Cross Gamer - Conference

GDC: Connecting Mobile Games and MMOs

Dan Roy — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:44:31 -0700

Last Tuesday, I presented at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in the mobile track about the best ways of connecting mobile games and MMOs. Here are my slides (PowerPoint file). Gamasutra wrote a surprisingly thorough summary. The session was well-attended; among the audience were several large MMO developers who have yet to announce their mobile plans. It will be interesting to see which directions they go with mobile.

My Media in Transition Presentation: Constructing Identities of Mastery in Games

Dan Roy — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:43:57 -0600

This Saturday I presented at MIT's Media in Transition 5 conference. The presentation covered identity construction, something I've been focusing on in my thesis. Gene Koo, Fellow at Harvard Law, summarized the presentation on his blog. Here's my own shorter summary for the conference program. I also moderated a panel:

Reimagining Identity
Anne Petersen, Perez Hilton and the New Star Production
Thomas Riccio, Trickster Reality
Agnieszka Wenninger, Deleuzian Perspectives on Ownership and Identity on the Web
Moderator: Dan Roy

GDC: I Moderated an Impromptu Roundtable about Mobile and Cross-Platform MMOs

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:56:25 -0600

Kyu C. Lee from Gamevil wasn't able to make it to his scheduled session on the mobile MMO Path of a Warrior (I interviewed Allen Lee last year about this same game). This was due to a scheduling miscommunication between Kyu and GDC, as Kyu had left earlier in the day (I later learned) for his own wedding. Since everyone in the room was interested in mobile MMOs, I couldn't let them just leave without meeting any of them and hearing their perspectives. So, with the blessing of the Conference Associates and the sound technicians in the room, I turned to the session into an impromptu roundtable. It ended up going very well. Read the summary on Gamasutra by Eric-Jon Waugh.

GDC: Experimental Gameplay Sessions Presents Games from the Boston Game Jam

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:37:45 -0600

Among the many games presented this year at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at GDC were the games we created at the Boston Game Jam at MIT back in January. Darius Kazemi ably summarized our creations for an audience of several hundred.

My GDC Presentation: Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:28:55 -0600

Here's a link to a talk I gave last Monday at the Serious Games Summit at GDC on the learning game I'm designing at MIT with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision. The talk was very well received by a packed room. We started the talk by describing the story, presentation, and gameplay, and ended it by letting the audience play a prototype level from the game as a group.

GDC: KidConfidence Interviews Me on Learning Games

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:08:06 -0600

Here's a short write-up and podcast of me being interviewed at GDC about learning games.

Boston Game Jam Coverage

Dan Roy — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:29:00 -0700

A week ago we had the first annual Boston Game Jam at MIT in The Education Arcade. I've already written a summary of the game I created during the Jam (Conflict Diamond). Now, I've written a guest blog for Henry Jenkins talking about the role of game jams in the industry and summarizing this particular jam. We've been getting a lot of coverage for the jam, from Slashdot to Gamasutra to Blue's News to VH1 to Little Gamers. The success the Jam enjoyed this year ensures that it will become a tradition.

Update: event photos on Flickr.

Update: GDC 2007 Presentation

Boston Game Jam Summary

Dan Roy — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:54:49 -0700

Crossposted at HenryJenkins.org

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam , armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Once upon a time, a single crackerjack programmer or a team of three could bestow their unique vision of gaming on the world with only a few months of work. Development cycles were short. Genres were undefined. Risk was low and creativity was high. The trend in the ensuing decades has moved away from all of this. We've reached the point as an industry where failure on a project costing tens of millions of dollars means lots of lost jobs and maybe a shuttered business or two. In that environment, publishers rely on proven intellectual property and remaking established genres to meet their quarterly targets. When publishers hold the money and the IP, contracted developers have little choice but to live hand to mouth. One missed milestone or delayed contract could be the end for such a developer with no savings.

In addition to the rising budgets and reduced financial risk-taking, individual employees find themselves working on more and more specialized tasks. This assembly line model stifles a lot of creativity. The benefits of feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself are offset by lack of control over the direction of the project.

And so, these game developers gather at MIT to seize back their creative control. They've come with plans for games they would like to make entirely by themselves. The programmers are no longer just graphics coders or physics coders or tools coders or artificial intelligence coders. They now hold the grand vision of the game, as well is the responsibility for wearing hats normally left to others.

