Author Archives: Peter Mawhorter

Local Santa Cruz game developer and perennial guest speaker Graeme Devine is visiting UCSC tomorrow (Wednesday the 22nd) to give a talk titled “Social Games are DEAD!” In his own words: Everyone on the planet is rushing to add a social element to their game, picture app, music app, whatever app. Our widely held view […]

At the recent 2010 Computational Intelligence in Games conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there were competitions for making race car controllers, human-like FPS bots, and Ms. Pac Man players, among others. The competition that drew my interest, however, was the Mario level design competition, which challenged entrants to create procedural level generators that could generate fun […]

On page 141 of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (excellent) Expressive Processing, there’s discussion of a citation of from Jesper Juul: Unlike most literary fictions, however, the worlds of many games are, in Juul’s terminology, “incoherent” (which is one of the things that limits Juul’s interest in discussing games in terms of narrative, as opposed to fiction). These are worlds in which […]