Looks like the Sandbox organizers are busy bees.

They want to deploy a new social game at SIGGRAPH 2009. AND they are even taking submissions so they are not just trying to find some ARG company to do it. I think this is great because a lot of work goes on at universities that surround social gaming and this is the chance for some lucky students to submit a project.

So if anyone has a sweet idea I’m in

My papers were accepted by the Meaningful Play conference, which will be held on Oct. 9-11, 2008 in Lansing, Mi. Here are the descriptions of each of them.

The main paper I wrote compares recommendation systems (reputation/rating/etc.) to digital games systems. This covers a wide array of topics that include: what types of data are collected by both systems, what filtering (or analyzing) methods each use, and how might games use recommendation features. I feel bad because I had initially submitted this paper to The Player Conference, which is held in Copenhagen, Denmark, but I could not get the travel funds to make it over there. I really wanted to go but I’m glad I can now give a talk about this research, especially since it’s related to my future thesis.

The second paper is actually a panel spot. The panel is about non-digital games and the participants will be presenting current work in the area, as well as opening a dialog about digital board game studies. We have some panel members talking about ethnographic studies of tabletop games, comparing board game mechanics to digital game mechanics, and mine, which looks at the different types of conflicts that arise in board games compared to digital games.

The third paper I was not the main author on but I have been working on the project for quite awhile and wrote a sizable chunk of it. It’s an off-shoot of the S.C.R.U.B. project as a result from a user study we did with the game and also some other studies done by Carrie Heeter. We explore the possibility of an “Impression Manager”, a player type which will play more conservatively in order to get an easier win or to not appear as an unskilled player. This is backed up by self-report survey data and gameplay data from serious and cognitive games. We also go beyond just looking at the Impression Manager type and compare it to an Achiever or Explorer player type (we define these as a combination between different player type research, including Bartle’s and Yee’s). In the paper we explore eight different games and how each game promotes these three player types differently. This includes looking at how players flow from one type to another and how these games can alter their gameplay in order to facilitate other player types (not necessarily adding new content, just structuring the current content in different ways). This is also related to my recommendation paper since both papers are looking at how to alter games to to match specific players.

I gave a demo of S.C.R.U.B at the Sandbox Symposium over the weekend. We had to create a video in order to demo our games at the symposium. So since I worked hard on it and the video does a good job of explaining what we are attempting to do with the game I put it online.

Plus now that summer is over (well in the academic sense <--oxymoron) I'll have some more time to work on our lab's site too, The Adam Lab.

Presenter: Tim Merritt

This was a talk about a mixed reality installation which is “a physical exploration of music theory.” It’s made at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore which has many other games.

Obviously there have been many new music games that have come out that focus on rhythm and the performance aspects. However, these don’t dive to deep into how music actually functions. Body Music was inspired by the performance art Eurythmy the study of “visualizing language and music in a form of body movement.” It’s used to teach concepts like pitch, “the higher hand the higher the note is.” In Body Music they draw on this concept has a person’s movement is the main driver of the music that is produced. They use easy to learn movements but also teach complex music theory in a collaborative space.

The Architecture

The players are tracked in an area with a camera overhead or multiple cameras. Speakers are around the players with a display screen in front of the them. Each user is in their own track, think of each person is a guitar hero button. The back end of all this is Max/MSP.

The Music

So what can players do? Well a number of things such as learning about frequency, time signature and dynamics. Frequency is represented by how close players are to one another, the closer they are the higher the frequency and pitch. For time signature it’s really easy, how many players do you have? 3? Okay ¾ time. 6? 6/8 time. It’s simple and yet makes so much sense For dynamics players can move around in their track, which each track represents an instrument, to increase the volume, learning about music notation and how volume can change the tone of the score.

My Thoughts

As a trumpet player for most of my grade school career this was pretty sweet. Now the main reason why it was sweet may be that I have not done anything heavy with music since I graduated High School and thus had a nostalgic moment. But I’ve always like these movement tracking instillations. At Future Play 2006 there was a student from UCLA who trucked over his instillation to MSU. In his game one you had to get away from an ever increasing red dot.

One thing that the authors talked about in the paper was how some players had to be given a little instruction to reflect on their movements in order to help them witness how it was changing the music. I think an awesome idea would to add in a conductor component. Have one player in front of the players acting as a director and actually have the director control the temp of the music. Then they can shout commands out to the players which would help players understand how they are affecting the music.

You know that feeling you get when one of your tech pieces dies and you’re in this state where you don’t have the time to fix it but it’s now going to be in the back of your mind until you do fix it. My last computer, which I was just keeping around as a file server, wont start. And now I’m going to just keep thinking about it until I have time later this week to fix it.

What an emotional connection with technology it is, if I could get this feeling in a game that would be great