Cross Gamer - MIT

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.

The Education Arcade and The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Innovation Lab

Dan Roy — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:55:37 -0700

Regarding my employment...

Throughout my time at MIT as a master student, I've worked with The Education Arcade. The project we've worked on for the last year (code-named Labyrinth) will help middle school students improve their math and literacy skills. It's a multiplayer, story-based puzzle game with a beautiful aesthetic. It's the first game coming out of The Education Arcade that will actually see commercial release and widespread adoption. As I near graduation (June 2007), my role in this project is coming to an end. MIT's involvement is also winding down, as we deliver the last of the design documents to Boston-based developer Fablevision.

My next project will be to spend the summer with The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Innovation Lab here on campus. Several teams of 7 Singaporean and MIT students will develop one small game each over 12 weeks, and it will be my job to help them navigate some of the technical and design hurdles. To prepare, we're testing the development cycle this spring with MIT undergrads. Some of my past work has suddenly become highly relevant, including organizing student game development projects with the Hi-Score Game Development Club I co-founded at UMass Amherst. Also, my experience with the Boston Game Jam and prototyping designs for The Education Arcade have helped me better appreciate the creative potential as well as inherent limitations of short, agile game development cycles.

For more information about The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Innovation Lab (GAMBIT for short), read the interview with Henry Jenkins, William Uricchio, and Philip Tan over at Wired.

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.

Conflict Diamond - Game For Change

Dan Roy — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:46:34 -0700

Download ConflictDiamond.zip (5.6MB Windows executable)

This past weekend we ran the first annual Boston Game Jam in The Education Arcadelab here at MIT. I've written a summary of the event as a guest blog for Henry Jenkins. In this post, I want to describe the game that I created, called Conflict Diamond. It's a game for change designed to draw attention to segments of the diamond trade that support violence. Here is the description of the issue included in the game on its About screen:

Conflict diamonds are most definitely not a girl’s best friend. According to Wikipedia, “A blood diamond (also called a conflict diamond or a war diamond) is a diamond mined in a war zone and sold, usually clandestinely, in order to finance an insurgent or invading army's war efforts.”

Synthetic diamonds are molecularly superior to “genuine” diamonds, but are stigmatized by many consumers as not being “the real thing.” Unfortunately, some “geniune” diamonds fund brutal organizations that not only kill but conscript child soldiers, keep soldiers drugged and out of their minds, and amputate limbs in whole villages. Synthetic diamonds don’t fund these atrocities.

The issue is a complicated one. Most "genuine" diamonds sold do not fund conflicts. There is a certification process by which diamonds can be verified as coming from conflict-free zones, however it is not entirely effective. Ideally, the money coming from the sale of "genuine" diamonds would go to support the lands where they originated, which are frequently desperately poor. In reality, the regions where diamonds come from in Africa remain impoverished, due to corruption and other factors. Synthetic diamonds do not support poor African villages, unfortunately, but since "genuine" diamonds don't actually support much growth either, that's not a crucial factor in deciding which kind of diamond to buy. In fact, any growth "genuine" diamonds do support in these troubled territories is undone many times over by the conflicts they also support. One can argue that getting verified diamonds from conflict-free countries like Canada is the best option, because it supports local industry without also supporting violence. However, synthetic diamonds are a legitimate choice for consumers, and promoting verified diamonds over synthetic ones reinforces the stigmatization synthetic diamonds have already suffered. The desire for "genuine" diamonds in turn supports the conflict diamond market.

You can read more about this issue at RealDiamondFacts.org.

The game I designed to educate consumers on this issue asks players to take on the role of a diamond salesman facing both financial pressures and consumer attitudes. Players choose one of two salesmen to role-play. One salesman only sells synthetic diamonds, and the other only sells "genuine." As each salesman makes sales, he gains experience and eventually increases his ability to sell more and more expensive diamonds. The synthetic diamond salesman begins life with a lower salesmanship level, representing the added challenge of selling synthetic diamonds to consumers. If he tries to sell a diamond above his level, there will be a high probability that the consumer will respond, "Synthetic? I'm not interested." On the bright side, he can more cheaply restock his diamond inventory. The "genuine" diamond salesman begins life with a higher salesmanship level, since it's easier to sell "genuine" diamonds to consumers looking for "the real thing." However, he must pay more to restock, and when he tries to sell a diamond above his level consumers may respond, "I don't want to fund violence." In reality, consumers are rarely aware that they are funding violence. The game is suggesting how they might respond if they knew more about the issue.

As a game, the play experience is pretty thin. The Boston Game Jam only allowed me 36 consecutive hours, so I wasn't able to implement many features. I would be surprised if players played for more than 5 or 10 minutes. However, I think the simple act of adopting the perspective of both the humanitarian and financial pressures may help players see the issue in a new way.

