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Keynote Speakers:

Invited Talks:

Expert Panel:

Title "What has the entertainment computing research forgotten?"

Experts:

 

Bios and Abstracts:

 

 

 

Nicole Lazzaro - President, XEODesign, Inc.

Title: "The Four Most Important Emotions of Game Design"

Abstract:

Without emotion there is no game. Emotions play a vital role in decision making, attention, performance, learning and enjoyment. Cross gender, genre, platform, age range and game; four emotions create the captivating nature of play experiences. These same four emotions separate successful games from their less successful imitators.

Based on XEODesign's research best selling games make four promises to the player: the opportunity for challenge and mastery, inspiration and rewards for experimentation, a ticket to relaxation and an excuse to hang out with friends. Called the 4 Fun Keys these types of gameplay produce compelling emotions such as Fiero, the in the moment personal triumph over adversity. These emotions increase engagement and come from player choices rather than story. Success at creating these emotions requires the use of the 4 Fun Keys and separates captivating play experiences from boring time wasters.

Bio:

Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President of XEODesign, Inc., is the leading expert on emotion and the fun of games. XEODesign's 14 years of interactive research has defined the 4 Fun Keys, the four mechanisms of emotion that drive compelling play. Her work on emotions and usability has improved the experiences for more than 40 million customers and helped expand the game industry's emotional palette beyond the stereotypical range of anger, frustration, and fear. XEODesign's proven techniques remove guess work from making better games by heightening emotions to create more captivating play. More and more XEODesign explores new game mechanics to create new genres that reach new audiences.

A frequent speaker at industry events Nicole writes extensively on emotion in games and why people play them. She has spent more than 16 years designing successful experiences for all levels of players and users, from novice to expert, in many game genres. Nicole founded XEODesign in 1992 to bring her expertise in player-experience research and design to the mass-market entertainment. Her clients have included Sony, EA, LeapFrog, Mattel, Sega, PlayFirst, Monolith, The Learning Company, XFire, Broderbund, Roxio, Ubisoft, and Maxis.

Her ground breaking research on "Why People Play Games: 4 Keys to More Emotion Without Story" has generated phenomenal interest in emotions and games. She has presented on Hard Fun, Easy Fun, Serious Fun, and People Fun at leading game and HCI conferences around the world. She is also the co-founder of San Francisco State's Multimedia Studies Program, where she taught Interface Design, Rapid Prototyping, and Scripting Languages for several years. Prior to her fascination with player experiences and games she worked in film and earned a degree in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University.
Free white papers on emotion and games: www.xeodesign.com.

 

 

 

Margaret Wallace -  CEO & Co-Founder, Skunk Studios

Title: Grandma’s Got a Secret: The Hidden World of Casual Games

Abstract:

There’s no question about it: casual games are hot. Once a cottage industry, casual games have become the fastest growing segment of the video game sector. The primary audience for casual games is typically comprised of mothers and grandmothers – and yet these people would hardly ever refer to themselves as gamers, despite untold hours spent playing. For many, casual games have become the primary way to relax and unwind – even taking the place of television. Using recent data from multiple surveys, we’ll explore the world of casual game players by asking the following questions: Why don’t they think of themselves as gamers? What sets these players apart from more “traditional” gamers? How do they participate in game culture? What social relations are reinforced or weakened as a result of playing casual games? Finally, how do these play patterns and perceptions influence our work as content producers?

Bio:

Margaret Wallace is the Co-Founder and CEO of Skunk Studios, a leading developer of award-winning casual games. Skunk Studios brands include QBeez, Mah Jong Adventures, Gutterball, Varmintz & Tennis Titans. Before Skunk Studios, Ms. Wallace developed games at Shockwave.com and worked on Mattel's Planet Hot Wheels. She created CDROM & online content for Mindscape Entertainment and at PF.Magic, makers of "virtual pets" brands, Dogz & Catz. Ms. Wallace was recently named in Next Generation as one of the Game Industry’s 100 Most Influential Women. She serves on the Steering Committee for the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Casual Games Special Interest Group. Ms. Wallace is a Co-Editor of the 2006 IGDA Casual Games White Paper and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS). She earned a B.S. and an M.A. in Communication from Boston University and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, respectively, and studied the intersection of popular culture and emerging technologies. A recipient of the Congress-Bundestag Scholarship, Ms. Wallace also attended World Learning in Brattleboro, VT and spent a year in Germany, studying its language & culture

