Does anyone want to contribute their Flash game for some player research?
Beginning this Summer I will be conducting user tests with Flash games and will be gathering gameplay data with the metric system I have been building. The purpose of this study is to understand what it takes to gather extensive metrics in online Flash games and how the gameplay data collected can be used in novel ways for design, visualization and artistic purposes.
If anyone is willing to provide me with any Flash games (both AS2 and AS3 coded games will work), ones that I can hook my metric software into, this would help my research greatly. I will need access to the actual code in the game and can offer NDAs for any person/company that wishes to keep their code secret. I will hopefully be able to share most of my findings with the developers that send me there Flash games and to the public at large. If anyone needs more details about how the provided games will be used I would be happy to speak with you. My email address is on the side link page, About.
And just to give you a glimpse as to how fantastic it would be to visualize and explore metric data in games, check out JoAnn Kuchera-Morin TED video below. She presents the Allosphere, a 3D immersive visualization room. She only discusses the visualization of scientific data but what if this was used with game data? How incredible would it be to explore game metric data gathered from 3D MMOs and display the data inside the 3D game world as you zoom around learning what players are up to.
There are giants below us. Apparently big ones because they are holding up Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier and other giants of the game industry. Those giants below them may not be game industry giants, as many of our current popular game developers did not necessarily grow up with games, but for the children of the digital revolutions we will be standing on top of the current heavy hitters in the game industry. But what does all this tower formation mean for the ones that are being continually stood upon? We may remember a few giants below us, maybe the bigger ones, but the others get lost in the abyss of innovation.
Should we care about this succession of innovation? Evolutionary science would state that we should not. The best of every set of giants is moved upwards, refined and grown by new giants into new ideas. But innovation is messy and unproductive, as Keith Sawyer would say in his book Group Genius, and it is easy to lose ideas as we begin to stand on each others shoulders. So what can we do to capture that line of succession and perhaps discover something that may have been left behind?
A presentation format is a presentation format. Whether I give a talk for 15 minutes or 6:40 minutes matters very little because I still have to make a condensed version of my work. I, personally, always try to use images before text, usually with great results. Beyond the use of images and a quickened pace that Pecha Kucha offers, I think the real problem is that there are good presenters and bad presenters. I’m not saying I’m in the former group but more often than not the latter group will fail no matter the format. Pecha Kucha or not.
With that said, I see two main problems with Pecha Kucha, in contrast with the obvious benefits of more speakers, concise talks and audience engagement. First, the talks are not in-depth. 6:40 minutes is not a lot of time and thus it is hard to go in-depth into any topic. Having an engaging presentation could lead to more audience questions or conversations after the talk but when do those occur? Does each presenter get time for questions after they present or are there ten talks in a row where the first few get lost in the fray. If the Pecha Kucha method is used there would have to be a way to address these issues, especially if the talk was so broad and high-level that people just do not know the right questions to ask.
Which leads me to the second problem, the talk cannot be referred to after the fact. I know I struggle with my poster design more-so than my 20-minute presentations because a poster is often experienced by the viewer at their leisure. Posters often have something that gets the viewer’s attention but then provides information or ‘talking’ points that can help the viewer understand the poster’s project without someone there talking over it, like a presentation would need. Therefore posters can be hung after a venue is over and still be useful. This can also be said for presentations that have actual text or substance on them as well, for instance placing them on slideshare.net. Pecha Kucha presentations would have to be digitally recorded in some format, otherwise I feel they would just not achieve the same resonance as the other formats can achieve after the presentation is over.
Though I think the format is useful. I was reading an old post over at Presentation Zen about the format where an example was given, students in a classroom can give a Pecha Kucha talk but then have to field in-depth questions for 20 or 30 minutes. This would help them create tight, brief talks but still have to talk intelligently about their topic afterwards. I also think that this kind of format would be beneficial for graduate students to give every year at the end or beginning of the school year, just to give everyone a clear picture of where everyone else is at.
In the end I really think that presenters need to be critiqued on their overall performance, not given a new format to screw up. Too often do we see a bad presentation at a conference and then just brush it off, with no further help to the one presenting. I know some conferences have feedback forms but an internal critiquing panel would be useful at conferences as well. Again format is format, a 20 minute talk can have the same feel as a Pecha Kucha talk if presented by the right person. The actual presentation skills of the presenter is where we should be focusing our attention.
Well I think a month is enough to break my vow of silence.
What an historic day. And I was able to be in Toronto, Canada today talking about conflict at the Future Play Conference. I was presenting my work on using conflict theory to build conflict systems in digital games. I can think of no better day to have talked about the concepts of human conflict.
In the last month I have presented work both at Meaningful Play and Future Play so I will be adding my papers and slides from those conferences shortly. And actually I was lucky enough to have two papers, from Meaningful Play, be accepted as journal papers. One of which I was the single author on. So October was a good month
Last Wednesday through Friday (Sept. 24th – 26th) I attended the Virtual Human Toolkit Workshop held by ICT. The workshop was mainly for graduate students working in the area of AI agents. The group was pretty diverse, from all over the country and overseas. It felt kinda weird though because all the students had academic advisors that the ICT team knew. So we were like the kids going to see some old family friend.
The workshop was great. ICT has a wide array of projects that are making use of virtual humans that they presented to use. The first day of the workshop was about the theory and results behind their work. The virtual human pipeline covers a lot of ground: speech/gesture recognition, NL processing, AI Cognition, non-verbal behaviors, text-to-speech, etc.
