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Mike Treanor

Mike Treanor is a game designer and PhD student studying at UC Santa Cruz. His work focuses on how to interpret and express ideas with playable media.

Prom Week’s “Social Exchanges”

To celebrate Prom Week’s release on on Facebook and Kongegrate, we thought we’d share some of the details about what’s going on inside of the heads of Prom Week characters. As we’ve posted before, Prom Week is a game where the player gets to shape the social lives of 18 highschoolers by controlling what social actions they take […]

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Prom Week Released on Facebook!

Delve into all the adolescent angst, drama, and scheming of the week before a high school prom in this online game, which uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to enable players to shape the social lives of 18 hapless high school students. Find dates for them, break up and make up, forge new friendships, make […]

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Prom Week a finalist in Technical Excellence at IGF 2012

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival! We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon. Whooo hooooo!!!

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Prom Week: Gameplay and Social Physics

When we started making Prom Week, our mission was to make social interactions truly playable. While games have increasingly gotten better at physical simulation, social interactions in games still tend to be scripted, with most games using dialogue trees of some form. A result of this is that many games end up being about physical conflict, as […]

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Prom Week!!!

For the past two years we’ve been working on a game called Prom Week and I’m happy to announce we’ve just launched our closed beta! Look here for announcements, news, and tales of its development in the coming weeks! Prom Week is a social simulation game where the player shapes the lives of a group […]

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Chaim Gingold Visits EIS

• Title: Human Play Machine • Speaker: Chaim Gingold • When: Wednesday 10/20/10 at 11am • Where: E2 room 506 • Abstract: Every game or form of play toys with some human faculty. Slot machines play with our sense of probability and reward, and soccer players play with social coordination, physics, and their bodies. Newborn […]

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