Project Sanitarium: gaming TB: a serious game for a serious problem

Collaborative projects between Industry and Academia provide excellent opportunities for learning. Throughout the academic year 2014-2015 undergraduates from the School of Arts, Media and Computer Games at Abertay University worked with academics from the Infection Group at the University of St Andrews and industry partners Microsoft and DeltaDNA. The result was a serious game prototype that utilized game design techniques and technology to demystify and educate players about the diagnosis and treatment of one of the world's oldest and deadliest diseases, Tuberculosis (TB). Project Sanitarium is a game incorporating a mathematical model that is based on data from real-world drug trials. This paper discusses the project design and development, demonstrating how the project builds on the successful collaborative pedagogical model developed by academic staff at Abertay University. The aim of the model is to provide undergraduates with workplace simulation, wider industry collaboration and access to academic expertise to solve challenging and complex problems.

The game jam movement: disruption, performance and artwork

This paper explores the current conventions and intentions of the game jam - contemporary events that encourage the rapid, collaborative creation of game design prototypes. Game jams are often renowned for their capacity to encourage creativity and the development of alternative, innovative game designs. However, there is a growing necessity for game jams to continue to challenge traditional development practices through evolving new formats and perspectives to maintain the game jam as a disruptive, refreshing aspect of game development culture. As in other creative jam style events, a game jam is not only a process but also, an outcome. Through a discussion of the literature this paper establishes a theoretical basis with which to analyse game jams as disruptive, performative processes that result in original creative artefacts. In support of this, case study analysis of Development Cultures: a series of workshops that centred on innovation and new forms of practice through play, chance, and experimentation, is presented. The findings indicate that game jams can be considered as processes that inspire creativity within a community and that the resulting performances can be considered as a form of creative artefact, thus parallels can be drawn between game jams and performative and interactive art.

An impression of home: player nostalgia and the impulse to explore game worlds

This is the accepted version of the paper following peer review.

Nostalgia videogames as playable game criticism

The aim of this paper is to consider the emergence of nostalgia videogames in the context of playable game criticism. Mirroring the development of the nostalgia film in cinema, an increasing number of developers are creating videogames that are evocative of past gaming forms, designs, and styles. The primary focus of this paper is to explore the extent to which these nostalgia videogames could be considered games-on-games: games that offer a critical view on game design and development, framed by the nostalgia and cultural memory of both gamers and game developers. Theories of pastiche and parody as applied to literature, film, and art are used to form a basis for the examination of recent nostalgia videogames, all of which demonstrate a degree of reflection on the videogame medium.

Playing popular science

This was a peer-reviewed event that took place at the DiGRA-FDG conference in August 2016. While it has a paper component (the attached proposal), the output was a demonstration of games rather than a conference paper. As such, this entry should be considered an Event or Exhibition.

Postdigital play and the aesthetics of recruitment

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in newly emergent material and digital configurations of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practices and spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid play relies on predefining clear and distinct entities that then enter into hybrid situations. Drawing on concepts of the ‘interface’ and ‘postdigital’, we argue the distribution of computing devices creates difficulties for such presuppositions. Instead, we propose an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is adequate to the new openness of social and technical play.

Homesick for the unheimlich: back to the uncanny future in Alien: Isolation

In 2014 Sega released Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation, a video game sequel to the 1979 film Alien. As an attempt to create both an authentic homage to the Alien franchise and a credible successor to Ridley Scott’s original film, Alien: Isolation was received as both a work of remediated nostalgia and as a deeply uncanny survival horror. This article discusses Alien: Isolation framed by theories of the uncanny (the unhomely) and of nostalgia (the homely), with the aim of revealing how the production design of the game reconciled these seemingly contradictory but nonetheless overlapping aesthetic qualities. By drawing on examples from Alien: Isolation’s visual and level design, this article discusses how the integration of nostalgic and uncanny qualities could be of value to horror and sci-fi game design, in particular to the development of sequels within existing franchises, and to remediations, remakes and reboots.

Postdigital interfaces and the aesthetics of recruitment

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in emergent digital materialities of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practices and spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid play relies on predefining clear and distinct digital or material entities that then enter into hybrid situations. Drawing on concepts of the ‘interface’ and ‘postdigital’, we argue the distribution of computing devices creates difficulties for such presuppositions. Instead, we propose thinking these situations through an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is able to accommodate the intensive entanglements and inherent openness of both the social and technical in postdigital play.

Pathfinder: a performance-game for the augmented drum-kit

Pathfinder is a performance-game for solo drummer, exploring the synergies between multiple contemporary creative practices. The work navigates between music composition, improvisation, projection/light art and game art. At its heart lies a bespoke electro-acoustic instrument, the augmented drum-kit, used not only to provide the sonic content of the work in real-time, but also as a highly expressive game controller that interacts with an instrument-specific game. The musical instrument offers a much wider range of expressive possibilities, control and tactile feedback in comparison to a traditional general-purpose game controller, and as a result it affords a more diverse and nuanced game play performance. Live electronics, lights, projections and the drum-kit all make up the performance-game’s universe, within which the performer has to explore, adapt, navigate and complete a journey.

An investigation of two real time machine learning techniques that could enhance the adaptability of game AI agents

Developers strive to create innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) behaviour in their games as a key selling point. Machine Learning is an area of AI that looks at how applications and agents can be programmed to learn their own behaviour without the need to manually design and implement each aspect of it. Machine learning methods have been utilised infrequently within games and are usually trained to learn offline before the game is released to the players. In order to investigate new ways AI could be applied innovatively to games it is wise to explore how machine learning methods could be utilised in real-time as the game is played, so as to allow AI agents to learn directly from the player or their environment. Two machine learning methods were implemented into a simple 2D Fighter test game to allow the agents to fully showcase their learned behaviour as the game is played. The methods chosen were: Q-Learning and an NGram based system. It was found that N-Grams and QLearning could significantly benefit game developers as they facilitate fast, realistic learning at run-time.