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Epic Game Design Tour

By Adam M. Smith | Published: March 8, 2010

This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know someone who is very serious about games but is a little too attached to their fanboyism to see the bigger picture. Tell them to skip past the first two minutes of class business and jump right into the real intellectual meat.
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Global Game Jam recap

By Foaad Khosmood | Published: March 8, 2010

global game jam 2010

The Global Game Jam 2010 concluded over 30 days ago, but the treasure trove of indy creations it left behind remains largely unexplored. Then again, how is anyone supposed to review some 1000 games created specifically for an event that shuns any global judging? Who has that kind of time anyway? Certainly not overworked grad students!

But I’m here to tell you, you should try! Among these games you can find some of the most innovative zero-budget designs ever devised in the span of 48 hours and you can see the source code that produced them. I’m writing this review partly in hope of inspiring similar reflections from GGJ enthusiasts and partly in anticipation of our upcoming talk at the GDC Education Summit on this year’s Global Game Jam.

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CFP: Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2010

By Ben Weber | Published: March 6, 2010

AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010.

This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!

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Game Developers Conference: Current TV Features EIS Podcast

By Sherol Chen | Published: March 4, 2010

Intro: "When I was 5 years old, I had a crush on Super Mario"

EIS was featured on current.com

The Game Developer’s Conference is less than a week away, and for those who don’t get to see what goes on during this amazing week, we, at the Expressive Intelligence Studio, put together a mini documentary about the “People Behind the Products.” Now, we aren’t film-makers at EIS, but in addition to doing some awesome research, it’s important to make the things we do accessible to especially those who only experience games as consumers.  To be honest, the best part of what I do, isn’t that I get to “play games,” but that I’m able to be part of creating games.  The creating process involves so many talented and creative people, and some of the best parts of video gaming is a bit hidden from those outside our community. I’m not sure what stops people from knowing more about us, but the purpose of this mini documentary is to invite those who appreciate being on the audience side of games into our community.  My hope is that we can enable more and more people to embrace the technology in ways where they aren’t merely consumers and grow the community around this inevitably magnificent technology.

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WoW Armory Data Mining: The Next Generation

By Chris Lewis | Published: March 2, 2010

The clustering of WoW Feral Druid forms (Bear on top, Cat on bottom)

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note that this is inferred from statistics choices, it is not a simple flag that is set in the data itself.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing someone move beyond the common averages and deviations that are commonly performed on WoW Armory data; there’s so much more there than that!

A highly recommended read for anyone interested in the golden nuggets buried in that data set.

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EIS Featured in Local News

By Chris Lewis | Published: March 1, 2010

The group (Copyright Robinson Kuntz/Santa Cruz Sentinel)

EIS is now able to claim “big in Santa Cruz” after being featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper (I’ve also heard reports of the story being syndicated to the San Jose Mercury News for the wider Bay Area).

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