Professor Bruce Hood to open the 2012 Games Jam

/

The Game Jam is now sold out, which is great news, but even better is that we've got Professor Bruce Hood to open the 2012 Games Jam and announce the theme!

We are extremely pleased to announce that Professor Bruce Hood, who holds the chair of Developmental Psychology in Society in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol, will be opening the game jam and revealing the theme for the following 24 hours of frenetic game development.

Professor Hood is known to millions of people from his numerous books, articles and TV appearances including the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures broadcast on the BBC, continuing the venerable tradition started by Michael Faraday in 1825. His written works include two popular science books “SuperSense” (HarperOne, 2009) about the natural origins of supernatural beliefs and “The Self Illusion” (Constable & Robinson 2012) about the fallacy that we are coherent, integrated individuals but rather a constructed narrative largely influenced by those around us.

Professor Hood said, "I'm really excited to be unveiling the theme for the 2012 Welcome Trust Game Jam - science opens so many potential doors of inspiration for developers, I will be fascinated to see how it inspires new games from this event."

You can find out much more at Bruce's blog.

Science Game Jam Starts Soon

/

The joint ExPlay, Wellcome Trust, Science Museum, PM Studio games jam is due to start in few days, as the Huffington Post reports:

Not everyone can make a great video game - and even fewer can make one in less than 24 hours.

But that's just what 120 games makers are going to try and do in a few weeks, at the 2012 ExPlay Games Jam, hosted by the Wellcome Trust, Science Museum and Pervasive Media Studios.

The Games Jam - held simultaneously in Bristol and London - will give participants 24 hours to make a brand new game on a specified theme.

And yes - it has to be playable.

Puns and prototypes: behind-the-scenes at 'Gamify your PhD'

/

There is a post on the Wellcome Trust blog that has some thoughts on the Gamify Your PhD session, images and also - most importantly - links to all of the games!

“Addictive, challenging and educational,” that was the remit for the 6 teams taking part in this week’s‘Gamify you PhD’ event at the Wellcome Trust. The two-day hack event brought together PhD researchers and games developers from across the UK for what Wellcome Trust’s Daniel Glaser called an “innovative interaction”. The aim? To create new games that could explore and explain the latest developments in biomedicine, and more specifically the PhD research of the scientists taking part.

Tomas Rawlings, gaming consultant for the Wellcome Trust, explained the rationale behind the initiative, saying, “Science and games are a natural fit: both are about the participant seeking to understand the rules that govern the world they find themselves in and achieving this by experiments such as trial and error.”

Tomas Talks Strategy to PCgamesN

/

Auroch Digital's Tomas Rawlings talks about the strategy of how games are being put to good use helping science and knowledge:

PCGN: Why has the Wellcome Trust taken an interest in games?

Tom: The guy who founded Wellcome, Henry Wellcome, was passionate that science was a part of human culture and that you didn't see a separation between the two. So part of Wellcome's mission, in addition to these big major challenges, is to engage with people so that they see science and culture together.

Games are a great method to talk about science because games by their nature are dynamic, they're interactive, and science is very hands on. So if you want to explain to somebody a complex system whereby as you change what's in the system the system changes as a result, games are a great way to do that because rather than just talking about it you can let the person experience it themselves.

I mean, ultimately, if you think about what a player does when they play a game they are using the scientific method, I mean they get dropped into a game on the first level, you don't know the rules of this new world, so what you have to do is trial and error to figure it out, and by trial and error you construct a set of rules in your head “If I touch this object I die, whereas if I jump over it I'm OK” and ultimately they are constructing a series of rules to help them navigate that world. And really, that's what science does. It's by trial and error, by experimentation we construct a series of rules that allow us to understand and engage with the natural world.

Biology, Authenticity and Fiction

/

Over on the Wellcome Trust blog, Auroch Digital's Tomas wrote a guest post about how they had worked with medical history experts to upgrade the authenticity of a game:

Authenticity matters in media, and it matters in games too. Titles like Call of Duty, Medal of Honorand many others employ military advisors to improve the authenticity, and hence the sense of realism, for the player. Any game, even one set within a fantasy world, can benefit from this, which is why it was key to us in the making of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. Although the game is partly based on works of horror and science fiction we wanted to make the World War I setting as authentic as possible.

The Wasted Land is a strategy RPG. You command a team of investigators to uncover a deadly inhuman conspiracy underlying the Great War, during which your units can and do get wounded. Of course, your team recovers from wounds faster than in reality, but we took pains to make the nature of the equipment and process used as authentic as possible. And because there was little out there to inform us, we’re grateful to a small grant from the Wellcome Trust, which allowed us to research thehistorical medical information we would use in the game.

This post was picked up by the front page of Wordpress.com and has become of the the Wellcome Trust's most popular posts as a result. There is a longer version of this article over at PocketTactics.

