The  Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message are now online at the DiGRA Digital Library.

Here is a direct link to what I presented in Italy in July:
http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/bleed-in-bleed-out-a-design-case-in-board-game-therapy/

There are also a few slides available from the talk I gave here:

Mirjam

Petri Lankoski and I presented the working paper “The Impact of Design Approaches” at the 14th  Game Research Lab Spring Seminar “Making Games” in Tampere in April.  Our working paper maps and examines the impact of different design approaches, illustrating and demonstrating the mapping by giving concrete example from three game design case studies

The setup of the seminar is such that the participants read each others papers before the event, and then spend ample time for each paper at the seminar to give constructive feedback and commentary.

I made some watercolor notes at the seminar:

M. Dymek (2016) Inside the gamification case of a mobile phone marketing campaign – The amalgamation of game studies with marketing communications? In: Dymek, M. & Zackariasson, P. (eds.) The Business of Gamification, Routledge

(more…)

We are involved organizing the next Nordic DiGRA conference.

Below you can found the CFP. The conference web site: https://digranordic2018.w.uib.no/

(more…)

Our students Bachelor theses, part 2.

(more…)

Our students has been doing some great stuff in their Bachelor Thesis at 2017 (in alphabetical order).

(more…)

A book edited by Petri Lankoski and Jussi Holopainen.

The design has been a study topic in various fields where design methods have been the focus of inquiry.

Design research, or design studies as it is also called, has been gaining momentum as a field of academic inquiry since the beginning of 20th century. Originally, design research focused on design methods and processes but it has moved to cover more varied research questions related to design. Current research topics include, for example, how to study design and what methods can be used to study design along with the more fundamental questions such as what is design in the first place and what kinds of knowledge design research produces. The topics of design research have also become more wide and varied with active research on architecture, information systems, product, service, graphic, and interaction design to name a few. Game design research, however, has received surprisingly little attention regardless of the large body of work in the more general design research.

The main aim of this book is to situate game design research within and alongside general design research. The more specific aims of the book are to:

1. Demonstrate the value of game design research from both academic knowledge creation and design practice point of views.
2. Provide methodologies for conducting game design research and present detailed case studies as examples.
3. Claim that game design can be studied like any other field of design, while at the same time highlighting and exploring its unique characteristics.

The chapters in this collection cover various perspectives to game design research from conceptual and comparative approaches through design and evaluation methodologies to studio and developers at work studies, making it a suitable textbook for game development and game studies courses.

Table of contents:

• Game design research: An overview / Petri Lankoski and Jussi Holopainen

1. Epistemological underpinnings of game design research / Laureline Chiapello
2. Multidisciplinary game design research: Ontologies and other remarks / Annakaisa Kultima
3. De-coding games through historical research in art and design / Christopher W. Totten
4. Investigating game design methods and models / Joris Dormans and Jussi Holopainen
5. Games design research through game design practice / Paul Coulton and Alan Hook
6. Game design mise-en-scène practice: Intention and means in JEU SERAI / Emmanuel Guardiola and Stéphane Natkin
7. Gaps of uncertainty: A case for experimentation in serious game design frameworks / Niels Quinten, Steven Malliet and Karin Coninx
8. Experimental game design / Annika Waern and Jon Back
9. Going indie: Methods for understanding indie production / Alyea Sandovar
10. Critical practices in game design / Jess Marcotte and Rilla Khaled

Citation

Lankoski, P. and Holopainen, J. 2017. Game design research: An Introduction to Theory & practice. ETC Press. ISBN: 978-1-387-40836-8 (print), 978-1-387-40837-5 (online).

Available at http://press.etc.cmu.edu/index.php/product/game-design-research/ (Printed book, e-pub & Free PDF)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a crucial tool and often part of innovative game designs. AI in games needs to be integrated in the design to not only encompass agents, or other tools, but also tie into the architecture of a game, both in terms of world-building, such as physics in the world, as well as the rules of the game. Together this creates the game mechanics, which may result in different play dynamics depending on how it is played.

When AI and game design is modelled and developed in tandem, the level of innovation is often increased: an innovative game design may need a new type of AI architecture, and vice versa. AI as a driver for game design is gaining traction in the research community, and is sometimes referred to as “AI based game design”, “AI-assisted game design” and at other times “AI driven game design”.

