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Category Archives: Academics

Emergent properties: game testers are “stuffed”

By Jim Whitehead | Published: September 16, 2011

Chris Lewis, a member of the Software Introspection Lab at UC Santa Cruz has his game testing work profiled in Science Notes 2011, in the article “Fixing Glitchy Games” by Donna Hesterman. Games increasingly have emergent properties brought about by the complex interactions between the player, AI-driven non-player characters, level geometry and items in the […]

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First Digital Lit, First Video Game?

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: August 29, 2011

What was the first work of digital literature, or digital art? What was the first video game — the first computer game played with graphical display? These are the sorts of questions that come up when we start rummaging around in the pasts of fields, thinking about the boundaries, and thinking about trajectories that might […]

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Winter in Brazil: Regions of Narrative, Software Studies

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: August 22, 2011

It’s winter in Rio, but I still spent a serene morning watching the waves, while mist clung to the green hills behind. So why the picture of a sign? It’s something even more unusual, for a visitor from the US, than a beautiful beach: a mall billboard advertising an event full of professors! In this […]

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Twilight Struggle on the Tabletop

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: August 10, 2011

Pat Harrigan and I have just published an essay on the remarkable game Twilight Struggle in a new book that Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson edited for ETC Press: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. We find Twilight Struggle fascinating — it is not just a game about the Cold War, in which one recapitulates many key […]

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Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in the Game Design Process (IDP 11)

By Gillian Smith | Published: June 16, 2011

Adam Smith (also of EIS) and I are organizing a new workshop to be co-located with AIIDE 2011 on the intersection of AI and game design. Game AI usually refers to controlling interesting agents in a game world, but this workshop is focused on how AI can assist during the game design process itself. Our […]

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Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality

By Jim Whitehead | Published: May 26, 2011

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M). The talk explores how to use mined gameplay data to reduce the cost […]

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