Category Archives: Academics

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 […]

Justin Hall, game designer of various stripes (and internet personality before it was cool), is visiting UCSC this Tuesday (May 11) to give a talk, critique undergrads’ game designs, and discuss with us. The talk’s open to the public, for those of you in the Bay Area, and will take place in Engineering 2, Room […]

Once again, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010) is hosting a Mario competition. This time, they’ve added a level generation track to the competition. The goal is to procedurally generate Mario levels that are entertaining. EIS is working on an entry and here’s what we have so far: I’ve made a […]

Games are increasingly making use of gestures as a way for players to interact in game worlds. While enabling players to perform a large number of actions in the game world, the use of gestures in games can also confuse players accustomed to conventional controllers. Bob Mitchell’s recent talk at UC Santa Cruz discussed developing games for 2020 and one of the points he made was that gestures are going to become prevalent in games due to the introduction of new interfaces. However, it is first necessary to build standard definitions of gestures in order for players to build expectations of how to interact with games.