Here are a few text where we have tried to describe this emerging field:

Technical Report: USCS-SOE-11-27: AI-Based Game Design: Enabling New Playable Experiences Mirjam P. Eladhari, Anne Sullivan, Gillian Smith, Josh McCoy, University of California Santa Cruz, December 2011

AI-Based Game Design Patterns, Treanor, M., Zook, A., Eladhari, M.P., Togelius, J., Smith, G., Cook, M., Thompson, T., Magerko, M., Levine, J., Smith, A. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015). Monterey, CA, June 22-25, 2015.

AI-Based Games: Contrabot and What Did You Do? Cook, M., Eladhari, M.P., Smith, A., Smith, G., Thompson, T., Togelius, J. and Zook, A. Playable Demo Track, Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015). Monterey, CA, June 22-25, 2015.

PCG-Based Game Design Patterns, Cook,M., Eladhari, M., Nealen, A., Treanor, M., Boxerman, E., Jaffe, A., Sottosanti, P., Swink, S. CoRR abs/1610.03138 (2016)

Game design aims to solve a design problem of “how do we create this specific game?” The main goal of this process is a game; new understanding about game development and game design is merely a by-product of that process. In game design research the aim is to uncover new facts and insight about game design, design processes, or games as designed objects; that is, to gain new knowledge and understanding about game design. (Lankoski and Holopainen, forthcoming.)

Below you can read two examples of my research by design project.

Lies and Seductions (2009) is a game built around a triangular drama. The game was designed to test ideas of character-driven game design and explore game mechanics around a social conflict between characters. While artificial intelligence (AI) was not a research topic, the game required building an AI capable modeling different personalities that react to events based on their personalities and preferences.

Publications on Lies and Seductions:

• Lankoski, P. & Horttana, T. (2008). Lies and Seductions. In ICIDS08 (Erfurt, Germany 26–29 Nov), Berlin: Springer, pp. 44–47. DOI=10.1007/978-3-540-89454-4_7.
  Lankoski, P. & Björk, S. (2007). Gameplay design patterns for believable non-player characters. Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference: Situated Play. University of Tokyo: Tokyo. Available at: http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07315.46085.pdf.
  • Lankoski, P. & Björk, S. (2007). Gameplay Design Patterns for Social Networks and Conflicts. In GDTW 2007 Conference Proceedings, Liverpool, UK.

In the MOGAME project (2003–2004), we studied the possibilities of mobile games that utilize the unique features of the mobile technology. The MOGAME project was design and development based research. Within the project (one of the firsts) persistent location-aware multiplayer game, The Songs of North, was build in order to study how certain game mechanics can be used in mobile games. In addition, how different limitations of mobile technology influence to the game design was studied. Pokemon GO (Niantic, 2016) uses similar game mechanics.

Publications on MOGAME

• Ekman, I., Ermi, L., Lahti, J., Nummela, J., Lankoski, P., & Mäyrä, F. (2005). Designing sound for a pervasive mobile game. ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology ACE 2005, Valencia, Spain. Available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1178477.1178492.
• Lankoski, P., Heliö, S., Nummela, J., Lahti, J., Mäyrä, F., & Ermi, L. (2004). A case study in pervasive game design: The songs of north. In: NordiCHI ’04: Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Tampere. 413-416. Available http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028014.1028083.

Zackariasson, P., & Dymek, M. (2016). Video Game Marketing: A Student Textbook, Routledge

• Zackariasson, P., & Dymek, M. (2016). Video Game Marketing: A Student Textbook. Routledge

The game industry is well on its way of becoming one of the world’s biggest cultural and entertainment industries in terms of turn-over. Sweden and the Nordics is a world-leading region, which is not only reflected in remarkably many and extremely successful game developers, but also by many game developer education programmes at university level.

The game medium has many years ago left its roots in the “teenage room” behind, and is now played by a broad spectrum of gamers of all ages on practically any electronic device with a display – on computers, game consoles, mobile phones, tablets, all connected via social media.

Despite the fact that the world of video games is one of the world’s most technologically intensive industries that creates one of the most consumer engaging products on the planet, the actual knowledge of its marketing is virtually non-existent. A very select limited few percent of all video game launches have respectable sales number, an even smaller percentage generates profit. The few hit games that succeed become metaphorical super stars that absorb all the splendour in an endless, and invisible, burial ground of commercial video game failures.

This book, which targets game development students, wants to change this state by acknowledging the basic premises of the marketing field – successful marketing starts before a product has been developed, and constitutes a guiding star throughout the entire development process all the way to product launch – and well beyond that. Marketing is not only about the sales strategy of a finished product (selling “pigs in a poke”), but constitutes a fundamental dimension in all successful product development and strategy. This book aims to help game development students to realise their vision of successful video games – not only technologically, but on all other levels.