Video Game Development and Production

The recent resurgence of interest in and widespread availability of virtual reality (VR) technology have paved the way for the use of VR systems as a gaming console. With the incessant popularity of VR gaming, the question then arises as to which input method affords the most intuitive interactive experience and provides the most enjoyable gaming user experience (UX). In an attempt to address these questions, the current study examined the impact of controller type (native VR controller vs. traditional gamepad controller) on video game UX in VR while playing a strategy game and an FPS game. Using both the native VR controller and traditional gamepad controller in a counterbalanced order, participants played a strategy and FPS game in VR and provided video game UX satisfaction ratings. Results of the strategy game experiment indicated that the two controllers were comparable in terms of perceived controller naturalness, sense of presence, and video game UX satisfaction during the gameplay, indicating that using a more natural input device did not lead to a superior VR gaming UX. Results of the FPS game experiment indicated that the two controllers were comparable in terms of, sense of presence and video game UX satisfaction during the gameplay, indicating that using a more natural input device did not lead to a superior VR gaming UX. However, results indicated that perceived controller naturalness was rated higher in the Oculus controllers than in the Xbox controllers, exhibiting that the Oculus controllers felt more natural.

Desde las sensibilidades metafóricas desarrolladas por Erving Goffman,
proponemos una aproximación a las problemáticas del juego a través
de una genealogía que rastrea las conexiones goffmanianas con los
dispositivos videolúdicos. De este modo, entendemos las interacciones
y la vida social como un espacio performativo donde se interpretan
roles y operan simultáneamente cuatro metáforas descritas por el autor
(teatral, rito, marco y juego). Aplicando una metodología de análisis
cualitativo basada en entrevistas y observación participante (virtual y
cara a cara) aspiramos a aprehender la cultura de juego mientras
profundizamos en los rasgos más sutiles y subyacentes de la
interacción lúdica. Para ello, proponemos un recorrido por los
escenarios, interacciones, performatividades y mecanismos de
socialización, presentes en los videojuegos, que progresivamente son
más ubicuos y relevantes en la preocupación y quehacer sociológico.

In the last decade, academic studies on games were mainly focusing on gamers, usually from sociological, educational and/or psychological perspectives. Here, in this qualitative study, the main features for a foundational framework of game design and development process will be described, using cognitive ergonomics methods such as semi-structured interviews, critical incidents gathering, and free mind mapping. Two European-leading games development studios were asked to be involved in this exploratory study. One lead game designer, one writer, two tech leads, one external lead artist, and one CEO/internal producer were interviewed about their work, during a 2-hours session. Analysis of these qualitative data helped us better understand how practices and representations can lead to a new vision of video games’ creation, while integrating user-centered design. In brief, results show that the iterative process of game design and development can be formalized from a cognitive ergonomics point of view. Besides, “real” organizational, management, design, and technical incidents are found during creation process. Ultimately, it could help both the product to be improved in quality, as well as the game design and development process to be more considered from a user/player interface design perspective.

We are now accepting proposals for Ludo2020 , the Ninth European Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, taking place at the University of Malta, April 24th-25th next year.

Please share our Call for Papers poster online and around your institutions.

We welcome proposals on all aspects of sound and music in games.

This year, we are particularly interested in papers that support the conference theme of ‘Participation, Performance, and the Body’. Papers on this topic may include:

Representations of the body through sound and music in games
Performance of gender/sexuality and game sound
Physical interactivity with music and games
Dance and drama as lenses for conceptualizing game audio
Voice and game sound
Game music and accessibility
Presentations should last twenty minutes and will be followed by questions. Please submit your paper proposal (c.250 words) with a short provisional bibliography by email to ludomusicology@gmail.com by January 6th 2020. We aim to communicate the programme decisions by January 20th 2020. If you require more information, please email the organizers.

We encourage practitioners and composers to submit proposals for showcasing practice as research.

The conference will feature as a keynote speaker:

Prof. Hillegonda Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture at London South Bank University, musician and electronic music specialist, co-editor of the special issue ‘Hear the Music, Play the Game’ for GAME.

And more to be announced…

Hosted by Costantino Oliva, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta.

Organized by Melanie Fritsch, Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers & Mark Sweeney.

In the landscape of contemporary education, raising environmental awareness is considered a vital goal that lies in the interdependence between humankind and environment not only to encourage conservation of irreplaceable natural resources but also to foster a sense of connection to the natural world. As part of the contribution of the proponents to create a medium that can promote environmental education, an action puzzle video game called Trash Attack was developed. Trash Attack is a 2D-based video game with a storyline that revolves around a girl named Julie who is tasked by Heidegger Industries to clean up a community full of waste using her special gun that can teleport trash to waste processing facilities to be recycled or disposed of properly. To help combat the increasing waste disposal and spread environmental awareness, the game mechanics was designed to make players familiar with the idea of waste segregation. Thirty-six respondents assessed the game and the game evaluation has proven the following points: (1) that the game promoted awareness to the environment while being fun and engaging, (2) that the game has performed efficiently while running, showing little or no frame rate issues and have caused minimal inconvenience to the players, and (3) that the game has been successfully ported to mobile devices allowing everyone to play and be educated.

