Hello! I’m Aaron A. Reed, lead writer on Prom Week, and I wanted to talk a bit about the challenges the writing team faced bringing eighteen characters to life during the most exciting week of their lives. (So far, at least… I’m pretty sure Lil is going to go on to do great things.) I’ve [...]

It is our pleasure to present Prom Week’s Audience Choice Special Release! Please enjoy playing this version of Prom Week — we would very much appreciate your vote in the 2012 Independent Games Festival Games: Main Competition Audience Award.

Dr. Cecil Brown began his lecture Games Blacks Love to Play by citing Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 observation that the games people play mirror the surrounding culture. Brown uses this stance—that games teach us about the culture they come from—to explore the history of African Americans, the interplay between black and white play cultures, and the [...]

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival! We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon. Whooo hooooo!!!

I recently gave a talk at the ASAP/3 conference that sketched the history of computers as tools & playthings. I’ve learned my lesson on giving dominantly visual talks: if you don’t have good notes then they are a major bummer to give in the future, plus nobody else can read them. What was I thinking when I [...]

An overview of how recording and analyzing player behavior can be incorporated in the game design process.

We’re planning a workshop on Design Patterns in Games in conjunction with next year’s Foundations of Digital Games conference. There is more info on our website (http://dpg.fdg2012.org/) or you can contact me directly. CFP follows: Workshop on Design Patterns in Games (DPG 2012) Co-located with FDG 2012 – Raleigh, North Carolina, USA – May 29, 2012 Call for Participation Overview A design pattern is [...]

This year the AAAI Fall Symposium Series included a track organized by Pat Langley on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Pat identified the following objective for the symposium: Pursue the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science: To explain intelligence in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts. Pat’s motivation [...]

When we started making Prom Week, our mission was to make social interactions truly playable. While games have increasingly gotten better at physical simulation, social interactions in games still tend to be scripted, with most games using dialogue trees of some form. A result of this is that many games end up being about physical conflict, as [...]

For the past two years we’ve been working on a game called Prom Week and I’m happy to announce we’ve just launched our closed beta! Look here for announcements, news, and tales of its development in the coming weeks! Prom Week is a social simulation game where the player shapes the lives of a group of [...]

maybe make some change, my new interactive story , does not have achievements, leaderboards, or co-op play. Many definitions of “game” might exclude it. Underneath the multimedia components it’s a parser-based interactive fiction, but there’s no space to explore, no objects to take. It’s inspired by a true story about war crimes in Afghanistan. It’s [...]

There’s nothing really special about this map-looking thing, other than that you can’t get from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner in less than 42 steps (I looks to take 56 or so). What is special here is how quickly we’re going to develop a flexible, style-ready generator for it. Set the clock for [...]

The Foundations of Digital Games conference, which covers research on a broad range of computer game topics, will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA from May 29-June 1, 2012. Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern Univ.) is the conference General Chair, while Mia Consalvo (Concordia Univ.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia Univ.) are the Program Co-Chairs. The conference [...]