Credits:
Dan Roy - design, programming
Geoffrey Long - art
Duncan Watt - sound

Screenshots (click thumbnails for larger images):

Warcraft Teaches Spanish

Dan Roy — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 22:54:49 -0700

Crossposted at The Education Arcade.

This is an off-topic article (not directly about cross-platform or mobile gaming) about my experience playing World of Warcraft to learn Spanish. This is the continuation of my thinking with Ravi Purushotma at MIT about how to use commercial off the shelf games as language learning tools (see our GDC 2006 presentation video and Ravi's thesis). The basic premise with all of this work is that commercial games are already localized into many languages and that language educators and game developers can use these resources to cheaply create entertaining learning experiences. Blogger Katelyn Olmstead, a co-conspirator in this experiment, has already begun her own series on playing WoW to learn Spanish. Her first article focuses on the technical challenges we faced getting the Spanish version set up in the US.

We picked World of Warcraft for several reasons. One, because it's an MMO, it's immersive and social and it elicits lots of playing time. Two, because it's WoW, it's popular and well known, with high production values. Three, because it has a highly customizable interface, and we saw potential for integrating translation and annotation features.

I play with a Spanish client (interface) on servers in Spain, so the other players all speak Spanish. Katelyn alternates between Spanish and English clients on the Spanish servers. Ravi plays with the German client on Spanish servers.

I have intermediate Spanish skill, so I can understand just about everything in the game if I read slowly and keep a computerized dictionary handy. There are a few ways that I expose myself to Spanish while playing the game. First, there are certain key words that come up over and over again which I learn easily. Second, every quest has a couple of paragraphs of the story text. Third, chatting with other players through text or reading their chat transcripts in real-time exposes me to natural, imperfect language production (natural in the context of the game, at least). I'll examine each of these learning situations in more depth now.

Some keywords in the game show up over and over again, and I learn them easily. These words relate to my character's primary actions, like resting, hitting, taking damage, and casting spells. I also learned all of my character's traits, like strength, stamina, and intelligence. I learn all of the parts of my character's body which can be protected with armor, such as head, chest, shoulders, legs, and feet. I learn the names of all of the creatures I encounter in the world, both real and fictional, including boars, wolves, bears, and crabs as well as Troggs and Murlocs. Fortunately for me, as a game designer, even these game-specific, fantasy names are relevant to my vocabulary. I learn all of the different professions players can adopt in the game, including tailoring, leatherworking, mining, fishing, cooking, and herbalism. I learn the names of the fantasy races, like orcs, elves, humans, and dwarves. Again, all of these words I learn easily without any extra effort on my part. It would be difficult to play with the Spanish interface and not learn these words.

Quests offer players opportunities to practice reading Spanish, but they are easily skipped. Each quest comes with a few paragraphs of story and instructions, where a computer-controlled character (NPC) in the game world requests that the player's character perform some services. Reading this text slows down play significantly. When playing in groups, other group members may become impatient and ask a player who is reading slowly to hurry up. If the player reads quickly enough or is sufficiently motivated to learn the language, these brief stories provide entertaining, grammatically-correct interludes with a fairly wide vocabulary. I read the text for every quest I do, frequently two or three times. I read it once when I get the quest, once when I begin the quest (which could be hours or days later), and once when I finish the quest. While reading, I switch back and forth between WoW and computer translator Ultralingua (ALT-TAB on Windows), typing in words I don't understand to see translations. I think this functionality could be built into the game's interface as a tool-tip pop-up, eliminating the need to type the unknown word. Because of my skill level with Spanish and because of the similarity between Spanish and English, I only need to look up a handful of words for each quest. Ravi, who plays with the German interface, struggles more, since German and English vocabularies differ more. Katelyn also struggles with the vocabulary and different grammatical forms, and generally forgoes reading the quest text entirely.

Chatting with other players in Spanish is perhaps the most compelling way to become more comfortable with the language. Unfortunately, I have spent the least time with this activity so far. Partly, this is because Katelyn, Ravi, our friend Lori, and I all play together, so we rarely require the skills and services of other players. We are too self-sufficient as a unit. However, the few interactions I have had with Spanish speakers have felt the most meaningful and have given me the biggest rush, in terms of language learning. So far, I have only communicated via text, but I hope to set up a guild which incorporates voice chat as well (probably via Skype or Teamspeak). I hope to write more about this in the future.

My initial impressions of WoW as a language learning tool are mixed. On the one hand, there is a high percentage of time spent in the game not learning the language. For this reason (and many others), use of a game like this would probably not find its way into classrooms. On the other hand, the game does encourage a long-term commitment to language learning. For some, slow and steady may be better than nothing at all. Players who enjoy the game and language will find play an easy, fun, and rewarding way to learn as a complement to other learning activities. Chiefly, the game includes very little spoken word (unless using voice chat with a group), so players may need to look elsewhere for ear training.