Reports

March 2005 | February 2005 | January 2005 | September 2004 | August 2004 | July 2004 | June 2004 | May 2004 | Archives |

March 2005
We met at Maxwells to discuss how the Chapter should move forward. There was a lot of great discussion, which is summarized in these meeting minutes.

Three things that we agreed upon were:

• shifting meetings from the 3rd Tuesday of each month to the 3rd Thursday of each month;
• starting the meetings at 6:30 instead of 7PM; and
• Continuing to meet monthly, alternating between business and social meetings.

February 2005
After some catching up, we discussed the current mission and vision of the Ottawa Chapter and decided that March's meeting will be devoted to refining them both. We will also be looking at the frequency of our meetings.

January 2005
Brian Robbins and Andrei Serghiuta from Fuel Industries demoed their soon-to-be-released Shockwave racing game. They talked a bit about the technology, and everyone got a chance to race a few laps.

We also talked about potential possibilities and technologies for network distribution of games. Currently there are lots of options for smaller web/downloadable titles, but not many are available for larger "retail" games.

Our next meeting will be a social meeting at the Royal Oak. 7:00 PM on Tuesday Feb 15th.

September 2004
A number of us got together over munchies and beer to talk about what's new. Steve and Kenton (i2 learning) have a new publishing opportunity, creating a training game for assessors.

August 2004
Kenton White from i2 learning demo'd a number of edutainment titles for us. As a group, we identified what we liked about each game and what aspects of the gameplay made the game worth playing (or not worth playing, in some cases). You can view the PowerPoint presentation for all of the details.

Waterbusters is a Flash game, where you guide your character through a house to try to find places where water was being wasted. We found the controls to be somewhat awkward, and overall, it was a little too easy to solve the puzzles. We came up with a number of suggestions to improve gameplay, including:

• having less "in-your-face" tone/messaging about wasting water
• better animation when your character is fixing something (feedback to let the player know he's actually doing something)
• better visual and audible indication of how much water is left so that the character can have more of a sense of urgency to do something about it
• have some actual consequences for losing a lot of water
• create some incentive for fixing the water quickly (i.e. show a water bill at the end of each round, where the money would come out of the player's score).

Quandaries was created by the Department of Justice in order to teach standards of conduct to new recruits. It was a DOS-based game (which brought the memories screaming back), and we found it to be a fun, funny, and slightly campy game. It featured a day in the virtual life of a federal employee, where you could schedule meetings, answer the phone, go for a coffee, etc. There were a lot of interesting scenarios where the player would have to make decisions on how to conduct themself, and these decisions were then judged right or wrong, based on existing policies. While it was fun, there were times when you didn't know what to do (should I make a phone call, should I just do some work?), and it was tough sometimes to keep track of time. Most of the questions/scenarios were based on ethics, so we thought it might need some diversity in content. We liked the fact that you got to take on an identity (hey, who doesn't fantasize about being a government employee?), and that you got to advance in rank through successful completion of various scenarios. Overall, a very solid and fun training tool.

Objection was created by Transmedia Games, and is used to train lawyers when and who to object to opposing counsel's questions or comments. Research indicates that lawyers have roughly 1-2 seconds to object to a statement/question. Some comments were:

• good use of time as a factor in the scoring system
• it would have been better for the comments/questions to have been spoken, instead of forcing the player to read them (not everyone reads quickly)
• felt like a quiz game (fast paced questions/answers)
• good voice acting (the judge)
• the story elements backed up the gameplay. The questions weren't just random, they follow fairly intriguing plots
• the goals were clearly defined (you need 1200 points to advance to Level 2, etc)
• once you learned the question types, the game could become a little boring -- however, the plots might counteract that. Regardless, the replayability factor might be somewhat diminished.

Cube Dude was created by Games2Train, and was designed to teach business ethics to people. Unfortunately, it wasn't a well designed game in that the content (business ethics) didn't match the gameplay (a "Pac Man" maze type game). Your character, Cube Dude, navigated a maze, eating dots, and being chased by enemies. When "CD" got to a computer (like a power pill), the player would be asked a question about business ethics. If the question is answered correctly, the enemies turn blue, and CD and "eat" them. If the answer is wrong, then the enemies stay the same and he is forced to go to the next computer/power pill. We didn't like this game because it was non-immersive, non-situational. They were using a game to force a topic, and we didn't feel that it worked.

Virtual U was created by Jackson Hole Higher Education Group, and was designed to foster a better understanding of management practices in American colleges and universities. It takes place in an isometric generic campus and plays like a sim. It was by far the most polished of the games demonstrated, but also had the steepest learning curve. We had a hard time figuring out what to do. While you had many controls and could get into incredible levels of detail, you could be very successful in the game by not doing anything whatsoever. We felt this game had the best potential for replayability because it was the most immersive. The many different scenarios made it very interesting (even though you could be successful by doing nothing).

Overall, it was a very interesting night, and many thanks to Kenton and Steve for putting together the presentation and walking us the games and the discussion.

July 2004
We had another social meeting at the Oak, with a few new faces, and some great discussions on the local industry, how to break in, work environment/quality of life issues, and more.

June 2004
Tuesday June 21, 2004 - Many thanks to Jason Della Rocca for making the trek out to Ottawa! As expected, he proved to be a very entertaining and knowledgeable guest, and brought along some great swag, to boot.

With Jason moderating the discussion, the group identified a number of issues facing the game development community with the goal of exploring them in detail, and then coming up with a list of what they saw were the priorities that needed to be addressed. Because we delved very deeply into the subject matter, we weren't able to complete the exercise, but we did come up with the beginnings of the Ottawa Consensus (.doc, 40KB).

You can also check out the images from the meeting.

May 2004
Tuesday May 18, 2004 - We got together at the Oak again for a social meeting. Steve got us caught up on all that was happening in Afghanistan, and we welcomed a group of new guys from Artech.