Games

Video games, entertainment, education, and training media have been developed for many years, and eliciting emotional experiences is an integral part of that process. Production and editing of the media in order to produce the desired emotional experiences can be expensive and cumbersome to media de- signers. This paper presents a pilot study intended to show that such experiences can be induced with after-the-fact audio-visual effects. As subjects of the us- er study, players are given the same virtual environment with two emotional states: fear, and peace.

The Global Game Jam® is the world’s largest game creation event, a physical jam that is held annually for eight years now. The 48-hour activity brings together game design enthusiasts in over 90 countries around the world for a weekend of experimentation. The organization facilitates tens of thousands of jam registrations every year, and thousands of responses to its annual survey. In this paper, we analyze Global Game Jam using multiple largely unexamined sources of data. We produce and discuss some key observations supported by the evidence.

Game jams and game hackathons are proliferating at a significant rate. It is not merely the number, but also the variety of these game creation events that have been increasing. In this paper, we examine several prominent organizing philosophies that are often cited when producing in-person versions of these events. The approaches differ in target demographics, goals, facilities and logistics. We analyze unpublished sets of statistics and user feedback data previously to further explore some of the distinct approaches.

The goal to designing a game that is both educational and enjoyable can present some unique challenges. Using effective educational methods can sometimes conflict with effective design strategies for creating an enjoyable game. Kanakatana is an exploration into finding areas of overlap between foreign language learning and Role-Playing-Games. It was designed so that its most important mechanics leverage similarities between learning a new language and playing an RPG.