Emma Westecott.

1

• Emma Westecott.
• Game Forms for New Outcomes

2

• Interactive media
• First what people think of games
• Game
• lens to look afresh to the world
• Research tool to better understand transition
  from analysis to praxis
• Method to unify experience within context
• Fulcrum from which to express practicioner's
  philosophy

3

• The Interactive Institute's applied research
  studios in Sweden Zero-Game
• Work focussed on game form
• Digital games are powerful as research tools
• As a medium made for modeling
• As a framework for focus

4

• Method
• Iterative software development process
• Game a set of rules played over time to be won
  or lost
• Process of designing a game is itself a research
  tool available to designers to more closely
  understand their own design process and potential
  outcomes as well as the audiences of their work

5

• Jumping-off place for designer when it comes to
  exploring specific themes and motivations for
  game development
• Action
• Framing for experience
• Consequence
• Player as performer
• Social construction
• Cultural healing
• New business

6

• Action
• Game natural candidate for guiding research for
  its active character
• Framing for experience
• Each gaming experience has its own narrative
  style
• exampleintimate physical nature of using a
  mobile device calls for more personally directed
  style of narrative
• Each game can be mapped against particular type
  of narrative experience intimate, public,
  social, spectacular
• Point of view and situated background that the
  player brings into the interaction (where and how
  they are playing) and type of player (why they
  are playing) determines relevant mapping

7

• Consequence
• Active nature of games potentially changes the
  dynamic embodied in existing cultural media
  that media supports distance from culpability
• Games positively affect our culture of remoteness
  by involving players in the interplay between
  action and consequence
• Designer should not make moral decisions for
  player!
• Designers provides a tool set for decision-making
  and feedback regarding the associated outcome

8

• Player as performer
• Game pattern analysis looks at the bottom level
  of game activity necessary to build a pattern of
  behavior to progress the game
• Carrying out this pattern of activity
  performance on the behalf of the player
• Practical design work looks to support different
  acting styles and modes of characterization
  within a game context

9

• Social construction
• Transpose social structures into simulated game
  space
• Explore different forms of social structure and
  community construction
• Relevant to understanding audience

10

• Cultural healing
• Games are used to heal communities in crisis
• e.g. Aboriginals. By talking about in-game
  behavior it has proved possible to provide enough
  emotive distance form real-life situation to
  enable productive discussion of issues at hand

11

• New business
• Games are drivers for new business opportunities
• e.g. Location-based gaming for tourism
• Explorations of game form lead to new outcomes,
  the market for games will grow from entertainment
  to other domains like education, health,
  citizenship, ethics and policy

12

• Conclusion
• Game form is exceptionally generative framework
  for research explorations

13

• The core values of the Manifesto (the full
  Manifesto can be read in document
  020225-GameStudio-Manifesto.doc) can be
  summarised as

14

• Part I Critique
• Games are too powerful to be regarded as merely
  entertainment.
• Games have the potential to change society.
• Current games obsessed with supremacy are only
  one amongst many possible forms of game
  experience.

15

• Part II The Nature of The Game
• Games should be regarded as an opportunity to
  inspire our realities.
• Games represent a form of reality.
• Playing games is a creative activity.
• Playing games frees humanawareness from the every
  day.
• Games are a form of ritual.
• Games are art.
• The game player, by playing, completes the piece.
• Games are a form of magic.
• The Game is the Great Work.

16

• Part III/Praxis
• Our games will not be dictated by the market
• Our games will be art
• Our games will break bounderies
• We will introduce gameplay as a virus into the
  concept of story
• We will use and reuse the shadow ideologies of
  history as catalyst for new visions
• We will not be limited to articulations within a
  dogmatic language
• We are architects of the third place
• We will celebrate the universal dialectic of the
  binary code
• We will be shamans of the post-human age
• We will walk the path of the trickster

17

• Game startship Titanic
• Doorbot