Edinburgh Interactive Festival 08
I was lucky enough to attend the , it was an awesome 3 days and I heard some great presentations.
Much of what I heard was about innovation and what is changing in the games/interactive industry and communities – such as new ideas & audiences that are turning traditional attitudes on their heads – I certainly came back suffering from information overload, but in a good way! It was a very busy conference, but I managed to grab a few with some of the attendees.
The festival also encompassed the video games competition for student games designers and developers, where I saw some interesting and varied demos from the University of Abertay Dundee. Teams had 10 weeks to develop a game prototype. There are three winners and each wins a cash prize and a BAFTA nomination for the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ award which will be announced in March next year.
My colleague Brendan will be following up this post with some of his highlights from EIF08. Anyway, to be getting on with, below are notes from a few of the presentations…
Opportunities in the new digital age: Chris Deering – EIF08 festival chairman
This was an extremely in depth presentation, so I’ve just included some highlights!
New trends for the expansion of immersive gaming experience:
* 6-10 age games, family and grey gamer sectors grow
* High definition enabled homes spawn combi console / STBs
* Ubiquitous wifi powers ‘anywhere’ gaming
* New game engines, physics, lightning and lip-sync tools
* Voice recognition, GPS and ‘location aware’ servers
* Massive worlds, cinema-real ‘thinking and speaking’ characters
New trends drive new gaming business innovation:
* Behavior tracking will enable ‘pinpoint’ marketing
* Micro-payments and cash online transaction modes
* Advertising subsidises consumer spending
* Gambling becomes a source of development funding
* User enhanced, user generated and user published games
* Games for special niche communities
Opportunities in new experiences where gaming culture will be relevant:
* GPS on mobiles and ‘location aware’ servers
* Ubiquitous screens and high definition redefine TV
* Females become the biggest paying audience on the web
* ‘Concierge’ services as time becomes a precious commodity
* Monestisation of streaming unleashed the ‘long tail of live’
* Revolution in user interfaces and input including voice
* Mobile phone communities go massive and global
-+-
Too Cool for School - A New Look at Games in Educations - Derek Robinson -
Derek gave a fascinating talk about how are looking at different approaches to games and learning. He has set up , a centre for games based learning.
Traditionally, games have been frowned upon in schools, but in Scotland they’ve seen some remarkable results by allowing kids to play off the shelf games such as Nintendogs, Guitar Hero, Brain Training and Endless Ocean. They found that these games helped flatten out the divide between different skill streams in the classroom. It was found that with maths games, for example with Brain Training and Nintendogs, kids learnt quicker, became faster at solving problems and overall had more confidence and engaged more freely with other members of the class.
Playing these games has inspired the kids in Scotland no end, they’ve set up blogs to talk about their experiences, such as how their pet dogs in Nintendogs are getting on and accessories for them. Derek emphasised how off the shelf games should not be dismissed and to be careful of thinking that ‘worthy’ educational games are the right or only choice for education.
-+-
(University of Edinburgh) - Innovative Education using Virtual Worlds
Austin is Director of AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Virtual worlds technologies are getting really interesting, as they’re increasingly specialist, especially where applied to learning and simulation worlds from art galleries, to military and healthcare. The following notes are a bit lean, but I hope the links help you find out more…
Timeline for virtual worlds
* 1978 onwards - multi-user dungeon & domain via early chat / IM
* 1990 onwards - MOO - MUD object orientated
* 1990 onwards - MMORPG
* Now - multi-user virtual environments and virtual worlds (MUVE/VW)
* Next - external content management and links to web services
The Virtual University of Edinburgh VUE, has a campus in Second Life. It’s looking at new methods of teaching and new ways to study - a bit more fun and more effective ways of doing things. The VUE virtual campus has a building reminiscent of the college buildings and also features local Edinburgh buildings. It has art installations - they have a gallery open in Second Life that will also open soon in real life.
iRoom: a room for intelligent interaction related to virtual collaboration work. For example there’s a Paternoster tasting room - people have their own whisky tasting kits at home, but join in an educational and social experience online.
Other virtual worlds include , and .
There are some professionally licensed and private virtual worlds such as ProtoSphere - which is aimed at companies as well as educational establishments:
Forterra Olive is also licensed and quite expensive as it comes with lots of applications and specialist worlds in areas such as refugee, medical and military:
Twinity allows closed walls and systems. It allows the user to let selected people into their areas:
Anyway, there’s tons of virtual worlds - but they’ll almost certainly thin out as some survive and some don’t. Privately managed regions and controlled areas are becoming popular, especially for simulation for medical, government and military. It’s all extremely interesting :-)
-+-
from the Psychology of Music Research Group, talked about the relationship between music and games, here’s some notes from her slides:
Videogame play presents a valuable yet relatively untapped platform for musical experience:
* Exposure to symphonic scores eg Halo
* Increasing customisability of soundtracks eg GTA series
* Boom in music performance and creation games eg Rock Band
How music plays a fundamental role in videogame experience
* Forms a channel of communication, interaction and direction
* Enriches the game world - aiding the creation of context, setting the scene and semantic inference about protagonists
* Assist the player in navigation of the play space - directing the player through the sequence of game play and providing functional reference and feedback
* Developed from underscoring the characters actions and functional feedback from the environment to enriching, maintaining and manipulating the emotional context of the game world - aiming to create a seamless impression of gameplay.
* Music acts as an emotional glue between the player and the game - symbiotic communication of induced and expressed cultural, emotional and social content.
She went on to tell us about some research into gamers response to certain types of music in games - how it affects the rate of player activity, player physiology and emotional state - they used Wii Sports, Wii Star Wars and WiiFit games. As you might imagine self selected tracks had the highest arousal results.
Summary
* Music is a powerful tool to elucidate social emotional and cognitive processed and outcomes of our gameplay experience - an emotional glue and channel of information between the game and player.
* Music is a tool to regulate our social, cognitive and emotional interaction with games - it has both positive effects on accuracy, efficiency, judgment, attention, motivation, enjoyment, mood state, liking and evaluation of the game - mediated by preference, perceived control, contextual specificity and liking.
Comments