Tag: research

Game seminar Friday next week

The University of Copenhagen is hosting the next down-to-Earth but often pleasant public game seminar in our twice-a-year series. Program below:

To Kill or not to Kill – and other presentations on computer games research

Friday November 12, 2004
MODINET’s Conference Room 5.2.29a (old KUA)

PROGRAMME:
09.15-09.25: Welcome
09.25-10.05: Gitte Stald Perspectives on Fascination of Death and Violence in Games
10.05-10.45: Kjetil Sandvik Game Characters with Scruples?
10.45-11.00: Coffee
11.00-11.40: Susana Tosca To Kill or not to Kill: the Butterfly Effect in Blade Runner
11.40-12.20: Troels Degn-Johansson On Death and Destruction in Strategy Games
12.20-13.15: Lunch
13.15-13.55: Jesper Juul What the Game Means: About Grand Theft Auto 3
13.55-14.10: coffee
14.10-14.50: Charlie Breindahl Racing Games
14.50-15.30: Jonas Heide Smith Games, Peacocks, and the Theory of Conflict

Risk-free societies

I’m quite bored with the Disneyworld approach to social interaction strived for by several MMORPGs. I think I’m ready for something more PvP soon – and a bit of permadeath wouldn’t hurt either. Also, it seems increasingly self-defeating to me to instate rules that roleplaying can never be an excuse to violate the be-nice rules of EULAs. I think my dream MMORPG would have PvP, permadeath (or at least something close) and an advancement system which made sure that even newbies could “physically” threaten experienced players. Oh, and now that I’m reading from the wish-list I would also like to see worlds in which choices actually had long-term consequences even if it meant upsetting carefully established gameplay balances. But I guess I’ve ranted on this before.

Twinked!

Moving rapidly from frog-fighting street thug into the ranks of the newly rich, I met up with Chek in Star Wars Galaxies. Chek, being accomplished in the arcana of the game’s mechanics was throwing around goodies like credits and a nice hover bike now residing comfortably in the… well, pocket of yours truly. Biking in the sunset I was given a great tutorial and was later taken to see the stately – postcardly situated – houses of certain esteemed game researchers.
Oh, and Chek keeps some dragons around. And I think he is closer to the emperor than he cares to admit :-)

The World will have to do

The game center gets a writeup at BBCs The World. My attention was caught a statement by one Jonas Schmidt:

“It was weird to think that there would be some sort of payoff for all of the hours spent,” Smith says. “You know, telling our parents this, but they didn’t believe us. They should see this.”

The depth of wisdom within this one sentence, not to mention its daring position on the issue of internal coherence, boggles the mind.
In one of the pictures my office mate can be seen hard at work doing basic research.

But seriously, it’s a nice piece. There’s supposed to be a companion webcast but I can’t seem to find a working URL.