Game Design Commons^™

The Synchretic Network: Linking Music, Narrative, And Emotion In The Video Game Journey, Ivan Mouraviev

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

In the 2012 video game Journey, music is an important component of the playing experience. This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on narratology, semiology, and film-sound theory to examine the relationship between music, narrative, and emotion in Journey. After first discussing video games’ interactivity in general, philosopher Dominic Lopes’ theory of digital art is presented as a means of articulating the interactive aspects of Journey’s soundtrack. Theories set out by scholars Jochen Kleres and Michel Chion—which deal with the narrativity of emotions and audiovisual meaning, respectively—are then integrated to produce the “synchretic network”: a theoretical framework ...

Game Specific Approaches To Monte Carlo Tree Search For Dots And Boxes, Jared Prince

Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In this project, a Monte Carlo tree search player was designed and implemented for the child’s game dots and boxes, the computational burden of which has left traditional artificial intelligence approaches like minimax ineffective. Two potential improvements to this player were implemented using game-specific information about dots and boxes: the lack of information for decision-making provided by the net score and the inherent symmetry in many states. The results of these two approaches are presented, along with details about the design of the Monte Carlo tree search player. The first improvement, removing net score from the state information, was ...

Salvation: Into The Cosmos: Board Game Project Blending 4x And Eurogame Styles, Zachary Stewart Griffith

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project is an attempt at creating a shorter and simpler 4X strategy game. To do this, the author takes elements of the Eurogame genre and combines aspects of The Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber and Shattered Plans by Jagex while following the requirements of the German board game award, the Spiel de Jahres. After following the traditional game design process of conceptualization, prototyping, and repeated testing, analysis, and revision, the author succeeded in creating a core foundation for such a game that also had marketing potential on its own.

Dreamkeeper: 3d Game Using Unreal Engine 4, Marii Elizabeth Boyken, Martin Clayton Coleman, Casey Kendrick Albert-Hall

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

The goal of this senior project was to combine our diverse skills to make a 3D game. The plot involves a young girl who has been given the powers to enter dreams and defeat nightmares. The 3D assets that we built and animated were made in Autodesk Maya. We used Unreal Engine 4 to piece together our assets and create the logic for the game. This document explains the technologies that we used, design choices we made, feedback from our player-testing, and work that we want to complete for the project in the future. Our final game demo features two ...

Constructed Reality: A Study In Spatial Perception Through Virtual Reality, Jose P. Rodriguez

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture often begins explorations that lead into various modes of end products. These modes of production and representation could often embed traces that shape the outcome of the design. In his book, “Architectural Representation and The Perspective Hinge.”, Alberto Perez Gomez says that “Architects do not produce Buildings but instead produce images of buildings.” These representational images are an expression of an idea or design. Historically, representation began in static two-dimensions. By bridging into digital environments, these representations become more dynamic. As computing power increases and software broadens, the use of virtual reality environments and immersion simulations are becoming more ...

The Possibilities Of The Video Game Exhibition, Elizabeth Legere 2762328

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display ...

Inside The Mind Of Mcmillen, Tina Duong

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

The paper discusses how Edmund McMillen created “The Binding of Isaac”. It goes into his inspirations, influences, and his background leading up to the game. It then describes the game, going into its mechanics, design, art and story and how each of these elements were unique and risky to put into an Indie game. I discussed how “The Binding of Isaac” brought in fresh, new elements that most mainstream games wouldn’t dare touch, and despite that “Binding of Isaac” accomplished amazing success. Then, I talk about how the game was initially made by a group of two people, and ...

Mmorpgs And Their Effect On Players, Udit Manocha

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

The purpose of this essay is to explore the popularity and effects of video games in the MMORPG genre. Games and play have been a part of human culture for an exceptionally long time, and in the recent decades video games have a become a large medium to continue this. Studying how video games, such as MMORPGs, can be used in order to advance life skills is important to understand the future of human development. By researching other studies done on various topics of related to MMORPG, I developed the idea that this genre of video games could be very ...

Glhf: A Brief Overview Of Gaming Cafes, John Sun

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

My paper is on the history of internet and gaming cafes, focusing on how they are seen today, the problems they face and some potential solutions. Although my focus is on gaming cafes in America, because they are so popular overseas in Asian countries (such as South Korea, China, and Japan), they inevitably come up more often in my paper and presentation.

Art/Cs 108, Introduction To Game Studies, Section 2, Spring 2017, James Morgan

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Course syllabus.

Art/Cs 108, Introduction To Game Studies, Section 1, Spring 2017, James Morgan

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Course syllabus.

Promoting Your Department To High School Seniors, Jeremy H. Sarachan

Academic Chairpersons Conference Proceedings

Increasingly departments must take charge of their recruitment, but most academics are new to public relations and marketing. What are the best methods to reach high school students? Led by a media and communication chair, this discussion will revolve around best practices that are both affordable and easy to manage.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities ...

Women Self Actualization: A Narrative Of A Performative Gender Constitution, Hala A. Gabr

Theses and Dissertations

In a traditional Middle Eastern society, men and women have been confined within society’s gender definitions. Those imposed social constructs condition men differently from women by dictating expected behaviors, establishing a hierarchy of gender positioning and enforcing definitions that limit abilities and potential.

Based on postmodernist philosopher, feminist and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir and postmodernist American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, gender is not an inborn role, but rather created through stylized repetition of acts informed by society, named performative acts. For de Beauvoir and Butler, gender can never be a stable identity (Butler 1988).

Informed by ...

A Sound Idea: An Investigation Into Accessible Video Game Design For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Luke James Brook

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

A widely accepted, and incorrect, assumption towards hearing accessibility in video games is that deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users are those who encounter the least barriers and are generally well catered for. Rapid advancement in video game technology has seen video game sound evolve from simple blips generated by internal circuitry to fully realised digital audio used to convey critical information. To accommodate the DHH, this information needs to be conveyed in an alternative manner. However, evidence suggests existing accessible design solutions for the DHH lack specificity and are insufficient. Thus, the inability to hear, or hear well ...

Art Beyond The Object? Art Beyond Grad School? (A Kickstarter Fundraiser): Help Me Complete My Mfa And Kickstart My Life As An Artist., Hsini D. Leary

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The goal of this paper and Kickstarter project is to enable the production of my last semester’s work and thesis exhibition, and also to aid in the post-graduation transition to a sustainable art practice that does not rely on the current gallery structure.

Gecka3d: A 3d Game Engine For Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition, Erik Cambria, Tam Nguyen, Brian Cheng, Kenneth Kwok, Jose Sepulveda

Tam Nguyen

Commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning is key for tasks such as artificial intelligence and natural language understanding. Since commonsense consists of information that humans take for granted, gathering it is an extremely difficult task. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D game engine for commonsense knowledge acquisition (GECKA3D) which aims to collect commonsense from game designers through the development of serious games. GECKA3D integrates the potential of serious games and games with a purpose. This provides a platform for the acquisition of reusable and multi-purpose knowledge and also enables the development of games that can provide entertainment value and ...

Play Time

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

In October IVE (Lee Wai Lee)'s Department of Multimedia and Internet Technology played host to more than one hundred computer enthusiasts who came together with the sole aim of creating dozens of new games in just 48 hours. As Summer Cao reports, Hong Kong's inaugural Game Jam was a thumping success.

Technology Matters: The Courts, Media Neutrality, And New Technologies, Deborah Tussey

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

This article explores the copyright principle of media neutrality in the context of three sets of cases dealing with videogame enhancements, database compilations, and peer-to-peer file sharing. In each set of cases, at least one court produces a judgment which relies heavily on technological distinctions among electronic storage and retrieval systems, in apparent contravention of the media neutrality principle. Media neutrality confers fairly broad authority on courts to extend protection to copyrighted content distributed through new technologies. However, judicial concerns about the relative institutional competencies of Congress and the courts, most clearly expressed in the Sony decision, rightly impose limitations ...

Machinima And Copyright Law, Matthew Brett Freedman

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.