tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71562342009-12-02T01:30:43.452+01:00Blog about my PhD work on player characters in MMO's, games, game research and occasional notes on this and that. Welcome!Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.comBlogger162125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-39252423882166914142009-12-01T23:50:00.004+01:002009-12-02T01:30:43.457+01:00

DIGRA 2009 was held at Brunel University, in the outskirts of London, the same university where A Clockwork Orange was shot. The conference took place the 1st to the 4th of September, that is, three months ago.The most prominent memories I have from the conference is:Richard Bartle's grumpy keynote, where he highlighted the lack of fundamentals of games expressed in formal syntaxes.Michael

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-84191591485138861702009-10-16T11:27:00.001+02:002009-10-16T11:27:29.980+02:00

i'm a donkey without destiny on my way to serendibOriginally uploaded by mimmiEvery now and then we at the game department at Gotland University gather to play games, an yesterday we played the boardgame The tales of the Arabian Nights by Eric Goldberg at Jakob's place.My character was Sheherazade, but I was turned into a donkey. During the game - i had a fad for looking too closely at mysterious

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-43972602667368301132009-06-18T13:24:00.004+02:002009-06-18T14:13:39.915+02:00

Alice and Kev is a story about two homeless characters in Sims 3, played and written about by Robin Burkinshaw. Burkinshaw writes about what happens as he playes the game, each interpretation he makes in the text is based on an event.The new version of Sims, which I haven’t played yet, seem to be an even better environment for story construction. I made a small story in Sims 2 to try it out. It

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-45441148304470202432009-05-16T15:03:00.002+02:002009-05-16T15:06:14.080+02:00

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-12399872421021113092009-05-10T16:52:00.002+02:002009-05-10T16:55:54.751+02:00

In the demo session we got the chance to look closer at the applications presented at the conference.The demo session reminds me of the ACE conference, but here at FDG it was more weaved into the program: It was put late, so that one could go and look closer at those applications that had sparkled an interest during the paper presentations. All conferences in this field should do it like this! As

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-54529039973715364552009-05-10T16:09:00.003+02:002009-05-10T16:41:58.110+02:00

Damian Isla, Founder, Naimad Games, Next-Gen Content Creation for Next-Gen AIDamian Isla approached the area of content creation aided by AI for games by looking at two possible solutions: (1) Michael Mateas’ standpoint of the need for a new breed of engineering competent designers, and (2) Chris Hecker’s standpoint of the need for better authoring paradigms (“The Photoshop of AI”). Damian

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-56582845088055949462009-05-10T16:06:00.001+02:002009-05-10T16:09:02.938+02:00

We spent the afternoon ashore, and after returning to the ship it was time for the poster session and a panel about Academic/Industry Collaboration.Here are the posters that I found most interesting:Panel about Academic/Industry Collaboration.Steve Berman (Founder & CEO, Transformative Media Consortium and COO, IP Pacific/Canada), Mark Overmars (Utrecht University), Magy Seif El-Nasr (Simon

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-68693010647818608622009-05-10T15:45:00.002+02:002009-05-10T15:49:31.861+02:00

Paper Session #5: Game StudiesSession chair: TL TaylorHardcore casual: Game culture return(s) to Ravenhearst, Mia ConsalvoMia Consalvo has been studying the player base of the casual games produced by Big Fish Games in order to see if players of casual games differ from players of other types of games – but found lots of similarities between these players and players of more ‘hardcore’ games.I

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-88914817370424921852009-05-09T17:53:00.001+02:002009-05-09T17:56:17.231+02:00

Invited Talk: Yasmin Kafai, Ph.D., Professor of Learning Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School at EducationBeyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Girls and GamesYasmin Kafai gave an interesting speech on the history of designing games for girls, providing us with three named categories for these design endeavors:- Games for girls only- Games for social change- Games

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-58805058024050827682009-05-09T17:33:00.000+02:002009-05-09T17:34:58.951+02:00

During this session I was distracted: I thought I had lost my camera, so I was running around searching for it, and filled in a form at the guest services in case someone had found it. Once I gave up I had missed Ken’s speech (Scenario generation for emergency rescue training games, Kenneth Hullett and Michael Mateas).The room was full, so I settled down on the floor listening to Gillian

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-77066433452276775212009-05-09T16:48:00.004+02:002009-05-10T14:25:42.955+02:00

Before lunch the second day of FDG Magy Seif El-Nasr held the Working Group Meeting: Towards Acknowledging the Diversity of Game Research Methodologies. These were our starting points:We gathered in groups and presented what research we were doing, and what methods we were using. In our group this took 20 minutes of the 30 we had. It was diverse of course, our methods. The discussion concluded in

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-63561594900552737182009-05-09T16:16:00.002+02:002009-05-09T16:19:35.529+02:00

In the morning of the 2nd day of FDG I listened to the AI session, were David Olsen presented his take on computational humor in games. (Beep! Beep! Boom!: Towards a Planning Model of Coyote and Road Runner Cartoons) He recognizes the following problems:David is specifically looking at physical humor, and is studying Coyote and Road Runner Cartoons. Here, there is a set of rules to lean on:David

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-20493408597738292462009-05-09T15:37:00.002+02:002009-05-09T15:41:05.721+02:00

