Tag Archives: videogames

My 2003 DiGRA Keynote

Posted on August 1, 2017 | 1 comment

The world’s first  Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference was held in Utrecht in 2003.    Joost Raessens has just unearthed the videos and posted them online. Here is my keynote from that meeting, “What Are Games Made Of? ”

2003 DiGRA jhm

 

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Posted in Ch 1 Design in an Evolving Medium, Ch 13 Game Model

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Future of Storytelling | Dramatic Agency

Posted on September 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

Here is a film that was made for my participation in the the 2015 Future of Storytelling Summit.

Source: Future of Storytelling | 2015 Films

Among the games that flash by are Dys4ia, Blood and Laurels, Unmanned, Every Day the Same Dream,  Framed,  Walden, Her Story, Papers Please, and Game of Thrones: Iron from Ice

The interactive TV projects are from my Georgia Tech eTV Lab

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Posted in Ch 0 Introduction, Ch 2 Affordances of the Medium, Interactive Narrative, Virtual Reality Storytelling

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Games as human drama

Posted on August 20, 2015 | Leave a comment

A coda to my Last Word on Ludology v Narratology:

In this moment from the popular British sit-com Gavin and Stacey (BBC 2007-2010) — available now in the US on several streaming services including youtube and very worth watching — Nessa, a jaded woman of the world who now works in a small Welsh video arcade, explains why she is never bored watching customers play videogames:

 

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Posted in Interactive Narrative

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Molyneux’s Curiosity Game: why did anyone play?

Posted on May 30, 2013 | 2 comments

Now that game auteur Peter Molyneux‘s massively mobile cube clicking game, Robot playing CuriosityCuriosity -What’s Inside the Cube?, is over we are left to puzzle over its odd success.  The gameplay was so mindlessly repetitive that it could be performed by a simple robot. And yet millions of people downloaded it to their iPhones and iPads and clicked away at billions of pixelated squares, and 30,000  of them were still at it almost six months after the release date when the game came to an end last Sunday.  What would make a human do it?  I think there were 4 main motivators. Continue reading →

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Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, What is a Medium?

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Games and the pleasure of synchronized behavior

Posted on April 8, 2013 | 1 comment

Synchronizing your behavior with a single mysterious multi-player companion is a new convention of interaction in thatgamecompany’s Journey (2012)

Thatgamecompany’s  award-winning Playstation game  Journey (2012)provides a poetic and evocative experience that makes players feel as if they have lived through the classic stages of life from joyous exploratory childhood through challenging and dangerous adulthood, successful and golden middle life, and the impotence and paralysis of old age, ending with an ecstatic sequence that many have found suggestive of an ascent into heaven. It communicates this lifetime of experiences without language, wholly through movement, gestures, landscape changes, and orchestral music.

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Posted in Ch 13 Game Model

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Are Games a Medium?

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

The publication of Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames has opened up the question of whether or not games are a medium in themselves or just a part of the larger medium of software systems (as one reviewer suggests) or as I would call it, the digital medium. Continue reading →

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Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, What is a Medium?

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