Author Archives: lankoski

Is Jade (the player character in Beyond Good and Evil)? It seems that that opinion vary (see, Chris Kohler’s “Jade Is Black?!”: Racial Ambiguity in Games). Kohler writes: It’s quite likely that the game’s designers wanted Jade to be racially ambiguous, so that she would have just this effect. By which I do not meanContinue reading “Race and Player Character”

I finished Deus Ex: Invisible War yesterday evening. The game is interesting and it seems contain branching goal structure with various endings. The game balances between offering choices to a player, that will influence how the game progress, and coherent information structure. (I need to play the game again to the how that works.) InContinue reading “Deus Ex: Invisible War”

Wish I could be in Denmark for this lecture: Can you make them cry without tearing your hair out? Emotional Characters, Thursday June 7th. I hope that someone will blog the lecture…

Totally off-topic rant… I have been trying to get flight tickets to DiGRA conference at Tokyo but using travel agency Area, that Finnish universities are required to use, seem to render this very simple task impossible. I asked ticked (at May 23) to Tokyo so that I would arrive to Tokyo before September 24, 2007Continue reading “How Hard Can It Be?”

Mark Grimshaw have made his PhD thesis available to download. It’s a rare breed of studies in soundscapes of games. Need to check it out with time. Grimshaw, M. (2007). The acoustic ecology of the first-person shooter. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Waikato, New Zealand, http://sirfragalot.com/mainsite/phd.html.

Dirty Dancing game is is developed by Say Design. The game is based on film with the same name released in 1987 starred by Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. The game is told to be casual action puzzle game, whatever that means. Sounds potentially interesting game. (From http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=77018) John Woo and Warren Spector teams upContinue reading “Games in Production”

I got just message that told that paper Gameplay design patterns for believable non-player characters written by Staffan Björk and me was accepted to Digra 2007: Situated Play Conference (Tokyo, September 24–28). Now I need to organize funding for the trip to conference. Here is abstract: Descriptions of humans require several qualities for people toContinue reading “Paper Accepted to Digra 2007 Conference”

I started to playe Canis Canem Edit (aka Bully, Rockstar Vancouver) and I find it interesting. The game takes GTA engine and uses it to brings carricature of a boarding school, where hard-handed headmaster is keeping order and classmates are bullies. The game consist taking classes (which are different kinds of minigames), free roam, andContinue reading “Canis Canem Edit”

Rubenstein discuss about character design and the role of beauty design on blog entry The beauty myth and character design in relation to Kathrine Isbister book Better Game Characters by Design. She finds similar weakness on Isbister’s argument that I did when I was wondering why models in Vogue are beautiful females in my commentContinue reading “Beauty and Female Game Characters”

Rune Klevjer’s Doctoral dissertation What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Games (pdf) is downloadable. Need to read it…