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.