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November 30, 2007

Recap of Ernest Adams talk

Ernest gave a great talk at RPI last night. If you missed it, you can still check out the slides for the talk on his website and a real audio recording from the same talk he made at GDC 2007.

Slides from Ernest Adams talk last night can be seen on his website here: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Rethinking/rethinking.htm

Real Audio from this lecture is also available: http://realserver.earthlink.net/~www.designersnotebook.com/Media/Rethinking.rm

All the rest of his lectures can be found here: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/lectures.htm

27 people (including Steve Okimoto from Nintendo of America) joined us after for food and drinks at Holmes and Watson in downtown Troy.

At the lecture

Kathleen Ruiz, Ernest Adams and Marc Destefano

Hanging out at Holmes and Watson after Ernest's talk

Ernest gives his final farewell

Posted by IanStead at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2007

Ernest Adams at RPI

Freelance designer, author, and IGDA founder, Ernest Adams, will be coming to RPI this Thursday to give a lecture on stories and challenge in gameplay.

Thursday, November 29th
7:30-9pm
Russell Sage Laboratory
Room 3303
RPI Campus
Troy, NY

Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

Abstract: In this lecture Adams will take a second look at the role of challenges in gameplay - how they construct the player's experience and affect his or her emotional response to the game. Starting with a new proposal for determining the difficulty of a challenge, Adams goes on to question the assumption that games should be challenging at all, and make a case for other forms of computerized play beyond the traditional challenge-achievement-reward structure. The lecture also addresses the effect of challenges on storytelling, and discusses how different mechanisms for influencing the plot of a story produce different feelings in the player. The lecture ends with a suggestion for a unifying meta-approach to interactive storytelling that obviates all the debate about the "right way" to design games.

Get directions to this event here.

Posted by IanStead at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)