 

Prof. Robert J. Stone

Chair in Interactive Multimedia Systems

Director Human Interface Technologies Team

University of Birmingham

Title: Serious Gaming

Abstract:

The serious gaming community is a rapidly growing international body of researchers and developers, many of whom are claiming that we are entering a new era exploiting powerful interactive content generation tools and run-time “engines” associated with off-the-shelf games products for the benefit of “serious” applications in defence, medicine, education, cultural heritage and many other sectors. But haven't we been here before? Didn't we witness almost identical claims in the 1990s? Then the technology was called Virtual Reality, or VR – once described as “the most significant technological breakthrough since the invention of television”. VR was popularised by a myriad of technologies – head-mounted displays, instrumented gloves and motion capture suits, multi-screen rooms or “CAVEs”. By the end of the 20th Century, VR would help us to abandon the keyboard, mouse, joystick and computer monitor in favour of interfaces exploiting the skills we were born with. We would all interact naturally with virtual objects and people whilst “immersed” within a multi-sensory, 3D computer-generated world. As we now know, this brave new world simply did not happen. Despite sizeable early investment, national initiatives, expensive (and unexploited) international collaborative projects and the widespread launch of so-called centres of academic excellence, VR delivered very little of use to the global IT community. A handful of organisations actually adopted VR, but most were simply scared off by its complexity and cost. The VR supply companies have either passed away or are hanging on by a thread and academic centres have closed or are fast becoming expensive technology museums. And the biggest mistake made by the VR community was that it completely forgot the human factor - the needs, capabilities and limitations of its end users. We are, today, still using keyboards, mice and conventional computer displays. Serious gaming has the potential to revolutionise the use of interactive 3D, or i3D, technology for part-task training of individuals and teams, to mention but one application. However, unlike Virtual Reality, the serious gaming arena has already produced a suite of affordable, accessible and highly usable tools. These tools are capable of delivering synthetic environments of extremely high quality – in many cases outclassing simulation products more familiar to the defence arena – with underlying physics and artificial intelligence databases capable of producing highly convincing dynamic internal and external environments. However, technology of this nature has to be designed in conjunction with the end user, identifying how best to exploit gaming technologies to deliver appropriate content, fidelity and interactive technologies, as opposed to impressive special effects that may look impressive to avid gamers, but may well distract the serious application user from the task at hand. Don’t deliver it because you can – deliver it because it’s needed; this is where yesterday’s VR failed; this is where the serious gaming community has a second chance.

Bio:

Bob Stone holds a Chair in Interactive Multimedia Systems at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he is the Director of the Human Interface Technologies Team within the Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering. He graduated from University College London in 1979 with a BSc in Psychology, and in 1981 with an MSc in Ergonomics, and currently holds the position of Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Integrated Systems Design at the University of Plymouth. In 1996, he became an Academician of the Russian International Higher Education Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and an Honorary Cossack in 2003. Bob’s ergonomics career has taken him from human factors research in defence and offshore applications (during his time at the British Aerospace Sowerby Research Centre), through a period of developing telepresence interfaces as part of the UK’s National Advanced Robotics Research Initiative in the 1980s, to the world’s first industrial VR development programme in the 1990s. He is currently involved in researching the human factors aspects of interactive 3D and serious gaming, with regular contributions to projects in the fields of defence, surgery/healthcare and cultural heritage and in the development of methodologies for rapid context and task assessments, especially in the field of technology-based training. His applied R&D efforts since 1998 (commercial and academic settings) have concentrated on training analyses and training simulator content definition – including serious games implementations – for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (close-range naval weapons, submarine training, the NATO Submarine Rescue System, bridge navigation trainers and helicopter voice marshalling) and on ergonomic/task analyses for the automotive industry, ENT surgery, endoscopic robots and (from 1980 to the present day) unmanned/semi-autonomous vehicles. Bob is also the Research Director of the UK’s Defence Technology Centre for Human Factors Integration. He is one of world’s longest-standing pioneers in the field of VR, having in 1987 become one of the first Europeans to experience the NASA Ames VIEW VR System. His work in telerobotics, VR and human factors has received a variety of awards and he is regularly invited to keynote at major national and international events. Bob is Vice President of the VSMM Organisation and a co-founder of the UK’s Serious Games Alliance, launched in August 2005.  