By noon, everyone had settled in with his project and was making steady progress. Max McGuire in particular seemed ahead of the game, as he already had something playful-looking up on his screen. At a game jam, one can always step away from his computer, wander around the room, and become inspired by the ideas and energy of all the other auteurs. A casual observer would notice that screens full of code intermittently give way to intriguing visual representations of progress.

Later in the day, Jam organizer Darius Kazemi warned us that if we didn't have something playable by this evening, we were in bad shape. A couple of teams took this opportunity to step back from their original visions and refocus on something more practical. However, a surprising number of projects were right on track. It seemed we had scoped our projects well to not fall into the common trap of taking on too much.

After dinner, some participants started to call it quits for the day and head home. As the coordinator of the Jam facilities at MIT, I resolved to stay in the lab until everyone was finished. I was quite tired when I walked home at 5 a.m. As most people who have ever been excited about a project can tell you, there are good and bad kinds of sleepy. The energy that I took from the group and from my own creative process had not yet dissipated, and even as I lay in bed exhausted I found my mind eagerly bounding between the possible features I could implement the following day.

That following day began three hours later. In my exhaustion, I must have set my alarm incorrectly, because I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. When I arrived at the lab to punch in the door's security code there was already a line of antsy developers. I felt guilty for standing in the way of their work, even early on a Sunday morning.

As the clock drew closer to the 6 p.m. deadline, the entire room tightened its focus. As time ticked features a way, developers became even more earnest to preserve what they could of their initial visions. You could hear the whir of productivity, punctuated by semi-sarcastic exclamations from Al Reed like, "I just realized I don't know how to program." Kent Quirk and his son/teammate Lincoln also had their moments, like when they both leaned in close to the
screen and simultaneously grunted. "Huh?" and "Hmm."

Darius stopped us all precisely at six, and we gathered around the projector to present the creative gold we had mined all weekend with our pickax keyboards (handy tools, those). Max McGuire had managed to conjure up a respectable competitor to Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore , in which you take creatures from their basest existence through the height of civilization and into outer space. The core mechanic is shifting terrain up and down. Impressive, and as fun to watch as to play.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jonah Elgart created a game around shifting rhythms, redirecting streams of beats to create a symphony or cacophony of precautions and notes. It seems like a great game if I could just figure out how to play it.

Philip Tan, who has been flying back and forth between MIT and Singapore for half a year as he sets up an international game lab called GAMBIT, made a game about jetlag. In it, players must manage passengers' moods so that they're in peak state when they hit the ground (hopefully softly). The whole room had listened earlier in the day as Philip recorded the voiceovers for the flight attendants. It was definitely the fifth take of "Coffee, tea, or soda?" where the humor of the flight attendant's annoyance finally came through.

Kent and Lincoln Quirk made the only 3D game of the Jam, in which players shift an avatar between conveyor belts to reach the center of a maze. The tricky part was that if you stayed on the conveyor belt long enough, you would flip over with it... to the dark side.

Al Reed and Alex Rice somehow overcame Al's inability to program, creating a Mario Brothers type game called Squish in which players hop from platform to platform shoving boxes around in an attempt to crush each other. The only explicitly multiplayer game of the Jam, it clearly showed off the potential of humor in social interactions. The hilarity of watching Al's stick figure accidentally squish itself cannot be denied.

Darius, who had originally planned to not make a game and only assist others, had found himself twiddling his thumbs and cranked out a Game Boy Advance game of shifting mazes.

Darren Torpey and David Ludwig created a game about shifting seasons. They made the executive decision that four seasons was far too many, and unilaterally cut it down to two. Personally, I'll miss fall and spring tremendously and can't condone their actions.

Geoffrey Long and I (Dan Roy) created a game about shifting perceptions around the diamond industry. Conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds, have been used to fuel terrible violence for years, and I wanted to educate some consumers who might be unaware what their purchase might be funding.

Jim Ingraham and Duncan Watt contributed art and sounds respectively to all of the projects, and they did so valiantly in the face of our common and impending deadline. Duncan in particular knows how to triage.