While on the subject of Call of Cthulhu and biology, Tomas didn't just stop there:

What Darwin did was to point out that death, both of the individual and the species was the normal part of nature. This was and still is a major change to how we see ourselves and the world around us. Because for our very brief life-spans things don’t seem to change that much, it can be hard to appreciate just how much change does occur on a wider time-scale. We still sort of don’t fully get it. We talk of environmental protection to ‘save the planet’ when the planet will be fine either way. It’s our (and other living species’) ability to live on the planet that is under threat from our polluting ways. Hence political philosophers like John Gray argue that we’ve not yet full grasped the meaning of Darwin’s work; that humans too will one day die out. Cthulhu gets it too, as he lies there dreaming of the end of the age of mankind and his return to the surface; “Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer.”

Sweet dreams, all!

The Profile of a Gamer

/

So what is a gamer? In some respects it is a little unfair to group a diversegroup of people into a single title when the only unifying thing about them is just that they play games. However for various reasons, it does help to understand who plays games. Originally ‘gamer’ was used to describe people who played paper role-playing games but the term has broadened as the video games has grown, into a term to identify people who are fans of playing computer games. As a categorisation this is a new phenomena and so understanding its boundaries is an uncertain subject yet there clearly exists a group within society who identify with this tag. While there is still debate over what gamers are (and are not) but emerging findings suggest that they are not the lonely figure as stereotyped in other media forms but are very social, often helping others within their arena and also influencing the media consumption of others around them.

- A gamer can be further sub-categorised into forms such as ‘Casual’ or ‘Hardcore’. - Gamers tend to be younger (the younger the age group, the more of them play games) - About 25% of UK adults can be considered ‘gamers’. - The vast majority use Facebook to both communicate and play games (86% of US gamersaccording to one survey, I expect this to be the same here too, especially as the age group gets younger, the number using Facebook grows again.

There are lots more facts and figures about gaming and gamers on Tomas' blog.

/ /
,
, , ,

Codey Dyer

Game Accessibility: Gaming For Everyone

/

There is a growing awareness that we need to make the games we create more accessible   As such a number of people have been pushing the issue:

With gaming becoming a more popular and pervasive form of entertainment, accessibility issues are starting to be recognised and tackled by the professional game development community. "There are four types of disability – visual, hearing, cognitive and motor," says Hamilton. "By knowing and thinking about these groups upfront, game designers can easily avoid the barriers that may have prevented gamers with disabilities being able to enjoy playing.

"Even a simple thing, like choosing blue instead of green for a team colour, as Treyarch recently did with their colour-blind friendly mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops, can make your game playable by significant swathes of the population that would otherwise have had great difficulty. The red/green colourblindness that Treyarch addressed affects 8% of males, meaning they were finally able to tell their team-mates from their enemies."

Hamilton reckons a big part of the challenge is helping developers to recognise that greater accessibility doesn't necessarily mean masses of extra development time or resources. "Fully functioning and accessible games being produced in the space of 48 hours is a really powerful demonstration that accessibility doesn't have to be expensive or difficult," he says. "Also, the results are often great examples of nice simple design principles that can be applied across the industry."

So at the Bristol event we were organising, we added a special prize for acessibility to spur the developers on; and there is more on the winner here.

There is now an online resource about this issue for developers to help them understand accessibility:

15-20% of gamers are disabled (PopCap). Other conditions that aren’t registered disabilities can also hit barriers. 15% of the adult population have a reading age of below 11 years old (NCES / BIS), 8% of males have red-green colour deficiency (AAO), and many people have temporary impairments such as a broken arm. Many more have situational impairments such as playing in a noisy room or in bright sunlight, and all players have different levels of ability – there’s no ‘typical gamer’.

This information is now collected at the resource: gameaccessibilityguidelines.com - we have used these documents for Gamify Your PhD and will be including the information therein for all the game jams we run from now on.

/ /
, ,
,

Codey Dyer

Store Wars: The Strategy of Digital Game Distribution

/

Tomas has written an article for GamesIndustry.biz on the strategy of the current crop of digital distribution stores:

The money is only part of the power of such stores. A strong store also gives its owner lots of options for wider strategic distribution - when your platform has lots of great stuff that people want, it makes it attractive so users will install your client and/or buy your devices. A powerful store also gives you control of a space from where you can lever its audience to do other profitable things. For example, a store owner can choose to (or be paid to) promote certain apps, services or products that suit it. Go to Amazon's webpage and you'll see the Kindle promoted, the retailer using its store front to heavily promote its own hardware. From a biz-dev point of view this sort of horizontal integration makes total sense as once Amazon locks people in to the Kindle, the chances are they'll then use the Kindle's inbuilt store link to buy ebooks so cementing the relationship between the store and customer.

He's also written a couple of other articles recently on developing and promoting mobile games and the designer of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax.

