We recently re-ignited our work with “casual” and Expanded Game Experience model (EGE). After presenting the article “Casual Games Discussion” at the Future Play 2007 in Toronto, I have been working tentatively with heuristics concerning the design of casual games. I set up an internal blog for our team and started writing down the thoughts about “casual in games” in the form of design heuristics. Since then we have had also two internal brainstorming sessions concerning the topic. We are now working towards a new comprehension of the Expanded Game Experience as well, since the understanding the wide spectrum of casual in games seems to require wide perspective and holistic view on the game experience design.

One of the comments at our internal brainstorming session was quite humorous: “It is far more complicated to design a casual game than a hardcore game”. That is propably true in the end. But that was a thought sprang from our first draft and we are working towards a modular and easy-to-use heuristic set. We also experienced that even though brainstorming problematic subject as “casual” can be very fruitful, it seems to be very energy-consuming. Hard work indeed.

Pictures of us working with the model and the heuristics:
 

Pelixi game concept and demo competition for youngsters in Finland have announced their winners. I provided some materials to the site last autumn on behalf of GameSpace, as also giving out our at-that-time-ready VNA. I have decided to publish the card-set also here at my blog, since Pelixi site is closing at the end of the May. If you use VNA, please provide feedback and experiences that you have had with the set by email to me (annakaisa.kultima[ a t ]uta.fi). At the moment I have no idea if any Pelixi-participants have used the card set or other methods, but hopefully I will hear about it later.

The VNA card set is provided as a printable pdf version. You can print all the pages with a colour printer, glue face and back sides together and cut in order to create your own VNA set. Then just gather friends or colleagues and do some rapid free association starting with a random verb.

Preview of the pdf:

Download: vna_casualgames_cardset_2007

Instructions (only in Finnish): vna_fin_1

I also included these links at my new static section of this blog “other materials“.

Today we finally organized a draw for all the respondents of our game idea generation study survey. Three fortunate participants were informed today of their happy news; our prizes included two free of choice book prizes and one surprise prize of Thinkpak cards. Hopefully soon we can reward also other participants with the results of the study. There is enough data for a while and we are still on the phase of making transcriptions of all the interviews and analysing other data. Look for future publications!

Here is the official draw committee (Hannamari took the pic):

One of the reasons I have been rather blog-quite after GDC is that our GameSpace team has been responsible for organising our Game Research Lab annual spring seminar. This year’s topic was “Breaking the Magic Circle”; we received large amount abstracts, welcomed over 50 participants and enjoyed loads of discussion in the actual event ending today.

Interesting palette of 17 working papers were presented during the two-day event including different theoretical approaches towards the very concept of ”magic circle” originated from Johan Huizingas Homo Ludens as well as more practical applications revolving around this notion. There was talk about fictionality, social play, evolution, serious games, apophenia, pervasive games, law, society, monkies, flickr games and even applying game design principles for designing organizational experiences just to name a few.  Even more interesting discussions were done during the breaks, lunch, yesterdays evening venue at our lab and hopefully tonight as well after the sauna.

Our own paper was discussing the design process of our idea generation games and the usefulness of magic circle that games can provide for fostering the idea generation. Hopefully we get this paper published as soon as possible. There is still some work to do.

Frans Mäyrä, as being the chair, already managed to start the picture stream at Flickr. The first picture of the stream, which is also presented at Frans’ blog entry includes me too in my blueness. I am not sleeping… I was chatting at #breakingmagiccircle with my phone since my mac refused to continue without power.

Here are the slides of our presentation:

I have been too busy after GDC (planning future project, preparing Breaking the Magic Circle Seminar, writing an article, finnishing my studies on philosophy etc.) to actually post on my blog, but I will in near future. In the meanwhile, check out the media coverage for my GDC presentation:

• Gamasutra
• Game Helper
• Games on Deck

As the Game Developers Conference is approaching I want to show you the slides that I uploaded last week for the conference site.

I only wish that my flu would now lost its hold on me so that I could continue with my tentative analysis of idea generation study data and make some final touches on the slide set.

But here is the current one:

As GameReactor, the biggest Nordic free game magazine came to Finland, I made the decision to work as a volunteer and trying to experience how it feels like to be “on the popularistic side” of game analysis.

