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Hi all,
This is an open invitation to a lecture I’m giving on game design in NCAD on March 11 at 5:30 pm.
The lecture will be based on my own MA research and aims to define broad concepts such as game, story, intelligence, play and learning and suggest links between such concepts within the context of game design.
By boiling these ideas down into abstract components, I hope to re-build them to suggest possible design structures that might make the task of game design a little easier.Debate is encouraged and I would be especially interested in seeing people who intend to enter the Dare to be Digital competition at the talk. If people could RSVP through this thread, it will give me an idea of how many people we need to accommodate.
Shane
P.S. NCAD is at 100 Thomas Street. If you walk for 5 minutes from the Digital Hub towards the city centre, it’s on your left. I’ll be somewhere in the HADCom department; a room hasn’t been decided yet. Watch this space.
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Hello Shane,
Although I cannot yet confirm, I am very interested in attending your lecture. Hopefully I’ll get the all clear from my college to go and take the time off. If I stay ahead in my studies then that is most likely.
Do you know what time the talk will end at?
If it’s over by 8pm I’ll be able to catch the last bus home to Belfast so I can make college the next day. :)
Thanks.
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Hi Ronny,
Good to hear some interest so soon. I haven’t run through the entire presentation yet (still writing), so I can’t give an exact time, but I hope to keep the actual talk to around 45 minutes. Questions and answers will hopefully follow, probably 10 – 20 minutes for that. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but it will be something along those lines. I’ll post a more exact time here if I get a better clue myself.
Shane
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I will attend on the off chance there will be free cake. Only joking. I am entering Dare to be Digital – this will (should) be helpful.
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Hi Shane,
The topic sounds interesting and it’s excellent to see this subject being presented in a design context, something close to my heart ;) I will be making a big effort to attend all going well!Cheers,
Ian -
Hi Shane,
hope to make it along myself. Good luck with the event
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i’ll see you all there too!
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Catbert, there should be cake available in the canteen at a reasonable price. However, I believe some of the cake is on loan from the Museum of Natural History, so you can only look at it but you can’t eat it.
Nice to see the interest so far. Keep it coming.
Shane
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Aphra, I forgot to include the title in the first post, which I’ve just edited. So I’m calling it:
“Play as Communication”
If you get the chance, could you please add that to the page in the news section?
Thanks for putting up the notice, by the way,
Shane
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Shane,
Will be there. I’m a game developer, but also doing MA Electronics Arts in Middlesex University. Focusing on automated games testing and feedback from users.
Conor O’Nolan
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Sounds really interesting – currently working on a final year proj that’s relevant so I’ll be there and probably someone from my group too.
Thanks.
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It’s going to be in the Tiered Lecture Room in Hadcom. 5:30 Thursday 11th March.
(The Sybil Connolly room).
Shane
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Keep up the good work!
Will see you there…
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I’ll try and make it, but where is Hadcom in NCAD? I’ll just have to annoy a porter I guess…
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You walk in the front gate from Thomas Street (big blue arched door). Take a right and go through the automatic doors. There should be a piano in front you. Take an immediate left inside the automatic doors. Walk through the next automatic door and go down the path with the garden on your right. There should be a door to the right after the garden and that’s the Hadcom building. The Sybil connolly room is the first door on your left.
It’s not a big place — you’ll find it. Alternatively ask a porter.
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Hey Shane. I’ll be along. 45 minutes of pure Shane is too good to resist.
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It’s probably going to be more like an hour — I’ve run through it a couple of times already. But hey, that’s 25% extra free. You don’t have to pay to get in of course, but I’m thinking of putting a tips jar by the door…
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Hi Shane,
Will you be making a digital copy (Word / Powerpoint) of your presentation available afterwards? I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get away from work in time to make 5:30 in NCAD. Bloody shame!
Anyway, hopefully you can make some copies available.