The Culture of Games and Science

/

Tomas was interviewed by new PC games site PCgamesN recently about our work at the Wellcome Trust and how it fitted the organisations overall strategy:

What [The Wellcome Trust] want is, and it's back to that point about science and culture being together, they want to see content where the science sits naturally. Like, one example, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's not a Wellcome project but it's a great example of where cutting edge science has informed the content of a mainstream game, and I think it's a better game as a result or having that scientific credibility and yet at the same time the game play isn't compromised at all, it's a brilliant game.

It's not always about the money, although the funding is an important bit of what Wellcome does, it's also about the scientific expertise that are on offer, the ability of Wellcome to work with people to bring ways of operating that just wouldn't happen without their help.

They have this massive untapped resource of scientific minds to be used to inspire, if you're doing a game and it has some sort of DNA aspect and you though “Well I'd like to know a bit more about this”, we can put you in touch with a scientist. Wellcome also looks at games in regards to education, especially what they call 'Informal learning'. So Wellcome's interest in games is pretty wide reaching, which is why it's important to be strategic about it because there are lots of areas it can touch on.

All About the 'Gamify Your PhD' Project

/

Gamify Your PhD was a project conceived and produced by Auroch Digital for the Wellcome Trust.  In this project the scientists will became the game designers.  To show scientists how one might gamify science we assembled the team of MobilePie, Wired and the Wellcome Trust to create this guide to designing games (complete with mini-games):

Wired wrote a great article about the project:

The Wellcome Trust has launched an initiative -- called Gamify Your PhD -- to bring together researchers with developers in order to create games that explore the latest developments in biomedicine.

Researchers are invited to send their ideas about how their PhD research could be illustrated through a game. In order to inspire them, Mobile Pie (with the advice of Wired.co.uk editor Nate Lanxon) has created an interactive embeddable guide to basic gaming mechanics, featuring 16-bit minigames. These include a Darwin-inspired survival-of-the-fittest pigeon game, a Mendel genetics puzzle game, a game based on Asch's work on conformity and a Newton-targeting apple physics game.

Meanwhile, teams of three or four game developers are invited to apply to join a game-hack in London in September in order to bring the researchers' ideas to life. Each team must have all the necessary skills to create a prototype game in two days -- design, code, art and audio -- plus their own equipment. The best team will receive funding to develop their idea into a releasable game.

Where they quoted Auroch Digital's Tomas Rawlings:

The initiative is the brainchild of Wellcome Trust's gaming consultant Tomas Rawlings, who said: "Science and games are a natural fit, both are about the participant seeking to understand the rules that govern the world they find themselves within and achieving this by experiments such as trial-and-error. Gamify your PhD is an exciting twist and evolution of these areas."

Here is the official press release:

The Wellcome Trust invites researchers to gamify their PhDs
11 July 2012: An innovative new way of communicating science research launches today with Gamify your PhD, a project from the Wellcome Trust which brings together researchers and games developers to create new games exploring and explaining the latest developments in biomedicine.The Trust is inviting researchers to share ideas for games based on their PhD work in biomedical science or the medical humanities, and small teams of games developers to turn these ideas into addictive, challenging and educational games.  Those selected will partner at a two day hack in which the games will be created.

The best of these will receive funding to develop into a releasable game.To help inspire ideas and give researchers a flavour of what's possible a web-app http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/gamify, developed by Mobile Pie, has been commissioned, offering an interactive and fully embeddable guide to the nuts and bolts of mechanics and motivation that lie behind successful game design.  The web-app also features sample 16bit mini games to illustrate the different elements of gaming, including a Darwin inspired survival of the fittest pigeon game, a Mendel genetics puzzle game, a game based on Asch's work on conformity, and a Newton-targeting apple game.Gamify your PhD is part of a wider commitment by the Wellcome Trust to using games and gaming culture as a means of engaging people with science.  A range of awards schemes is open to developers interested in creating innovative, entertaining and accessible games based around biomedicine and medical history.Daniel Glaser, Head of Special Projects at the Wellcome Trust said: "The engaged researcher has lots to learn from gaming and game design can benefit hugely from the latest scientific advances. That's why the Wellcome Trust is throwing its weight behind this innovative interaction.

Today's brightest researchers understand that science does not take place in a vacuum and the best research can engage with the most popular culture. I'm very curious to find out what these teams will come up with."Tomas Rawlings, the Wellcome Trust's gaming consultant said: "Science and games are a natural fit, both are about the participant seeking to understand the rules that govern the world they find themselves within and achieving this by experiments such as trial-and-error. Gamify your PhD is an exciting twist and evolution of these areas."The deadline for applications from researchers and developers is 12 August, and the games hack will take place between the 3-4 September 2012. The resulting games will be made available online.  All details about the scheme and the web-app guide to gaming can be found at www.wellcome.ac.uk/gamify

The project's twitter hashtag is #gamifyyourphd

So the event got lots of interest via twitter (you can see a sample here). Plus we've been getting some great press coverage pre-the actual jam of it including: