generation games. I got a lot of interesting feedback from Vancouver team and enjoyd the discussion with them, which also gave me some foretaste from the upcoming study of idea generation techniques that we are currently conducting.
Hi, my name is Annakaisa Kultima and I work as a (game)researcher at the university of Tampere. This is my personal blog about games and game research.
People call me AaKoo (AK pronounced in Finnish) or AK (e.g. in english), hence the name of the blog.