Most of these game concepts would never have been made if not for an environment like the Boston Game Jam. At least, they never would have been made within the industry model that only makes space for AAA titles. However, there are promising signs that at least some segments of the industry are shifting back to smaller teams, smaller budgets, shorter development cycles, and wackier concepts. Digital distribution helps here tremendously, as do content delivery models like episodic. Chris Anderson's Long Tail is just regaining prominence in the game industry, and the "hits" of the future may be niche subscription titles. Henry did a number of posts on the rising independent games movement not too long ago that readers may find interesting.

The mood in the Education Arcade lab after giving our presentations was inspired exhaustion. Everyone agreed that they'd like to do the Jam again, with some calling for it every six months instead of annually. Most participants didn't seem to mind that they had just worked halfway through the Patriots-Colts game, even with New England's team represented. We had just had our own game of realizing our visions, in which we proved ourselves as much as played in the sand. I think I speak for everyone at the Jam when I say we are fortunate to do what we do.

MIT Futures of Entertainment Conference Webcasts Posted

Dan Roy — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:29:43 -0700

Webcasts for the Futures of Entertainment Conference are now online. This was a great conference at MIT a few weeks ago. Take a look at the sessions on User-Generated Content, Transmedia Properties, and Virtual Worlds ("Not the Real World Anymore").

Via Henry Jenkins's blog.

My Future Play Presentation: Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education

Dan Roy — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:34:04 -0600

I gave my presentation Wednesday at Future Play 2006, as part of the Student Perspectives on Issues in Games panel. I call it, "Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education," because it relates to MMOs, school, cross-platform gaming, and what I'm calling positive identity construction. Here's my own summary.

The Education Arcade

I spent the first half of the talk introducing Comparative Media Studies, The Education Arcade, and the Learning Games to Go project.

Comparative Media Studies is what you make of it, and it's different for every student, but for me it's a game design program that encourages me to think historically, culturally, interdisciplinary, and internationally.

The Education Arcade, formerly Games to Teach, is what inspired me to design games for learning, or Serious Games. I got involved with them near the end of 2002, working on Revolution (I won't take any credit for it, as my involvement was minimal). Revolution was a total conversion mod of the fantasy game Neverwinter Nights to teach high school students about the American Revolution. It was a collaboration with colonial Williamsburg , and we replicated that town in the game.

Then I described Making History, the multiplayer PC strategy game I helped design while at Muzzy Lane Software. That game teaches history, international relations, and political science to high school and college students. The gameplay focuses not only on military strategy, but also economic, domestic, and diplomatic. Version 1 came out in 2005 and is being used in high schools and colleges across the country. Version 2 is nearing release this fall.

Our current project at The Education Arcade is a collaboration with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. It's funded by the Department of Education. The Education Arcade is doing the design work, and we've contracted Fablevision to do the development. The game is best described as a multiplayer, story-based puzzle game to teach math and literacy to middle school students. And, as the name suggests, it will have a mobile component. I'll be writing a lot more about the mobile component and how it connects to the rest of the game in this blog and my thesis.

I also described our research manager Scot Osterweil's past work on the Zoombinis line of games. They are math and logic puzzle games, and have heavily influenced our design for the Learning Games to Go project.

I forgot to mention this in my presentation, but I'd like to call attention now to another project, called Star Logo. It's a visual programming environment for teaching the concepts of coding and especially making them accessible to children.

Finally, I summarized some of the work going on in The Education Arcade and the Teacher Education Program around augmented reality games. We're making augmented reality games for indoor environments which use WiFi connected PDAs to determine where players are inside of preset buildings and rooms. We're also making similar games for outdoor environments which use PDAs with GPS. Both lines of games involve multiple players and learning objectives.

Positive Identity Construction

I spent the second half of the presentation talking about why it's so important that players construct positive identities in games and how that contrasts with my experience in schools.

I want to talk today about the benefits of using persistent, multiplayer, online games for education. I won't say massively multiplayer online games specifically, because I'm open to more limited scale multiplayer games or even massively single player games like Spore. The persistent, multiplayer parts are important because I want my actions as a player to accumulate into an achievement that is notable and visible to my peers. In other words, my accomplishments in the game must take place within a social context, otherwise my investment in them is reduced.

