Can you make them cry without tearing your hair out?
– Emotional Characters
Associate Professor Katherine Isbister, Rensselaer Politechnic Institute
Time and Place:
Thursday June 7th, 16:15-17:30. Auditorium 3, ITU.
About the talk:
Have you been hearing more about how important emotion is for reaching a bigger audience and taking full advantage of new platforms in game design? This talk focuses on one key area of games that can add emotional impact: characters. Working from a foundation in understanding the psychology of the player, this talk presents some essential challenges and opportunities in character design that come along with the rise of procedural animation, better processors that can handle more complex AI, and new input devices (such as Nintendos DS touch pad and Wii controller) that provide richer opportunity for player expression.
Bio:
Katherine is Director of the Games Research Lab at Rensselaer (RPI),
where she has worked to build an undergraduate major in game design,
as well as a robust program of games-related research. She developed
and taught a course at Stanford University on the Design of
Characters for Games, before joining RPI’s faculty. She received her
Ph.D. from Stanford, with a focus on using ideas from social
psychology to design better, more effective interactive characters.
Katherine recently completed a book entitled: Better Game Characters
by Design: A Psychological Approach, which was nominated for a Game
Developer Magazine Front Line award in 2006. She has published work
in a wide variety of venues, and has given invited talks at research
and academic venues including Sony research labs in Japan, Banff
Centre in Canada, IBM, the Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm, and others.
Comments are closed.