As a follow-up to the 2011 web-friendly film Native Representations in Videogames, I’ve kept a beat on progress made in Indigenous representations in commercial and independent games. You can catch it in 2012’s web-friendly film Indigenous Representations in Assassin’s Creed III.
So what’s happened?
Change!
Life has been busy for AbTeC as we prepare for the Skins Summer Institute (SSI) in late July at Concordia University in Montreal. SSI is a two-week intensive workshop for Aboriginal (Indigenous/First Nations/Native) youth that combines instruction in video game design with immersion into Aboriginal stories and storytelling techniques. The workshop covers traditional storytelling as [...]
I recently presented “The Good, The Bad, and The Sultry: Indigenous Women in Video Games” at the Unpacking the Indigenous Female Body Symposium put on by Dana Claxton at Simon Fraser University. I figured I would share some of my thoughts since I’m all twisted up dreaming about new media culture jamming these representations.
So before [...]
Concordia University’s Career and Placement Services hosted a panel discussion, ‘Careers in the Gaming Industry’, on Wednesday, November 11, 2009. Six Concordia Alumni from Computer Science and Software Engineering discussed what it takes to get into the industry and their personal experiences throughout their careers in gaming. There was much valuable insight shared with a [...]
I’ve been toiling over the script for the “Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video Games” portion of the forthcoming Skins documentary film for the past several days. I’m still at 1 minute and 40 seconds when I need to get it to 1 minute. I don’t think it’s possible, so I’ve decided to go ahead with [...]
The Little Big Planet workshop was a small success. It was attended by 3 people from our research network: Bruno from obx, and Lynn and Morgan from Tag.
It takes me an unusually long time to finish games. While I frequently hear industry folks talk about their “pile of shame” (i.e. the stack of unplayed, often unopened, triple-A releases that they have yet to play,) unlike them, I don’t have the (valid) excuse that I work 50-70 hours a week making games for [...]
Tracy Fullerton provides a helpful overview and in-depth suggestions about how to set up, run, and make use of playtesting sessions as a designer. I plan to adapt these methods into the playtesting sessions of the games made during my doctorate. I strongly believe in the process of iterative game design, as supported by Zimmerman, [...]
I’m glad to hear from Simon that SeriousGamesSource.com is making a comeback soon. On that note, the field of educational games is growing past its phase as “edutainment” (please, please, would people stop making up silly merged words that date us?). James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy [...]
Based on, admittedly little, of what I have read so far concerning AI perspectives of interactive storytelling and interactive drama as it relates to games, many researchers follow the Hero’s Journey, the Three Act Structure, and the rising action/climax/denouement forms of story. They often divide this structure into a series of beats to program out [...]
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