G4C Rapid Fire Talks

Ushahidi – Crisis Mapping
Interested in using games to improve crisis mapping
So far the mapping has been massive manual information. Trains tons of people to use the platform, received info from texts from haitians and then crowdsourced translations.
Interested in how services can be microtasked, turned into Human Intelligence Tasks manageable through Mechanical Turk or WoW.
Wants to develop altruism scores, re-vision labs and going from crowdsourcing to playsourcing.

Richard Lemarchand lead designer for Uncharted 2
Charles Dickens knew first hand how crappy 19th Century London was. He wove comedy and tragedy, chifhangers, but he didn’t sermonize or offer solutions. As Orwell said, “He managed to attack everybvody and antagonize nobody”

Max and the Magic Marker

Good game story telling is very challenging-all the challenges of normal narrative plus the unique structure of games

Challenge is to align the peaks and troughs of gameplay experience with narrative peaks and troughs

Dickens of games is probobly not a single person but a collaboration

Jessica Hammer – game designer/reseracher
People tend to lie about who they are. Really, people lie about everything, like all the time. “Social desirability bias” We want to look appealing to others.

As a designer, you must take SDB into acount. With games for change we want games to be processing deeply. With SDB, though, people are often doing what they think they should be doing, behaving how they think they should be behaving, and so they will be less likely to really think about what your trying to communicate. If your game is about telling people what they should be doing, it will not be received.

Give people legit choices, make them balance one social good against another, give them challenges about how much, when, etc.

Ntiedo Etuk – Dimension U – a portal to educational games
“Student -Centric Learning”
Trying to make learning a lifestyle
Games are good for learning. Kids are not
African Americans and Latinos actually play games more than white kids

Games designed so kids need academic skills in game, but can access resources in real time to help their problem solving.

Brian Reich – Managing Director some media company
Why is what we’re doing not working? –good question
Expectations for what people have for games is determined by everything out there–shoe commercials, music etc.
We don’t understand our audience well enough
We need to understand why people play other games? Why do they like them?
We need to work with people of various skills.
We need to stop typing what we’re hearing because it seems inconsequential.
Too many words on powerpoint slides.

Jane Pickard–Foundation 9
Designing for the total limbic games
We used to ask what does the player do, now we ask what does the player feel while doing it?
Games are good at stimulating reptilian and neo cortex, but less good at stimulating limbic system (love, emotion)
In most games, if there’s love, it’s like discovering a love story written for you
Dragon Age is complex enough that it feels legit
Designing for love/What to do on a first date:
Make player smile
Adreniline-filled moments
Let the player express herself
Allow for vulnerability

Love is a battlefield and there’s a lot of room for conflict

Rob Dubbin – writer the Colbert Report

robdubbin@talkingpet.org

Aphorism = a constraint on reality
Game design is a constraint on reality

Any aphorism can suggest a game design.

Elegance can yield complexity if you poke it enough

Games 4 Change Korea

Running out of battery! Emergency Incomplete Post!

level end/only one life

via: Pictures for Sad Children

That wasn’t the punchline. It’s actually much darker.

See the rest.

Adventures in Sex City

As the serious games movement spreads, there are bound to be awkward moments. There will be instances when, well, maybe I should just describe the game. In “Adventures in Sex City” the player can assume a position within the Sex Squad and be either a virgin woman who promotes abstinence, a woman who is sexually active, a man who is short, looks like a child, and has the super power of “rock hard strength” or another man who because of a lab experiment gone wrong is now half condom, whatever that means. The player chooses a character and then sets off to fight the Spermanator, a giant Mexican wrestler with an STD who has penises for hands and attempts to ejaculate on the player. His sperm have shark mouths. The only way to avoid the danger is to correctly answer safe sex questions in a quiz.

Uh huh.

This is just wrong. Do I really need to analyze why? I hope not. Please serious game designers, you can take challenging content and wrap it in an edgy, cool, funny, context, but no Mexican wrestlers with penis hands please. And no more quizzes with animation, that’s barely a game and nobody’s fooled.