The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland
This is the highly informal blog of the GAME-department. We use it mostly to document the things we do outside of running one of the worlds strongest game educations. For information about our education, programs and courses, check the official site at Uppsala University.
Grave Call got invited to exhibit at the Play 19 festival in Hamburg this weekend, and they came home with the Audience Award!
Curious about what else GAME students have won? Check out the award database! It lists all awards won by students from the Department of Game Design – international, national and regional. Alumni of the Year is listed separately (as is the alumni statistics – if you want to check out what type of jobs our students end up in).
Guest lecture on Wed, 15:30, F25!
Apologies for super short notice, but this is well worth your attention! Dr. Jeffrey Wimmer is visiting us from University of Augsburg and giving a talk. Feel free to attend.
Some authors claim e.g. that the mediatized “playgrounds” of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have the potential to establish social capital, and hence provide an opportunity for social involvement and participation (e.g. Steinkuehler/Williams, 2006). Following this approach, under specific circumstances, the mediated und ubiquitous worlds of current mobile games (a current popular example is Pokémon Go) can be understood as a form of ‚social media’, creating new socio-culturally and politically relevant spaces for interaction, which Oldenburg (1991) calls a third place (see for an empirical pilot study Wimmer 2014). Building on this the lecture looks theoretically as well as empirically at how the – intentionally non-political – participatory processes of mobile gaming are (not) being transferred into participation and engagement in other domains of social life.
References:
Last Friday we held our annual introduction game jam at the Department of Game Design.
A game jam is a playful challenge to design and prototype games in a short timespan. The model is similar to that of a hackathon, where participants have a limited amount of time to work on a project using an iterative design process.
In addition to some rapid prototyping and development, My First Jam aims to:
117 students and faculty joined up to create games for a day, and 18 games were delivered! (all games are available to download from the Facebook Event page)
After a couple of hours of pizza and playtesting, all the counts had been voted, and the list of nominees were:
Most Fun:
Best Interpretation:
Best Execution:
Congrats and well played, everyone!
Visit the Facebook Event page for all the games, and to see more photos from the event. 🙂
Join us in the water (you will be soon anyway…)! The world is burning, and Gotland being swallowed by the sea. As Campus Gotland will be under water soon we might as well get used to lectures in the water right now!
Put on your swimming gear, bring a towel, and join us for a climate protest and a swimming lecture on digital games and (un-)sustainability.
Despite how often game developers talk about games for sustainability and social change, we tend to close our eyes tightly to the ways in which games are contributing, materially and culturally, to this catastrophe. Patrick Prax, at the Department of Game Design, will explain why this is and what we can do.
