Author Archives: lankoski

Computer Games and Emotions

Update 2012/08/30:  the full text is available on my blog. I have a chapter about emotions in computer games in The Philosophy of Computer Games book. Here the abstract of the chapter: How players experience games emotionally is the central question in this essay. The answer varies and depends on the game. Yet, most of the actionsContinue reading “Computer Games and Emotions”

“Losing Yourself” by Lisa Libby et al.

Note to myself. read the article, as it seems to describe simulation in extreme.”‘Losing Yourself’ In A Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life” – Ohio State Research and Innovation Communications http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology online first are on http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.ofp&jcode=psp)

Theory Lenses: Deriving Gameplay Design Patterns from Theories

Petri Lankoski, Staffan Björk ACM, (2011). This is authors version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in MindTrek’11 (Tampere ) http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181041. ABSTRACT Gameplay design patterns are semiformal interconnected descriptions features of gameplay. While most previous patterns have beenContinue reading “Theory Lenses: Deriving Gameplay Design Patterns from Theories”

Original Prince of Persia Source Code

Jordan Mechner published the original Prince of Persia (1989) source code (in 6502 assembly language) along with a technical document associated with the code. Links to the code and doc are on the page https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II. This is a great move to preserve the history of videogames!  

Level Design

This is a reading I used in my course Level Design. These were used in one-day workshop where we did go through students design and discussed them based on the themes presented in these pieces. Stage Lighting Design: http://www.stagelightingprimer.com/slfs-poc.html#poc, http://www.stagelightingprimer.com/slfs-functions.html, http://www.stagelightingprimer.com/slfs-qualities.html An Architect’s Perspective On Level Design Pre-Production, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2848/an_architects_perspective_on_.php GDC 2001: Interactive Theme Park Rides,Continue reading “Level Design”

Role-playing in single-player videogames

I will present my paper Role-playing in single-player videogames at Role-playing in games seminar (April 10-11, 2012). (The paper might be  in the program with its old title Role-Playing in Single-Player Computer Role-Playing Games). The paper present a small study set to investigate relation between role-playing and story. Following hypothesis are examined: Role-playing ones characterContinue reading “Role-playing in single-player videogames”

Unethical Research?

Malena Ivarsson et al. put 12-15 year old children to play Animaniacs and Manhunt to see if there is different effects on playing these games (http://www.su.se/forskning/ledandeforskning/samhallsvetenskap/stress-arbete-och-halsa/valdsamma-dataspel-paverkar-kroppen-1.79509) Can you see any issues here? The Pegi rating of the Manhunt is 18, because it contains extreme violence. Hence, it is not meant to be played by 12-15Continue reading “Unethical Research?”

Rpy2 and drawing pie diagram

Here is code that I come up with for drawing a pie diagram using rpy2. The function takes two lists. Function takes two lists: data contains frequencies and labels labels. The argument title set the title text of chart. Radius sets the radius of pie (max 1.0). Font size 1 is default, 1.5 is 50%Continue reading “Rpy2 and drawing pie diagram”

Calculating correlation with rpy2

I spend some time trying to figure out how to use R via Rpy2. Here are a short python code that I used to calculate correlation using Rpy2 import rpy2.robjects as robjects def get_rcorr(floatData, n_rows, method=”spearman”): “”” floatData: list of floats, number of rows in the data matrix Hmisc library needs to be loaded beforeContinue reading “Calculating correlation with rpy2”