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Games, Page 3

Questions, questions

My head is full of questions today. On the one hand, I need to get some front end evaluation data on young people and mobile gaming together, in just a month, so I’m composing an online survey about that. On the other hand it is the deadline for Bodiam Castle to submit bespoke questions for the National Trust’s visitor survey, so I need to get my head around what questions to try and persuade them to add. Continue reading →

The Bartle Test

I’ve been reading about the Bartle Test. It came up in conversation when somebody asked about player motivations. Turns out people have been asking similar questions for years, and after much discussion on the bulletin board of a UK “Multi-User Dungeon” Richard Bartle came up with a 1996 paper, outlining four gamer types. A few years later, Erwin Andreasen and Brandon Downey came up with a web based test which players could take. So I took it. Continue reading →

Henry V, the Southampton Plot, geolocation and open source (oh, and punk)

Last Tuesday I’d booked a day’s leave from work so that I could attend the SXSC3 digifest. But 15 minutes in, after the introductions, I had to duck out to hot-foot it back to the university to meet with the Dean and others,to discuss a possible project for the 2015 anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Now, I know my St Crispin’s day but what I wasn’t aware of is that Shakespeare mentions a plot against Henry V’s life that actually took place around Southampton. Continue reading →

Steamships, vampires, pirates, space colonists and emergent narrative

This is a bit of a portmanteau post. Which I guess is what one gets when one’s mind has been concentrating on the mid-term exam for a Coursera statistics course. In the end I got 84%. I might have worked harder (you are allowed pretty much as many retakes as you want) to get a perfect 100, but, you know, life’s too short. And all the time I was discovering things I wanted to share and play with. First of all, the Full Steam Ahead game from SS Great Britain in Bristol. Continue reading →

The Strong, National Museum of Play

Before last week’s Decoding the Digital conference, I visited the National Museum of play at the Strong. There are a number of Strong endowed institutions in Rochester, including the university Hospital, but unlike the city’s other famous sons and benefactors, George Eastman of Kodak fame, and the Xerox corporation, none of the locals seemed to know who the Strong family was or how they made their money. Continue reading →

Holiday Reamde

Last week, for my holiday in Cornwall, I took some “hard” reading with me, but I was determined to have some holiday reading too. Having mentioned Neal Stephenson in a previous post, I was reminded that I hadn’t ever picked up one of his more recent books, Reamde. Shopping around, it was pretty cheap on Kindle so I downloaded it, and took it with me. Continue reading →

Music in new media

I’ve been thinking about music again, and staring into the pit of unknown unknowns that is my non-existent understanding of music, except as a casual listener. I know music affects me, and I’ve how important an emotional trigger in the games I’ve been playing for my studies, but I don’t know how or why, and right now I’m wishing I had a degree in Cognitive Psychology to help me understand. Continue reading →

My first abstract

I’m excited because my first conference paper proposal has been accepted, and it gets financial support to help me go deliver it. So in September I’m off to the University of Rochester, NY for their Decoding the Digital conference. I thought I’d share the abstract here. Now, of course, I have to write the paper. Abstract The creators of digital narratives, in the form of computer games, are experimenting with form as they explore story telling in virtual spaces. Continue reading →