So far, I have realized that it is a hard work to produce an opinion and also mediate it in Finnish. As we are used to play games in English, and I read and write about games at my work primarily in English, Finnish words feels awkward. Try for example translating “gameplay” into something else than “pelattavuus” (playability) with just one word…

So far I have made reviews of Endless Ocean, Bee Movie Game and The Sims 2 Castaway (as a review of High School Musical Making the Cut! for Nintendo DS is for a reason still under construction). I have to say that it is not always that pleasant to find out that the game is boring and yet you have to write a relatively interesting article about it. If only the game would be boring enough to make me feel worth expressing it…

I seem to have some kind of perversion to transfer my love for games into suffering and misery… Ok, fare enough: I enjoyed playing Castaway and to some extent that bee-thingy and ocean-thingy as they had their strengths despite their weird weaknesses. Certainly, I would not have played these games that much without the pressure of writing a review of them. However, only true mistake I made was with the Disney Channel licence game of High School Musical. As dedicated to my deeds, I actually even watched the movie thinking that my limit for tolerating teenager/children movies is much higher than for others. So wrong was I. But I made the commitment, so I suffered my time.

The game itself is nothing truely enjoyable and it is not really about being a DS game with low resolution. We all have seen really good DS games. Game just sucks. Sucking happens particular with some cognitive aspects (for example providing understandable feedback to the player about their actions: somebody needs those design heuristics big time) and as a fan product (heuristics of casual game experiences or instrumental value of play, here). Well, ok, you can remember the songs till the end of times after playing the game. Maybe you are then a happy happy fan with the best game ever. Hard to say - we come in so many shapes and colors. But more about it, hopefully soon, in a review at GameReactor…

John Kirriemuir gave us a visiting lecture at Tampere at the end of the last November. He had an interesting and, as always, entertaining talk, this time exploring connections between library and games. He made such points as “librarians are cool people too” (he noticed that game researchers are cool folk last spring here in Tampere while giving a speech about his studies at Outer Hebrides). I learned that in U.K. they have cool stuff at libraries such as game evenings for kids. (I also learned that my hometown library lists games as non-fiction and only such titles as Moomins are available.) Nice perspective to games again, John! Check the slides of the presentation from Johns own blog.

Sometimes it can be rather funny to be a (Finnish) researcher. I have used word “ideating” and “ideation” in my presentations about creativity techniques in game design referring to the idea generation processes in general. This makes pretty funny faces in the audience from time to time and it is not rare to hear question: “Is it a real word?”. Even though we as researchers do have the priviledge to come up new and even awkward words suited to our purposes, it is not my invention or not even an adaptation from the Finnish word “ideointi”. This word DO exist outside my head as well.

Serious references could be found in the creativity literature, for example in the article of Maria M. Clapham “The Development of Innovative Ideas Through Creativity Training” from the International Handbook on Innovation (2003, Elsevier), which is actually nice overview of the effects of different creativity training approaches. Clapham says: “A critical component of innovation is idea generation, or ideation“.

More entertaining reference we found at the Future Play 2007 conference. One of the presentations was about prototyping and the presentators made some points on idea phase of game design on the way. There were three of us, Finnish researchers, taking photos of their slides when the word “Ideation” appeared as a title of one slide… Funny. It IS a word for others as well! For what comes to the quality of this presentation, I would not dare to say anything… But at lest we got entertained by one slide. It is a happy discipline, after all!

Ok, it seems that “ideation” is covered, but I am still lacking the coverage for the word “ideating”. For those who are still suspicious, check it for example here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ideating.

Now, I have done it. Stop complaining or I really start to invent my own words.. ;P

After discussing, tossing and turning, analysing, wiriting, preaching and presenting GameSpace views of casual in several different occasions, we finally made it as a paper called “Casual Games Discussion“. The paper was presented at Future Play conference, Toronto, where we also presented a poster on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design”.

The conference itself was quite fine, except for scheduling. There was no proper time slots for discussion and some keynotes were scheduled as “lunch keynotes” (poor Espen, for example). Organiser really did not want us speak to each others and socialise. As some of the “official” supporters (which name I cannot recollect) phrased game studies as a “happy discipline”, I started to think, if we were nonetheless mistaken as “listening discipline” from the “ADHD discipline” that I would find more descriptive…

Our Gamelab was rather well represented: Frans Mäyrä gave a keynote at Saturday, Jaakko Stenros paper presentation about pervasive games on Thursday and me and Janne Paavilainen about casual games on Friday. Because of the schedule (or other possible reasons that we also acknowledge), we did not manage to get any comments. Poster presentation on “Creativity Techniques in Game Design” was much more discussive success. That was my first academical poster (ever) and I enjoyd it much more than the traditional presentations, I have to say. Only thing that I did not got was that posters were not set all through the conference, instead of few hours (after that we had to remove them). I did not even have time to check posters of others.

Ok, I could say more: there is some stuff about karaoke, sushi, Scandinavian bunch backed with one American, sugar, margaritas, brownies, smokey salt, missing a stop on the subway, and couple of things alike. But to keep it short I end this post here and give you some pictorial material (much more you can find with a search word “futureplay2007″ at Flickr, check also Jenny Brusk writing about the presentations of the conference).