Yesterday I found my iphone’s browser pointed at my schedule blog post quite a few times to remind me of where to go. I thought I’d do it again.
Start in La Duquesta Room
Switch to La Espada Room
La DuQuesa Room
La DuQuesa Room
Gorgeous 2d art, subtle music, puzzles galore and I love the way they demo a pictorial version of a dialog system with a though bubble instead. Anyone played it?
Introduction to Computer Engineering is a course that has about 200 students a year.
It is important to build problem solving and make links to other courses.
The WiiMote
Wiiwrap is a windows cmd tool that outputs comma seperated values that can be used by another program. For example: “wiiwrap /A | lab6″
This allows the student to write “lab6″ to do something interesting with the data.
This group does not teach physics, but programming. For example:
From the earlier course that didn’t use the Wiimote, they saw a 10-29% increase in motivation based on student surveys.
In the future they are playing with a add-on that adds (2) 2-D gyros.
What are the factors?
The goal is to build three models that can be quantified to compare individual vs. pair work
In his paper, they have algebraically modeled three of the above and provided a mathematical basis to understand the gains in pairwork.
Implication: Give pairs more attention
“You also have to prepare them for the work market and social competence”
Representing social networks currently allows for
But the Negotiation of Meaning and Multiple points of view are not represented in current models and the purpose of this study.
Studying the Negotion of meaning
To really boil it down, the goal is to visualize different ways that social interactions and perceptions can be visualized over time. MY questions is how those relate to group performance.
Attending a conference can be hard work. There are hundreds of folks presenting about things they are really interested in and the conference organizers do their best to collect those ideas into themes into 1.5 hour sessions. The problem is that every participant is organizing based on their own theme.
If this was simply a wiki, we could just tag-cloud the heck out of it and everyone would have their own custom schedule. In real life however, there are overhead costs of switching rooms and a bunch of work to plan it all out.
That said, here are the themes I am interested in seeing:
informal learning, contextualized learning, project-based pedagogues, new media (social, interactive, mobile)
So here is the plan for today
Start in La Princeta Room
Leave Session early, Jump to La Vista Room
Start in La Condesa East
Leave Session, jump to El Mirador West
Start in La Condesa East
Move to La Condesa West
Often a player is able to choose an option and the system responds. These choices are prexisting and the player has little creativity involved. There are a few ways for the player to interface:
When it works, it gives the player a sense of creativity. The problem is that it often doesn’t parse correctly.
“You hit the X and Y wounded him”
This format of text is created by having the player select the x and y. The obvious advantage it that is gives more control to the player that a multiple choice interaction, but is much easier for the system to parse than direct text input.
Completely predefined text that plays out like a cut-scene.
“You hit the X and Y wounded him”
Gives a fair amount of objects. Not good for multiple language support. Limited use.
Facade and the Postmodern text generator
“Puzzles are fun and have a right answer” Kim
“Puzzles are games that are not fun to replay” – Shell
Like Games:
Unlike Games:
Good Examples: Tetris, Zelda, etc.
Bad Example: 7th Guest. No real connection between the puzzle and the environment
Why comics in game design?
McCloud defines a comic as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”
Is the Bayeux Tapestry a comic by this definition? Myan Murals/Writing and Art? Egyptian Hieroglyphics?
Icons are any images used to represent a person, place or idea.
Abstracting allows us to focus on what we want to draw attention to. Its not a matter of reducing detail as much as picking the details that are important.
Words can also lie within a continuum from received to perceived.
Comics are fractured snapshots of a continuous timeline. From this, we all construct a unified reality. The world on the other side of the comic page is assumed to have a reality and we are trying to make sense of it.
These last few weeks I’ve been doing a series of presentations out of a fantastic book on game design, The Art of Game Design – A Book of Lenses, by Jesse Schell.
In the beginning of chapter 11, Jesse begins the description of two ways that fairness can be created in multiplayer gaming. The first is what is called symmetrical balance and many games such as football, chess, tennis and halo use this to create a fairness in play.
I think the most simple example of symmetrical balance is found in the classic game of tic-tac-toe. In this game, both players have the same actions available to them, namely the ability to fill any of the empty squares with their symbol. They are able to do this once per turn, then they wait for their opponent to make their move. The players also have an identical goal to win the game; they must place their symbols so that three are in a row either horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The first player to do this wins.
Because both players have identical affordances and goals, this game is completely symmetrical. The only imbalance is deciding which player goes first, which gives them a slight advantage. In many games like this, a random draw to decide clears up this final problem.
On the other hand, asymmetrical games give players different possible moves or different goals to win. On the simple side of things, the board game risk does this when played by the mission rules. Here players have the same kinds of moves, but they have different goals. A more complicated example is one of my current favorite games, Team Fortress 2.
TF2 has 9 player types, including:
So which character is the best? Well, that is where the asymmetrical balance is seen. Each of the characters have strengths and weaknesses. No single character is the best because if we assign values to things such as speed, maneuverability and firepower, we see that they all have the same value overall.
It should be obvious that designing an asymmetrical game is quite a challenge. Despite our mathematical models of predicted value, it is impossible to say how important each category really is for victory. In addition, the use of this characters is impossible to predict, all kinds of emergent and unplanned activity takes place. The bottom line, is that the only real way to find balance is to playtest the heck out it and see what players do. As soon as one character shows a clear domination, we change the attributes.
So there it is: Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Balance. Symmetrical games are easier to balance for fairness, but Asymmetrical games allow for a much richer set of player choices at the expense of much harder game design.
