The Acagamic

Having sur­vived day one of GDC Canada, filled with meet­ing great peo­ple and lis­ten­ing to excel­lent talks, the next day would even top my expe­ri­ence. First, of course, I went to see the keynote by Bioware founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk about their quest to fully engage a player emo­tion­ally in the inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tives they cre­ate. Again, it was a very friendly atmos­phere, almost like you were hang­ing out at a friend’s place for watch­ing game trail­ers and hav­ing bar­be­cue. The pre­sen­ters were excel­lent, how­ever, con­tent­wise I yearned for more than just a recap of Bartle’s player types and cool clips of their mile­stone games, but was left unserved. Then, there was also this trailer, which was dif­fer­ent and dis­turb­ing:

Anyway, the keynote was brief enough to head back up to Future Play again and join the excel­lent work­shop on Designing Effective Exercise Video Games orga­nized by Nick Graham, together with Tad Stach and Regan Mandryk. I really enjoyed the pre­sen­ta­tion and also the topic does war­rant a lot of research and got me really intrigued to look into this in more detail. Maybe even fol­low up on it with an arti­cle. After a brief lunch, it was then time for our ulti­mate panel on game met­rics and bio­met­rics (empir­i­cal game research fueled by num­bers), which was accu­mu­lat­ing the speak­ers you see in the pic­ture at the start of this arti­cle. Mike, Regan, Tad and Alessandro are all experts in their areas and we had a lot of fun putting this together and dis­cussing it with the audi­ence (albeit maybe too brief for such a broad topic). I must say that this really was my high­light of the con­fer­ences. The slides to this are here:

Following this, I tried to get my adren­a­line down again for one last talk that I had to give on my research paper at Future Play 2009 called From Playability to a Hierarchical Game Usability Model. This the­ory allows some of my other research to be placed in con­text. It was the short­est of the pre­sen­ta­tions I was giv­ing, but nev­er­the­less, you can find the slides here:

The other papers in this ses­sion about gen­er­a­tive behav­ior pat­terns and mea­sur­ing gam­ing pref­er­ences were also really inter­est­ing. So, I decided to stick with Future Play for the rest of the day, watch­ing Alessandro’s pre­sen­ta­tion on game­play met­rics, and an inno­v­a­tive approach to 3D track­ing using two Wiimotes pre­sented by David Scherfgen, who I met right after I got off the plane and hung out with dur­ing some spare time at the con­fer­ence. He also is the author of the German game pro­gram­ming book “3D-Spieleprogrammierung mit DirectX 9 und C++” (3D game pro­gram­ming with DirectX 9 and C++), so you should really buy that book to sup­port his stud­ies!
The ses­sion closed with a health game talk by Tommy Brett of Algoma U, for which I mis­er­ably failed at play­ing his flash game (for demon­stra­tion). The day ended with too much rain, but lots of good feelings.

So, I close with acknowl­edg­ing that Canada is an excel­lent envi­ron­ment for devel­op­ing games and Vancouver is a great place to have a con­fer­ence. I hope to be able to come back in the future.

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