My article Player Character Engagement in Computer Games came out. Here is the abstract:
This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.
Keywords: game characters, player character, engagement, empathy, goals
Researchers demonstrate that our brain responds to social rejection in a similar way with physical pain. This research add more evidence for embodiment hypothesis. The authors write: “They [the results] are also consistent with research on “embodiment,” which suggests that somatosensory processing is integral to the experience of emotion.”
The interview gives some glimpses how CD Projekt Red approached story design and quest design in the game to create choices that influence how the events evolve within the game.
Lankoski, Johansson, Karlsson, Björk & Dell’Acqua, AI Design for Believable Characters via Gameplay Design Patterns just game out. Here is the abstract:
We address the problem of creating human-like, believable behavior for game characters. To achieve character believability in games, the game designer needs to develop that character so that it fulfills as many aspects of believability as possible. With believable behavior we mean that the game is consistently structured in terms of narration or gameplay so that it is possible to build and maintain coherent relations between the actions of the characters. In this paper, we first analyze the general patterns for game characters design in detail concentrating on the aspects that are relevant to the AI design. Then, we present an agent architecture that we are developing, and discuss how this architecture can address the identified design patterns.
Game Audio Symposium is an event organized by the Media Factory (Aalto University) and Finnish Game Audio Network on Friday May 20th 2011 at the Media Center Lume (Hämeentie 135 C). The symposium presents speakers from game industry as well as academia.
The industry speakers include Paul Weir (Earcom, UK), Max Lachmann (Avalanche Studios, SWE), and Barney Pratt (Supermassive, UK).
In the Game Project course students design and develop a game from a scratch to (at least) beta level. It is obvious that current version of the game project course has some flaws. Currently the structure suffers issues of the big-design-first model. The course milestones set does not require prototyping and iteration. This has worked somewhat, and it seems that groups are creating interesting games. However, the last deadline is looming and they have a lot of to do to get their games ready.
To improve the course in the future, I searched alternative approaches to game development process for the Game Project course and found Clinton Keith’s (2010) book Agile Game Development with Scrum.
The overall structure of project in Scrum is show the figure below.
The overall structure of the Scrum project (Keith 2010)
Roughly, a Scrum project consist of sprints that last two to four weeks and have a clear target. Each sprint starts with planning meeting in which the target of the sprint is set. The target is a feature list that should be developed by the end of the sprint. The initial list of the features are features (and each feature have a priority) are set in the concept sprint. Each sprint contains design, asset creation, coding, and testing. After each sprint, the team should have a working game build. (Keith 2010.)
I am yet not exactly sure how to adapt Scrum for the course, as there are some roles (such as Scrum master) that might need rethinking for the course context.
However, I like the idea of sprints. Students would set targets for each sprint with the teacher. Two to four weeks sprint in the course lasting almost the whole academic year means 7 to 14 sprints. That would split the goals to more manageable smaller sub-goals, as each sprint has its own feature list that should be ready at the end of the sprint. The Scrum process has natural checkpoints (at the end of each sprint) where we can check how the project progress.
References
Keith. C. 2010. Agile Game Development with Scrum. Addison Wesley.
I continue my literature search on game character. Some things I have missed, popped up:
Hefner, D., Klimmt, C. and Vorderer, P., 2007. Identification with the Player Character as Determinant of Video Game Enjoyment. Entertainment Computing. Springer. DOI=10.1007/978-3-540-74873-1_6.
Christoph, K., Dorothée, H. and Peter, V., 2009. The Video Game Experience as “True” Identification: A Theory of Enjoyable Alterations of Players’ Self-Perception. Communication Theory, 19: 351–373. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01347.x
My old blog is still up. I intent to move some things, such as my versions of publications, to this blog. Meanwhile they are accessible in my old blog pages. Here is the direct links to the most read ones:
Petri Lankoski 