Be ambitious!

When thinking about Patterns in Game Play of course one has to have Björk&Holopainens Book on Pattern in Game Design (link opens in new window) in mind. Someone may find Zagal’s Game Ontology Project (link opens in new window) appropriate. Both approaches apply a sacral, i.e. a rather architectural perspective on digital games. Their understanding of the term “pattern” has a structural motivation that might be applied accross digital games. However, when it comes to (the design of) game playing experience these approaches might be less useful. Conceptualisations that model the dynamics of game playing experiences are hardly to find in these approaches. At that point Raph Kosters writings about a Grammar of Game Play (link opens in new window) as well as Cook’s Game Play Notation (link opens in new window) become interesting. These approaches focus on user experience design (UX Design) applying an understanding of “pattern” as phenomon that reoccurs is a varying manner when playing a game. Patterns then serve as some kind of abstraction, i.e. as the principle behind these occurrences (instances of the pattern). Such an understanding of patterns can also be found in the “Game bricks” approach by Djaouti, Alvarez, Jessel, et al. on gameclassification.com (link opens in new window).

It is my impression that this approach might bridge the gap between Björk & Holopainens sacral perspective and Kosters UX perspective. Hopefully, I am going to take their perspective into account when continuing my work on “Layered Languages of Ludology” a term coined by Prof. Jantke.

Recently the following title came into my mind:

“Konzeption interaktiver Medienangebote für niedrigschwelliges Lernen (älterer Menschen) im Bereich der häuslichen Alten- und Krankenpflege”

“Designing interactive media for low threshold learning (of matured people) in the area of home care”.

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Right now I listened to a presentation that intoduced the nm2-System to the auditory. It deals with with the authoring of shapeshifting documentaries, i.e. documentaries that are reconfigurable and thus interactive, but still continuous and coherent.

For more information have a look at www.shapeshift.tv

Recently our team started to talk about “interactivity”. We found that term to be very important in all our projects and to be – to some extend – the glue wich puts all our projects together.

A first and very basic question was wether interactivity is a feature or a process. Our colleague Abdo who has the deepest insight into the state of affairs suggested a salomonic answer with his definition of

“interactivity as  a characteristic of a communication process and all its elements”

In a second step we actually work on the question which elements have to be taken into account when talking about interactive digitally mediated communication processes and which dimensions can be used to determine the degree of interactivity of these constituents.

Right now I was listening to a presentation of Prof. Jens Jensen regarding the meanwhile 50 years lasting history of interactive television. Very interesting were his “lessons learned from 50 years of interactive TV”: (mehr…)