GameCamp and Tabletop talks now up

 Posted by (Visited 3531 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Jul 132018
 

I have posted up the two talks I delivered last month. Sorry for the delay, but I caught something while at the first event, and have only shaken it right around… now, believe it or not. Four weeks of intermittent fever, coughing vehemently, and generally feeling unable to do much of anything.

One, entitled “Tabletop Game Grammar,” was a talk at the inaugural Tabletop Network event, a game design conference centered specifically on tabletop games. It was held at the lovely Snowbird ski resort, at a high elevation (we went up to the peak after the event, it was around 11,000ft high). This talk is centered on applications of game grammar to boardgame design, including a working through of how the addition of new resources creates the different variants of poker. Continue reading »

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GDC18 videos

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Mar 312018
 

The GDCVault has posted videos of sessions from this year’s GDC already! That was fast!

I’ve linked videos for the three sessions of mine that were filmed (a fourth was for a private event and wasn’t; a fifth was on the Expo floor and wasn’t). You can find them each on the page with the slides:

I want it all. I want to have the tools, the machine learning, the AI, the rich data environment, to be able to make a single, probably online, connected universe that we are in fact simulating down to the point of the little pink alien gophers on the thirteenth planet around that particular green sun (which was entirely procedurally generated) actually have a history and care about one another, and I want it to have all of that stuff and have all of it be alive. Specifically because I want to drop a player into that world and have them realize, as they play, that they are touching lives, messing with things that are alive, they are trampling grass that struggled to grow, “goddamnit, you’re stepping on me again,” to realize that when they build their virtual cities, when they conquer their virtual enemies that they are being colonialist about, you know — all of those things, I want them to realize that in their daily lives, they do the same thing in the real world. Because I want the AI and the machine learning and the code and the systems out there to hold a mirror back up to us as humans. I want them to use that space as practice for being better here. So give me all of it so that people can wake up and realize what they do day to day.

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My AAAI Workshop talk on game depth

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Feb 022018
 

Today, at the kind invitation of Joe Osborn, I gave a talk for one of the workshops at AAAI-18, one on Knowledge Extraction from Games. I was pretty intimidated about talking at all; any time I stand up in front of people who really know algorithms, systems, or math, I feel like an utter dilettante who is bound to say foolish things. I had been noodling around with some notes around the broad topics of depth and indeterminacy, centered around the idea of games as ternary output machines, so I sent them to him, and he talked me into getting in front of an audience with them.

Along the way, I stumbled into formalizing many of the “game grammar” ideas into an actual Backus-Naur Form grammar. This is something that was mentioned to me casually on Facebook, and which I was aware of from long ago classes on programming, in the context of parsers… but which I hadn’t ever seriously considered as an approach to the more humanities-driven process i was going through with game grammar work. Grammar was just a metaphor! Continue reading »

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The cost of games

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Jan 172018
 

Yesterday I was in Anaheim giving a talk called “Industry Lifecycles.” (click here for slides and video).

It was intended to be a brief summary of the blog post of the same title, with a dash of material from my recent post on game economics.

Now, that latter post resonated quite a lot. There was lengthy discussion on more Internet forums than I can count, but it came accompanied by skepticism regarding the data and conclusions. If you recall, the post was originally replies to various comment threads on different sites, glued together into a sort of Q&A format. It wasn’t based on solid research.

As many pointed out, getting hard data on game costs is difficult. When I did my talk “Moore’s Wall” in 2005, I did some basic research using mostly publicly available data on costs, and extrapolated out an exponential curve for game costs, and warned that the trendlines looked somewhat inescapable to me. But much has changed, not least of which is the advent of at least two whole new business models in the intervening time.

So the Casual Connect talk ended up being an updated Moore’s Wall. Using industry contacts and a bunch of web research, I assembled a data set of over 250 games covering the last several decades. This post is going to show you what I found, and in rather more detail than the talk since the talk was only 25 minutes. (You can follow this link to see the full slides, but this post is really a deeper dive on the same data.)

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