It's important to give players an opportunity to construct an identity for themselves that feels comfortable to inhabit. They must feel comfortable enough in this identity that they enjoy spending time in it. If the identity is studying, and it feels good, they will study more. If studying feels bad, because it reminds them that they're not good at it, it will take much more effort for them to make themselves study. Thus, if we want to produce good students, we must first cultivate a love of learning, or a love of oneself while learning. That's what games can bring to the table.

Contrast that with school, where students are typically expected to supply their own motivation for assignments. Grading is both a carrot and stick. However, what grades get you is too far removed. Yes, grades will help get you into college, but when you're in fifth grade maybe you don't know whether or not you want to go to college. So, what relevancy do grades have in fifth grade? Very little, beyond pleasing and impressing the adults in your life. However, your peers may or may not be impressed by grades. And, as you grow older and become a teenager and perhaps start to distance yourself from traditional authority figures, you may also distance yourself from the goals you used to pursue in order to please those authority figures. Namely, grades. Life may be easier in the long run if you get good grades, but that doesn't mean you're going to enjoy studying to get those grades. If you don't enjoy studying, you won't do it as much. I want to make studying feel as good as playing, so it's easier to succeed and feel good about yourself while doing so.

I'm interested in games going beyond fun (and even engagement). Fun is important, but I also want players to become invested in the game. I want players to see themselves more positively based on accomplishments they accumulate in the game. The game genre that does this best is massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The main qualities of MMORPGs that are important here are 1) the persistent nature of accomplishments -- that what I do now doesn't just go away when I log off -- 2) the social context -- that whatever I do and I'm proud of is easy to share and show off to friends and strangers – and 3) the ability to start fresh -- that, in an MMO, if I grow tired of one identity or feel it's limiting me I can simply start over with another and instantly remake how other players see me. The ability to start fresh, in particular, it is something we don't get enough of in schools (especially middle and high school). We get stuck in ruts, playing out the role of, say, the class clown or the underachiever. We feel social pressure to maintain our past identities. If a nerd tries to become a jock, generally the jocks will do their best to put the nerd back in his place. Games let us start fresh, exploring underdeveloped parts of ourselves and reconciling the differences between who we are and who we'd like to be.

As great as I think MMOs are right now in the ways just explained, we can still improve them. In particular, I'm researching what can happen when we extend MMOs onto cell phones. The problem with MMOs is that you have to be sitting at a PC or sometimes a console in order to play them, and that time is practically limited for most of us. However, if you carry a cell phone, you might like to access that identity and sense of accomplishment you've built up in the MMO from wherever you are. You might like to play the game, or interact with friends, or check on the progress of some event that takes time, or show off some equipment. And, you will probably want to do all of these things both online and by showing your phone to the person sitting next to you. Thus, when I think of mobile games, I think of cell phones, because they are already connected.

Let me further describe the game I'm working on now as a concrete example of these ideas. The game I'm working on with The Education Arcade (Learning Games to Go) is focused on teaching math and literacy to middle school students. It's a puzzle game, a lot like the game Zoombinis. The puzzles teach the math. The literacy component comes both from reading and understanding of the extensive story and from the multiplayer aspect, where players can use a message board within the game to share strategies about the different puzzles. If a player completes a puzzle successfully, the game encourages her to write a strategy about that puzzle to share with her team. Teams will be relatively small, maybe limited to six students. Every member of the team is trying to contribute to the team's success, so students will have incentives to write valid strategies quickly. They will also be rated by their team members similarly to how you rate Amazon reviews (helpful/unhelpful), so if they write more helpful strategies than unhelpful strategies, they will be able to increase their personal scores. This game will be playable online on computers, but will also be accessible from mobile devices. We haven't settled on a platform yet for mobile, but we're looking at cell phones, PDAs, PSP and DS, etc.

I wanted to describe that project now because it connects to the argument I'm trying to make on positive identities. Among other things, this project is a prototype for the idea that by using mobile games to connect to persistent online multiplayer games, players can have a fundamentally improved experience. They can immerse themselves more frequently in their online identities, can stay there for more time, can make more progress, can learn more, can feel better about it, and can show off their accomplishments more easily to friends, family, teammates, and competitors.

In addition to making this game with The Education Arcade, I'm writing my thesis on this concept of extending MMOs to cell phones. I'm researching how this connection affects player and learner identities and senses of accomplishment. If any of you have an interest in this area, please talk to me afterwards so we can share ideas and resources.