In the afternoon, when we were all safely aboard, Chris Satchell (Chief Technology Officer for the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), Microsoft) gave the opening key note: Evolution of the medium: Positioning for the future of gamingNext on the schedule was a panel about “Creating and Managing an Academic Games Program” with Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech), Gary Brubaker (The Guildhall at SMU),

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-14592691205416665802009-05-08T18:14:00.003+02:002009-05-11T22:12:03.741+02:00

I just got home from the conference Foundations of Digital Games (FDG). FDG has been running for a few years now, hosted by Microsoft, and was this year made larger than previous year, with 220 attendees.FDG is special in a number of ways. First, it is an academic game conference that explicitly focuses on the educational aspect of games, on how we teach them, and providing a forum for talking

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-55895009166995027242008-12-14T15:28:00.002+01:002008-12-14T15:37:26.467+01:00

The highlights for me on the second day of ACE were in the technology track in the afternoon:Aaron Lewisohn presented his system BeatBender and showed how it could generate rhythms. The application for trying out different rule sets for the rhythm generation seemed very tempting to play with. In the QA I asked whether he thought it would be feasible to use it in another system. It would be

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-36340959472828116532008-12-10T10:43:00.001+01:002008-12-10T10:47:02.484+01:00

Chief manager Shuntaro Yamazaki (NEC Central Research Laboratory) showed in his keynote “Information and Communication Technologies for Food and Entertainment “an application that can be used as a social icebreaker at large social gatherings, “Active Avatar”. People can, instead of shyly shuffling around in corners, get an idea of another person’s hobbies and other data, which will make it easier

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-5005228363556542752008-12-10T10:20:00.003+01:002008-12-10T10:23:55.578+01:00

The first day of the Advances of Computer Entertainment 2008 Conference in Yokohama was dedicated to keynotes and to a dinner so we attendees got a chance to socialize a little. Professor Tomio Watanabe (Okayama Prefectural University) gave in his keynote Human-Entrained Embodied Interaction and Communication Technology an exposé of a number of interesting projects. Several of them took a stance

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-85181418319472916482008-11-12T16:35:00.002+01:002008-11-12T16:38:57.058+01:00

I have been thinking. During trans Atlantic flights there is time for that. I just came home from Project Horseshoe in Texas, and being there led me to emphasize some thoughts to the point of this text being written, right now. I remember when I was sitting by the harbor in Savannah in the autumn of 2005 and a big ship passed by. I felt an instant identification. That is me. I have done like that

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-89022882930697963842008-11-12T13:03:00.004+01:002008-11-14T13:20:08.739+01:00

November 3 – 5, Toronto, Canada. FuturePlay is a yearly conference focusing on game design and technology, held in Canada. I had the chance to go this year to present work I have done with Mike Sellers: we have both worked on agent based architectures for characters in multiplayer games. Doing so we have looked at what we can learn about the human mind from the deconstruction of it done in

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-54272441265533097952008-09-15T16:57:00.001+02:002008-09-15T16:57:47.427+02:00

Books to keep closeOriginally uploaded by mimmiWhile packing up in Santa Cruz, before returning to Sweden, I had to decide which ones to ship and which ones I to take on the flight. These ones I decided i needed to keep close.

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-66338443300320840942008-08-06T06:10:00.004+02:002008-08-06T06:31:20.116+02:00

I have been looking at LaTeX packages for PhD theses, most closely at the Dalhousie package, the Stanford package, and the UCLA package.Dalhousie and Stanford uses the "plain" bibliography style, which means that references in text are as short as possible as[1]. For such a long text as a PhD thesis it would force the reader to have to continuously search the Bibliography in the end. The UCLA

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-91346726546327041032008-08-02T03:58:00.006+02:002008-08-02T09:03:17.558+02:00

Using OneNote for blogging is possible for those that have server space with WebDAV functionality... More... I use the software OneNote from Microsoft a lot when i work. It has features for documenting what one does in a really nice integrated way. It is useful to remember processes with many steps, where the first time one tries there are a lot of trial and error. Keeping track of the errors is.

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-79475459431849337242008-08-02T00:32:00.007+02:002008-08-02T09:05:16.641+02:00

After 30 - 40 hours of rolling out, rolling back, rolling out, rolling back (repeat) different versions of Torque MMOkit (version 0.0.3 SP, 1.3 SP, 1.5.2 SP) and searching the forums for undocumented todo's and trying them one by one.... and for each change, recompile world, update server database, build new client, restart servers, try client locally, try client remotely.... I finally got an

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-60177537132189601232008-08-02T00:15:00.003+02:002008-08-02T00:22:58.384+02:00

For the the guided paper prototype play i conducted some of the design for World of Minds, i used paintings by Bosch as inspiration when i made the single sentiment mobs. Here is an example:it was relaxing to draw these mobs, as a break from designing game mechanics and worrying about coding them.

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7156234.post-50738912037627284552008-06-17T21:03:00.005+02:002008-08-02T09:07:33.227+02:00

Gotland Game Awards is a yearly event where the game students at Gotland University present and exhibit the games they have produced during the year. The games are evaluated by an invited jury where the majority with members from various game production companies (this year from Starbreeze, Streamline, PixelTamer, Avalanche, Deadline Games, 3 Lives Left, JadeStone, Funcom, TripWire, Avaloop,

Mirjam Palosaari Eladharihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06305962737937579746noreply@blogger.com1