Week 22 Task

This particular blog as well as my last two are more than a bit late but this one is supposed to be about the GDC and what particular bits interest me before it occurs (or at least that’s how I interpreted the task) and since the GDC has been and gone all the information on the lead up to it has been mixed together with the results of what actually happened there so I'm going to add some on what happened as well because 1) I want to 2) I want to make sure I’ve cover the task if I misinterpreted what we needed to do.

In general the serious games talks look quite interesting. We had a lecture on serious games or something similar a while ago and I really didn’t think much of but I spotted a session titled “Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games”.

“LABYRINTH is currently being developed collaboratively by MIT’s Education Arcade, Fablevision, Maryland Public Television (MPT) and Johns Hopkins University. LABYRINTH is a multi-player puzzle adventure game, promoting math and literacy skills, and targeting middle-school students. The game will explore new approaches to storytelling, player collaboration, and pedagogy. Delivered both online and on handheld devices, it will also represent a new distribution model. Unlike many learning games that attempt to recycle classroom activities in interactive form, Labyrinth seeks to engage students in authentic play, and to help them build intellectual scaffolding that will benefit their formal academic learning.”

My preferred type of game is one I can play with friends and a multiplayer serious game is an idea that’s never actually occurred to me before. The setting of a labyrinth also interests me because of the potential variety of gameplay that could be included.

When I was at school although there were educational games I found only a few of them that were actually educational and fun. I think this game idea has great potential and I’d like to find out more about it.

I’ve now spent a good amount of time looking through a load of websites and so far all the extra info I’ve been able to gather on “Labyrinth” is that it’s played online. So I'm going to talk about something else from the GDC instead, the Maverick award winner Greg Costikyan.

Greg Costikyan founded Manifesto Games in late 2005 with Johnny Wilson. Manifesto games, an online PC game retailer founded to enable small developers to publish and distribute their own independent and experimental games. Costikyan envisions a world where game design is a recognised art form in a similar way to film and novels have been and that vision is not going to come true if the games industry continues as it is.

The GDC Awards. Some of the videos don’t completely work and there do seem to be bits missing. Greg Costikyan is in the Maverick chapter.

http://www.gamechoiceawards.com/video/2007/

These are volumes one and two of “Death To The Games Industry”, an article Costikyan wrote in Escapist Magazine outlining some of his thoughts on the industry and how it needs to change.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/3

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/9/4