Thursday, March 11, 2010

might be interesting to some:

Just came in by email:

Dear all,

is a research project aiming to facilitate the integration of
educational games and game-like simulations in educational processes in
general and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. It has been
developed by the e-learning research group at the Universidad Complutense de
Madrid (http://www.e-ucm.es). With e-Adventure, any person can write an
educational point & click adventure game. Also it is very simple to create
first person simulations based on photos, which can be very useful for
training or teaching procedural knowledge.

The platform includes special features targeting educational environments,
such as built-in assessment and debriefing and the possibility of
automatically exporting the games as standards-compliant Learning Objects
(packaged according to the IMS Content Packaging specification and marked
with IEEE LOM metadata). The games can thus be deployed without effort in
different VLEs and stored in content repositories  (now we are in the
process of integrating e-Adventure with LAMS).

The platform was published as a public beta a year ago, and in
these 12 months it has reached over 3.000 downloads from sourceforge.net. We
are now gearing up for the imminent release of v1.2 and
gathering feature requests for v2.0. We would like to invite as much
feedback from current and prospective users as possible, so that we can
incorporate it into our release process.

The tools,  a short descriptive video, and  a detailed tutorial, are here:
http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es
We would love to hear your comments and, if you create an interesting game
and wish to give it some exposure, we can make it available through our
website (properly credited, of course). Don't forget to have fun!

Best regards,

Lecture 2: 11Mar2010 The Essence of Games and Quick'n'Dirty Implementation

Today you have learned about that you can design hardware for a game very cheap, very easily, very fast, as long as you are creative. This should not be a problem, as you are artists!

Secondly, you learned that in order to create better games it helps if you get to the essence of things. How do you get there? An easy way for you is to ask the 'sports' person in your team to take you along to his team/club/class and interview people what they feel when they are participating. You can then go back and design for this 'feeling'.

Example: You interview surfers, and they might tell you they get a high when they have only seconds to decide what to do, after minutes of calmness waiting for the next wave. Then you can design for this high, as you know you need the calmness to get there, and you'll add a timer so that the time pressure is also there. And then you use this as a guide for every decision you make: "Do we need X in our design?""Well, does it help to support the high? Does it support the calmness?"Does it support the time pressure?".
Because during your design (and real life), you will have to make compromises, and its important to have a guide to make the right decisions. So think about your essence of your game first before you think about implementation.

Thanks again for the first 2 presentations! You have seen how quickly time runs, so, next week's teams, focus on only a few (1-2) points in the paper (skip what you do not think is important), it's okay if different presenters get the same message across in different ways. And bring your key message on a big piece of paper!


Homework for next week:

Thinking of a cricket game?

Get in contact with
http://firazpeer.com/

who is thinking about an Exertion Game of cricket at GATech.