This paper reviews the experiences of game workshop facilitators in a culturally mixed activist setting based on narrative interviews with representatives of the Game Girl Workshop (GGW), a Denmark-based feminist initiative established in 2010. By identifying emergent themes and concerns in the organizers' self-narratives, this study aims to unpack some current challenges activists from the Global North face when working towards empowerment in cross-cultural educational settings. Crucially, what can be experienced as "empowering" differs depending on cultural factors. This study looks at the practices and narratives GGW activists have developed in response to this intercultural challenge. The focus on workshop organizers' narratives is motivated by two opposed ambitions. The first ambition is to honor and acknowledge the facilitators' activist experience and tacit knowledges which have allowed them to follow through with their aspirational, mostly voluntary work in the games field. The second ambition, conversely, is to identify and redress some problematic assumptions surfacing in the facilitators' self-narratives as popular, yet potentially harmful stereotypes about Eurocentric entitlement and the Global South. By balancing these two ambitions, this study aims to validate the previous work GGW and other western feminist initiatives have done to change the status quo of game making, while identifying Eurocentrism and western entitlement as persistent myths to be resolved by current and future activists.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to develop a “Helper Tool” for Game Design engineers to balance internal economies of Game prototypes. The tool named RecMon is inspired by the Machinations Framework which is believed to be the UML tool for Game Designers. RecMon acts as a Unity plugin and has different windows to display various features like resource monitoring, recording, visualization and data exporting. The study takes a unique approach of considering 2 different game genres and fidelity levels of prototyping in parallel. An RTS Game Demo is implemented in a high-fidelity Unity Environment and a Tower Defense game demo is Paper prototyped. RecMon and Machinations are evaluated for both the demos and certain adjustments to the tool are made. The final product of this thesis is RecMon, a tool which helps Game Designers to balance the internal economies of their games in the prototyping phase itself by providing real-time resource variation data to the developer so that strategies could be developed.

The article provides a comparative account of two paradigms of independent videogame production: the Japanese dōjin (doujin) games and the increasingly global indie games. Through a multilayered analysis, it expounds the conceptual metaphors associated with indie and dōjin games, traces the two movements' respective histories, situates them in wider media environments, and compares their characteristic traits.

More and more people around the world are feeling stressed, and the consequences have become a global burden. At the same time, cities are growing both spatially and from within, creating competition for land which sometimes comes at the cost to our access to nature. Natural settings provide people with stress relief, and some of the feelings we perceive in nature are more efficient at this than others. The proximity to nature has also been found to be of great importance for our creativeness and ability to recover from mental exhaustion.
In this study a survey (N=95) based on the ‘eight perceived sensory dimensions’ was conducted at Massive Entertainment, a big gaming company in Malmö Sweden, to understand how employees at a gaming company perceived their level of stress, affinity with nature and how they asses that these two factors corelate.
The results showed that stress is affecting a share of the responding employees and that this influence their ability to work. Some of the employees even flag for the risk of being affected by more serious mental health issues in the future. At the same time, a need for nature is prevalent and a majority of the respondents seek out urban nature content with the purpose of finding relief from stress. However, the move of the company to a new part of the city may reduce access to nature since the new location Eden is in a part of Malmö where very little nature is to be found.
By bringing nature content into the city, through a green roof designed to utilise the strengths of the planned garden at Eden, there seems to be benefits for both the company and their staff, as well as Malmö at a society level. Benefits in terms of a better working environment for the staff with potential to positively effect creativity and mental health, company publicity and possibly a reduction in sick-leave, and societal benefits stemming from better storm water management and less air pollutants. If these benefits were to be translated into corporate value, this may be enough to show that a green roof is a sound investment.

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The article offers an analysis of the organisational forms and strategies and the logics and modes of action of the actors of interest representation within the creative industries. For this purpose, it presents the results of a research project with specific reference to the Italian case, comparing two economic sectors, which are different from each other by age, structure, business models, employment forms, and associative traditions: graphic design and video game development. The article shows that traditional actors play a limited, although not irrelevant, role, and share the arena of representation with other types of actors and spontaneous aggregative forms. It thus reveals an underlying tension between individualism and communitarianism, and between market and community logics.

Following the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the V&A created a space for applied arts centered on industry and design, a space that serves as a conscious foil to traditional fine arts museums. Curators Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing carried the spirit of this mission forward into the twenty-first century with their exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. The show revealed the innovative practices video game designers have developed over the past fifteen years, while simultaneously asserting the radical potential of the medium by focusing on politically motivated activist games. In addition to examining the sociopolitical impact of a pastime that diverts nearly a quarter of the world's population, the curators devoted specific attention to issues of design and craft. The exhibition was divided into four sections: New Designers, Disruptors, Players_Online, and Players_Offline. With its dim lighting, dark gray walls and permeable mesh dividers, fluorescent text, and video projections on LCD screens, the show's inventive design immersed viewers and guided them through a space that felt like a virtual world.

Non mi sono avvicinato al video game storytelling da giocatore che ha deciso di dedicarsi a una propria passione. Character Develpoment and Storytelling for Games di Lee Sheldon parla della narrazione veicolata nei videogiochi. La lettura di quelle pagine ha fatto emergere in me il ricordo delle mie esperienze videoludiche di almeno una decina d’anni fa. A colpirmi è stata la rievocazione non soltanto del desiderio di mettermi a giocare, ma di quanto provavo allora. Non era raro che un “game over” mi facesse alterare tremendamente o che faticassi a darmi un limite temporale quando gli impegni lo consentivano. Ho presunto che ci fosse una grande potenza nel mezzo in questione il cui approfondimento avrebbe potuto mostrare dei risvolti non scontati.

Nel testo inizio trattando la narrazione transmediale ovvero come veicolare un contenuto (storia) attraverso diverse piattaforme (media).  La parte centrale esplora lo storytelling interattivo applicato ai videogiochi secondo Lee Sheldon. La terza parte analizza il caso videoludico, quasi senza necessità di presentazioni, di GTA V.