 

 

 

Prof. Steve Benford

Mixed Reality Lab - University of Nottingham

Title: Design Challenges for Pervasive Games

Abstract:

Pervasive games extend the gaming experience out into the real world. From the city streets to the remote wilderness, players with mobile computing devices move through the world, sensors capture information about their current context, including their location, and this is used to deliver a gaming experience that adapts to where they are, what they are doing, and even how they are feeling. Players becomes unchained from their consoles and experience a game that is interwoven with the real world and that is potentially available at any place and any time. Drawing on recent collaborations with artists to create, tour and study a series of pervasive games, I will articulate distinctive design challenges for this new entertainment medium, including supporting location-based play, situating fictional games within public settings, and interweaving long-term persistent games with patterns of daily life.

Bio:

Steve Benford is the Professor of Collaborative Computing at the University of Nottingham where he founded the Mixed Reality Laboratory, a dedicated studio facility where computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, engineers, architects and artists collaborate to explore the potential of ubiquitous, mobile and mixed reality technologies to shape everyday life. He has also been a member of the EPSRC-funded Equator project (www.equator.ac.uk) and is currently the Scientific Manager of the European Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming (www.pervasive-gaming.org). In its broadest terms, his research addresses the design of new technologies to support rich social interaction. In the late eighties, he was mainly focused on distributed systems support for group communications. The nineties saw him working on collaborative virtual environments, with a growing interest in entertainment applications, including collaborating with artists groups to create live performance works such as the NOW’96 Poetry Slam (1996), the Out of This World inhabited television show (1998) and the touring performance Desert Rain (1998). More recently, he has worked with mobile technologies, continuing his collaborations with artists such as Blast Theory to create a series of performances and games including Can You See Me Now? (2000), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), Savannah (2004) and Day of the Figurines (2005). Ethnographic studies of these experiences have yielded new insights in interaction design and supporting toolkits and frameworks, contributing to over 250 published works at venues such as CHI, Multimedia, Ubicomp and SIGGRAPH. He was a recipient of the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art as was BAFTA nominated in 2000, 2002 and 2005. 

 

 

 

Thore Graepel

Applied Games Group - Microsoft Research Ltd

Title: TrueSkill™: Player Rating and Matchmaking in Xbox Live

Abstract:

Xbox Live is Microsoft’s online gaming service for the game consoles Xbox and Xbox 360. One of the key challenges for an online gaming service is to bring together the right people in the online world. Both social aspects as well as competitive aspects need to be taken into account to create an exciting and enjoyable online experience for everyone involved. In this talk, I will focus on the TrueSkill rating system which is in operation in Xbox Live to ensure that players enjoy balanced and fair matches, and to give them an incentive to play, practice, and improve. TrueSkill is a Bayesian generalization of the well-known Elo rating system used in Chess. It estimates players’ skills based on game outcomes and is specifically designed to address the challenges of online gaming, in particular matches with more than two players or teams. In addition, TrueSkill maintains the degree of uncertainty about a player’s skill to enable fast and accurate skill estimation. Competitive matchmaking can be carried out such that every team has on average the same chances of winning. The talk will cover mathematical aspects of TrueSkill, its integration into the Xbox Live service, and some conclusions from offline experiments and from observing the running system. This is joint work with Ralf Herbrich.

Bio:

Thore Graepel is a researcher in the Machine Learning and Perception Group at Mi-crosoft Research Cambridge. His current work is focused on the application of ma-chine learning techniques to games. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London working on learning theory and machine learning algorithms with Prof. John Shawe-Taylor. Before that, He worked with Nici Schraudolph and Prof. Petros Koumoutsakos as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Computational Science (ICOS) which is part of the Department of Computer Science of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETH). Topics of research were machine learning and large-scale nonlinear optimisation. He received my doctorate (Dr. rer. nat) from the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Berlin, where he was first a member of the Neural Information Processing group of Prof. Klaus Obermayer and later joined the Statistics group of Prof. Ulrich Kockelkorn

 

last updated 14 July 2006