Come to the XODOX ‘DOCJAM’ Creative LAB at Docville 2012! 1 may 2012, Leuven, Belgium Come to the world’s first ‘DOC JAM’ Creative LAB where documentary ideas are developed, disrupted and expanded. See what happens when factual ideas become multiplatform, interactive, playful and networked. Are you a documentary producer, director, game developer, game designer or [...]

Karolien Poels and I have a book out, titled ‘Vice City Virtue: Moral Issues in Digital Game Play’. The book can be ordered at Acco and Amazon. In the book we collect essays and research papers by scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, theology, psychology, cultural studies and communication science. We address questions like ‘under which [...]

DiGRA meetings are a guarantee for meeting up with different types of people and exchanging ideas with researchers from completely different backgrounds. This year’s meeting, under the motto ‘Think, Design, Play‘, was no exception to this. We saw presentations on in-game advertising (among others a study by Laura Herrewijn) next to lectures on the use [...]

Even though many speakers at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) were big names in the field of game studies (Yasmin Kafai, Constance Steinkuehler, Richard Van Eck, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, to name only a few), the conference proved far from familiar territory. Research on the educational potential of digital [...]

Nottingham Trent University hosted The Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability (ITAG) 2011 conference on the 25th and 26th of October. As the name indicates, the conference’s main topic was technologies which help people in need, be it for educational issues, health problems, or disabilities. It was positive to see so many people [...]

The play&game group will present the final results of the OSMA project at the e-culture fair and is looking for new collaborations to futher build on the OSMA platform.

The play&game research group is one of the partners in the GameHUB project. During the GameHUB event several keynote speakers will talk about the actual situation of the existing game companies in Flanders and The Netherlands and share their experiences and visions on this evolving market. Workshops organized in the afternoon will illustrate the knowledge [...]

Via: Online Colleges Guide

Op vrijdag 30 september 2011 organiseert MEDIA Desk Vlaanderen, in samenwerking met enkele partners, voor de tweede keer de Games Summit. In 2008 gaven we een publiek van 150 Europese game developers, beleidsmakers en andere betrokken partijen een overzicht van wat games kunnen zijn –zowel hun maatschappelijke, culturele, economische als creatieve waarde. Ondertussen, slechts drie [...]

Deze website is bedoeld als antwoord op vragen waarmee ouders, opvoeders en gamers zitten. Tevens is onderaan elke pagina een lijst met links voorzien naar belangrijke studies en websites waar men bijkomende informatie kan vinden.

http://www.cjsm.vlaanderen.be/gaming/index.shtml

Some of the researchers of the Play&Game research group also teach at the MAD-faculty. Here is a report of what CMD (Computer Media Design) master students created in the module ”Play”, guided by Thomas Laureyssens and Steven Malliet. The goal of the course was to create play-interfaces suitable for public space that improve communication between the workers of the [...]

Brace yourself for a trip around the world to discover the wonders of nature. Through a host of quizzes, challenges and fun games, Nat Geo Quiz! Wild Life will guide you through an amazing collection of images, video and sound from the incredible world of National Geographic.

 

In het volgend filmpje maakt men een vergelijking tussen boeken en games. De voordelen van games worden op een ludieke manier verduidelijkt.

This is seemingly the most trivial topic I have ever blogged about, but Kotaku’s article on how sports games label their difficulty levels actually resonated for me. I am a fan of many sports titles, and the NBA 2K series in particular. However, I have not gotten to the point where I am capable of playing on the highest setting. I tend to play the game at the “Superstar” level instead, which is the second highest difficulty level. I pick that difficulty level because it results in winning chances that seem realistic to me. That means that if I am playing with a team that is better than its opponent, I will more often than not win the game. This is however no longer the case when I still need to figure out my team’s skills a bit and/or the plays they are running. When I play exhibitions, I should lower the setting to “All-Star”, the third highest but also the third lowest setting. At that point, my basketball ego jumps in and prohibits me from playing at that level. It does not matter that I have the impression that the AI is already cheating a bit at the Superstar level. I simply will not go lower than Superstar, regardless of the fact that this will turn into an experience that will be less fun than when I’d just be a bit more humble.

