Game Changers Roundtable Presentations
Welcome
Presenters: David Red, Ruth Whiteside, Ellen Walsh, Richard Brecht
Video
FSI and CASL leadership open the Game Changers Roundtable.
Gaming Everywhere
Presenter: Mark Danks
Slides (PDF, 14MB)
Video
Over the past few decades, gaming hardware has undergone a significant shift from large arcade devices in the mall to home consoles to mobile phones. With this change, the audience for games has grown with each generation, creating a world where gaming is ubiquitous. Game mechanics increasingly are showing up in a wide range of “non-game” applications. Additionally, social games connect people from all around the world. This talk will explore this shift in games, and how an audience has developed that expects sophisticated game mechanics and high production values in everyday applications.
Creative Engagement—How Games Turn Learning into Addiction
Presenter: Sarah W. Stocker
Slides (PDF, 13MB)
Video
From the earliest text-based adventures to today’s console blockbusters and browser-based social interactions, games capture audiences in ways no passive media can. We speak of games as being compulsive and addictive but, at the most basic level, they are systems of education. How do games teach, reward, and reinforce player behaviors in a way that creates self-driven, “addictive” learning? This talk will examine the creative participation demanded by game systems, and how participation engages and incentivizes players. This talk will also explore how games use clear, concrete feedback loops to transparently teach players to navigate, engage, and excel within a game system—in a way that keeps them coming back for more.
Virtual Human Dialogue for Education and Entertainment in Virtual Worlds
Presenter: David Traum, PhD
Slides (PDF, 15.7MB)
Video
Virtual Humans are artificial agents that include both a visual representation of a human-like body and an intelligent "brain" controlling movements of the body. Many virtual humans can engage in face to face conversation with each other and real humans, using speech and non-verbal communication. Recently, natural language dialogue technology has reached performance levels that allow increasingly robust and sophisticated interaction with virtual humans for a number of distinct types of conversation, including question-answer interviews, collaborative task planning and performance, non-cooperative negotiation, casual conversation, and game-playing. This talk will briefly introduce dialogue models to support these conversation types, and illustrate their use in virtual human applications, particularly those created at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
The Language of Game Environments
Presenter: Matt Small
Slides (PDF, 4MB)
Video
Twenty years ago, a computer game environment could be as simple as a single two-dimensional screen with a few objects bouncing around within its confines. Today, we create sprawling three-dimensional landscapes that can take a player hours to traverse, and these spaces are packed full of detail and interactive touch points. As game worlds have become more complex, players' tolerance for puzzling out what they should be doing within them has declined. Modern gamers expect to dive into a rich experience and be able to organically understand how to play the game, without reading manuals and preferably with a minimum of intrusive tutorials. This talk will cover the language of gaming environments and the conventions environmental designers use to steer players through game worlds and towards the interactions that designers want, while maintaining, as much as possible, the illusion of player free will.
The Game Inside Your Head: Anticipation and Play
Presenter: Brian Upton
Slides (PDF, 4MB)
Video
Unlike board games and sports, the rules of most video games are hidden from the player at the outset. Instead of being taught the rules in advance, we learn them on the fly through experimentation and observation. A key element of this process is anticipation—using our existing knowledge of the game to imagine different scenarios and their likely outcomes. Comparing these expected outcomes with the actual ones significantly impacts how we learn with games. This process of "playing inside our heads" is a significant source of the enjoyment that games provide.
Training for Cognitive Readiness
Presenter: Ray Perez, PhD
Video
Cognitive readiness is the mental preparation, including knowledge, skills, and attributes, that an individual needs to establish and sustain competent performance in the complex and unpredictable environment of modern military operations. It enables one to perform successfully in unexpected, novel, dynamic, open-ended, ill-defined, and high stakes environments.
Closing Remarks
Presenters:James North, Joseph Danks
Video
FSI and CASL leadership close the Game Changers Roundtable