EIS at UC Santa Cruz

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 280, at 11am.

Justin’s currently at iPhone-game developer/publisher ngmoco, where he’s Producer for freemium online social games. He has an MFA from USC, and his thesis there turned into The Nethernet, a “passively multiplayer online game (PMOG)” (see the Wired piece), which he developed as CEO of his startup, GameLayers, from 2007 to 2009. Before that, he was famous for running links.net, which started in 1994 as a hand-curated set of interesting links (around the time Yahoo! was founded to do the same), and morphed into a “web diary” of sorts that, appearing as it did some years before the official invention of blogs, led the New York Times Magazine to later call him the “founding father of personal bloggers”. By the early 2000s, he’d become something of an evangelist for mobile gaming.

In his talk (again: E2 280, 11am), he’ll tell us:

What if the entire web were an MMO? What if web surfing leveled you up in a meta-game of information warfare with bombs and treasure buried across a web you explore through link filled Missions?

PMOG, the “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”, was an attempt to build an MMO in a Firefox toolbar. PMOG started as a research project at USC, in the Interactive Media Lab. With two collaborators, a writer/designer and programmer, Justin produced an experimental online game for his MFA thesis project in May 2007. These three people formed GameLayers, Inc. and raised over two million dollars to turn this game into an internet startup.

By late 2009, GameLayers had no Firefox MMO, two Facebook games and four employees. What happened to GameLayers? And what will happen to their Firefox MMO, The Nethernet? Justin will share his experience as a graduate student, entrepreneur, CEO, unemployed person, and now Producer at iPhone games company ngmoco.

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 few modifications to the game engine to explore a new direction in platformers. Each time the player loses, a new level is generated on the fly. The idea is to prevent the player from getting frustrated by always  presenting the player with a new level. Rather than frustrate the player, the system provides the player with unlimited fun levels. You can try out our level generator by downloading it here and running the Jar.

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 controls. 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.

A scene in Heavy Reain in which the player can choose from 3 gestures using the right analog stick and a single gesture with the left stick.

Read More »