So it’s fair to say that Kotaku hit a snare there, and I was very surprised to see that almost every other big sports game franchise uses a similar labelling method as NBA 2K12. Only Top Spin has somewhat of a subjective rating, but from my perspective calling “All-Star” “Normal” instead will only make things worse. Therefore I am an advocate of using the power of objective numbers 1 to 5, as the author suggests.

http://kotaku.com/5888302/the-rookie-mistake-most-video-games-make

I recently stumbled upon one of the latest entries to the Wizards of the Coast’s transmedial world that is the Magic: The Gathering franchise. I have a history with MtG, although it is a very small one. I have played the game for a year when I was about 13 years old. My impression of it was that it was a highly enjoyable and strategically deep game, that costed a ton of money (that I was not able to invest into it). Also, it is important to realize here that I played the game somewhat isolated since it was a very niche hobby in the part of Belgium where I lived, and there were no tournaments, trading events or shop selling single cards anywhere near. As a result, the only way I could ever get an elusive Black Lotus, for example, would be by finding it in a booster pack. So needless to say that MtG died out for me as I decided that there were more enjoyable games to spend money on (in my situation back then).

As time went on I played the 1997 Microprose game and the more recent Duel of the Planeswalkers for Playstation 3 a bit, but did not find them as fun as playing with actual people. I also wanted to give MtG: Online a try, but decided not to do so since I thought that it would cost a lot of money to build a reasonable deck. And then I saw MtG: Tactics on Steam and decided to have a quick peak, simply to see how well they managed to blend a turn-based tactics game (e.g. Heroscape, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.) with the original card game.

To answer that question briefly (because that is probably not why you are reading this considering the title of this post), they did a decent job. The card game part is brilliant, the tactics part is a bit thin and could be improved (e.g. by adding a more intuitive line of sight, diminishing the power of the random critical hits, etc.), but I would rate it an 8 out of 10 game, which matches its score on Metacritic if you’d deduct extra points for the terrible interface, outdated graphics and some annoying bugs. If you like mild tactics games and MtG then it is definitely work checking out. I would just give it a try to see the amazing MtG artwork come alive on the screen.

So what about the business skills, Bob? I am glad you asked. When I started playing the game, I liked it quite a bit, but I was still worried about the money it would cost me to keep playing. After all, free to play micro-payment games are seldomly, well… free to play. Reading the comments on Metacritic confirms this. For example, Aquila noted how:

“The free to play part is shockingly short. Dishonest marketing where people will trap for spending huge amounts of money. And a HUGE pay to win factor is present. So don’t trap for it people! But the game itself is fun if it was normally priced it will be a between 6 and 8. (Aquila, Metacritic)”

Normally, that would turn me away from the game, but I enjoyed the game enough to see if I could find a loop. After all, in Warstorm, another TCG I once played, I had managed to become a free player with a few competitive decks and that game sure was very tight in terms of its economic system. MtG: Tactics is a lot more flexible towards the amount of money a player needs to spend to enjoy the game. Here is what I found:

• In-game gold can be acquired by completing daily missions, up to 14 gold per day.
• Boosters can only be bought by paying $3.
• Boosters can also be acquired by defeating at least one opponent in a tournament that costs 20 in-game gold.
• Singles can be bought and sold in an auction house.
• Players are allowed to trade cards and in-game gold.

So that means that if you use tournaments as your main income of cards, that you can play a tournament every two days. The cards you win there can then be sold at the auction house for more in-game gold, potentially creating a positive feedback loop. Unfortunately, you have to defeat an opponent to convert 20 gold into a booster, so that will difficult without already having many good cards.

However, the MtGT community realized that this would make the game a lot less accessible for people who want to play it casually, and has made it very common for the winner of round one to refund the loser’s 20 in-game gold. After all, selling off the cards you do not need from your free booster easily nets more than 20 in-game gold.

Figuring all this out seems like an interesting exercise for economy students in secondary school. I’ll admit that this is not exactly the same as writing up a business model, but I do see some potential here. Another – albeit more obvious – application of the game is in its trading aspects. I have recently attended a session on negotation techniques at an empty moment at a conference, and it is remarkable how those techniques have paid off in MtG: Tactics.

So this could be an interesting topic for a master’s thesis or design research project. Based on my experiences with MtG: Tactics, I would therefore say that there is a lot of potential in developing a “homework” trading card game for secondary school, in particular if the game itself could be a learning experience as well (such as Elementeo). Economy teachers could use it to study the economic system that grows from within the game, art teachers could let students design their own cards, math teachers could use the game to teach probabilities, language teachers could let students write stories within the game world, and so on.

Another GAME JAM in Belgium! For all of you artists and programmers who missed the Global Game Jam in Antwerp end of January, we’ve got great news!! C-MINE the new site in Genk with ambitions to promote the creative industry is offering their under-construction location in Genk for the next Belgian Jam! When? Very soon! [...]

Er is goed nieuws voor 50-plussers die graag fit willen blijven, maar niet houden van een 'saaie' rit op hun hometrainer. Uit recent onderzoek blijkt namelijk dat Wii-Fit-spelletjes zowel hun geest als lichaam gezonder maken, al blijft de inspanning hetzelfde.