Cheers,
Ian -
I will be writing up a finished paper eventually, but that will take some time. Skive off early — you know you want to ; )
The slideshow doesn’t have a lot of words in it, so I’m not sure you’d be able to follow it just by clicking through it. I’m trying to record it on tape and my intention is to do a written transcription or an mp3 for my website, which isn’t up yet but will be soon.
Short answer: There will be something to read, hear or look at, but I’m not sure what or when.
Come along to it anyway, even if you’re a bit late. The feedback should be interesting.
Shane
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Leave it with me ;)
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Thanks to everone for turning up. I honestly wasn’t expecting more than fifteen people. I hope it was useful to you.
If it sparks off any more ideas from anyone, please stick them in here and we can continue the discussion. I’m always ready to talk about this stuff so you can email me if you want:
It’d be nicer to keep the discussion going here where everyone can see it.
Thanks again,
Shane
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Hey Shane. Well done on the lecture, some tasty food for thought there. Emergent games and gameplay are a very exciting direction for developers. My own particular interest would be in emergence in relation to player avatars, especially in multiplayer. Customising a character to suit your personality means many players become precious about this idenity. Emergent characters may be much more malleable though, and change in a way that the player doesn’t anticipate. Be interesting to hear what opinions people have about this.
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One thing I’ve been thinking about in aesthetic terms is that anywhere you see something that can only exist once in a game, try to abstract and generalise it so that it can be used in any situation. This happens in the design of gameplay and programming issues all the time, but also in graphics too — we use textures over and over again, for example.
We can blend textures and 3D animation and strategies with their counterparts to produce new results. An aesthetic area that doesn’t facilitate blending and non-linearity too well is recorded voice. In multiplayer now you have the headsets and don’t need to worry about it any more, but in single player games it’s still got to be recorded voice and we seem to be quite a distance from natural, believable synthesised voices. To get around this, I’m thinking we could pick up the slack in this area with the stuff that can be recombined in different orders — Half-Life 2 does it with the facial morphing and supposedly lip-synchs to new voice clips.
Remember that the early days of film survived quite happily without voices and if you look at the likes of Charlie Chaplin, he said everything he needed to with exaggerated mime and facial expressions. The creature in Black and White never says a word and does everything through gesture. We have the tools to mix up pre-recorded animation and pictures and sound effects, but not the same level of dynamism with voices yet.
Shane
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Note artificial text to speech systems are now at the stage of being very good, though somewhat computationally intensive. I’m pretty sure the UT 2k4 demo has something text to speech related in it (you can type in ala normal fps game, and have it converted for the other players to listen to).
A given text to speech system for a given accent in a given language can be represented near perfectly by about 2000 different short sound segments ( diphones – http://www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/csll/rochforn0203.pdf if interested). It wont be too long before implementing this kind of system, and having developers type in the accent and the words will become more efficient then actually recording all the speech segments. Once thing the system would also allow would be interruptible speech – enemy ai can react real time to events by cutting off what they are saying, having words transitioning into yelps of pain etc.
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Note artificial text to speech systems are now at the stage of being very good, though somewhat computationally intensive. I’m pretty sure the UT 2k4 demo has something text to speech related in it (you can type in ala normal fps game, and have it converted for the other players to listen to).
A given text to speech system for a given accent in a given language can be represented near perfectly by about 2000 different short sound segments ( diphones – http://www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/csll/rochforn0203.pdf if interested). It wont be too long before implementing this kind of system, and having developers type in the accent and the words will become more efficient then actually recording all the speech segments. Once thing the system would also allow would be interruptible speech – enemy ai can react real time to events by cutting off what they are saying, having words transitioning into yelps of pain etc. [/quote:24b4575557]
The UT2004 stuff isn’t that impressive but hats off to them for putting it in, it surprised the **** outta me when I first heard it.
What would be a good implementation of it is say, if the enemy in UT (or any other game infact ) cut off your ‘communications bunker’ not allowing you to send messages to your teammates.
So in addition to capturing control nodes (or whatever) you’d also have to protect a communicator relay building located away from your base.
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