Category: Blog

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.

Posted on - Comments Off on Alumni Days 2010
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Alumni Days 2010

All details after the jump.

Thursday 2010-12-09

09:30 E22:
Commercialize your projects! – Johan Zillén (Science Park Gotland)
Use your time in school to develop as an entrepreneur! Johan explains what the SPG Incubator can do for you and presents some of the current GAME-projects being housed and developed there.

We will be handing out tickets for the Christmas Party here. Don’t forget to sign up your significant other!

10:00 E22:
Warstories from the industry – Carsten Orthbandt (Pixeltamer)
Carsten Orthbandt talks about founding and running Pixeltamer. Expect lots of war stories from our German supreme-developer, from his fifteen years in the international game industry.

11:00 E22:
About The Artist – Leo Sandberg (Fabpics)
Leo has made a living as a freelance illustrator for more than 20 years. This is an opportunity for the curious to see Leo Sandberg present himself and his freelance business Fabpics.

13:00 E22:
Re-Doing Sex and Gender in Games (Lecture) – Bonnie Ruberg (sex- & game journalist)
Bonnie has written for Gamsutra, Wired, Joystiq, Terra Nova, The Village Voice, The Economis, Forbes and many, many more. Her lecture is an introduction to our medium’s poor understanding of gender, sex and sexuality. Expect lots of juicy examples. 🙂

15:00 B25-27
Re-Doing Sex and Gender in Games (Workshop) – Bonnie Ruberg
Following the lecture identifying problematics, Bonnie will have student work in teams to come up with their own content: character design, storylines that include sexuality, sex mechanics.

Note: This workshop follows her lecture, so the start is +-45 minutes! Be there early if you’re not attending the lecture.

Friday 2010-12-10:

10:00 B51
Alumni Panel (GAME Alumni)
All invited alumni sit down to answer and discuss questions from the students. What did you do after graduation? How do I get your job? What’s a work day like for you? Open discussion, questions and answers.
Moderator: Johannes Wadin

Attending alumni:
Micke Karlsson (Developer, IP Solutions)
Staffan Persson (Level Designer; Avalanche, Lionhead)
Niklas Norin (Game Designer; Avalanche),
Mats Andersson (Game Designer; Avalanche),
Tobias Lundmark (Quality Assurance; Starbreeze),
Johannes Wadin (Level Designer; Avalanche, Lionhead, Tapeduck)
David Hammarström (Art Director, B-Reel)

13:00 E22
Practical Profiling & Performance – Micke Karlsson (Developer, IP Solutions)
Micke Karlsson is a programmer and project lead at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. He’ll walk you through practical profiling and performance through cache optimizations and introduce the concepts of datadriven programming. You’ll need to install CodeAnalyst to participate in this lecture.

Note: Due to scheduling conflicts Micke had to cancel his lecture. You can still meet him at the Christmas party this evening though.

13:00 B51
The role of an Art Director – David Hammarström (Art Director, B-Reel)
David has been an Art Director at B-Reel for more than five years and is responsible for a lot of their interactive productions. He’ll explain what an Art Director really does.

14:00 E22
Analysing Games – Tobias Lundmark (Quality Assurance, Starbreeze)
Tobias shares his immense experience on how seemingly insignificant parameters can have very concrete effects on the gaming experience: camera controls, input latency, jump durations and lot more. Thoroughly researched and brimming with facts for designers and developers alike.

15:00 Strandgatan 1
The Networked Business – Science Park Gotland
Two lectures and three speakers over at Science Park Gotland. This is about modern company values and how to run a business in a flexible way, where you band together for specific projects and short term needs. We recommend that you register on (“Web & IT bar Gotland”) and participate. You’ll get a chance to visit the Science Park’s locales and will make it back to the Christmas Party with time to spare.

19:00 GAME Motion Capture Studio
Christmas Party for GAME students, staff and alumni!
Bring currency and don’t forget your ticket!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Gamex 2010
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Gamex 2010

Gamex is an entirely new game trade show – Swedens first – and took place for the first time last weekend in Stockholm. The show is somewhat smaller than the world-record holding GamesCom 😛 but still managed to pack some 28 000 visitors and 54 exhibitors during the three days.

One of Gamex greatest strength obviously, is allowing us to meet a Swedish audience just in time for next years study applications. It was a perfect match for us not only due to the obvious geographic benefits and common interests but also due to the huge audience diversity. It was very cool the way Gamex went out of their way to address a wider audience than these events usually attract. We saw a heavy emphasis on family-, party- and casual titles – allowing us to reach females, families and casual gamers. Just the type of material we need to build the talents of a modern gaming industry.

So even though it was a smaller event and lacked a business-to-business area we didn’t pull any punches.

We built a huge booth and brought along student projects matching the diverse audience: from the online children-friendly Fumbies, to the regular console title Pawns, the party friendly Vertigo and Abzolium, super casual Walkabout and the more “hardcore” Dwarfs, Cause of War and Gods of Steel. All of them represented by the student developers, of course.

Posted on - 1 Comment on About industry contacts
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About industry contacts

We work hard to maintain a notable presence at an international level – we exhibit at the largest fairs, send staff and students to conferences and initiated the International Research School of Game Design. Thus we’ve come to establish a huge and ever growing network within the international game- and movie industry, academia and independent scene.

The most visible benefit of these contacts is probably the jury for Gotland Game Awards – some 30-40 people from the world-wide industry comes to Gotland every year to see our student’s projects and give them valuable feedback.

But us networking is for so much more than just the GGA: the elective “fourth year” – International Game Production Studies – is built around having external stakeholders weighing in and guiding the student teams during a full year of development! We arrange for in-depth workshops by industry professionals a couple of times a year, and we bring in – on average – a staggering 15 on-campus guest lecturers every year!

These are some examples from the past two months:

Daniel Leaver from Media Molecule (England)

Media Molecule is a British video game developer, known for Rag Doll Kung Fu and LittleBIGPlanet 1 & 2 for the Playstation 3.

Prof. Richard Bartle on Human Rights in Virtual Worlds

Professor Bartle is a game researcher at the University of Essex. He’s most famous for having created MUD (multi-user dungeon) – the first of what would later evolve to become massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Johannes Wadin from Lionhead Studios (London)

Johannes graduated from GAME in 2006 and went on to work at Avalanche for three years. He joined Lionhead Studios in 2009 and was awarded Alumni of the Year at Gotland Game Awards 2010 for his outstanding professional achievements.

Prof. Ernest Adams on Developing Backwards and in High Heels

Prof. Ernest Adams has been in the game industry since 1989 and currently works as a free lance game designer, writer and teacher. He’s written four books in total and he has developed online, computer, and console games for everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to the Nintendo Wii. Ernest is also the founder and first chairman of the International Game Developers’ Association.

Michael Mateas on AI for Serious Games

Michael created “Façade“, an interactive drama about the relations between three persons in a small flat. Michael holds the MacArthur Chair at University of California, Santa Cruz and runs their Expressive Intelligence Studio where they explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, art and design.

Joakim Setterberg from Fatshark (Stockholm)

Joakim Setterberg is a Level Designer at Fatshark, and credited in titles such as Diplomacy (2005), Terminator: Salvation (2009) and the newly released Lead and Gold (2010).

The people in this network of ours are all friends and respected colleagues. They provide a great service and a unique value to our students!

All lectures are filmed and digitized with slides and notes. Some of them are made freely available through the Gotland University Web TV, while others require an active student account for the courses in question.

Posted on - 1 Comment on Nakajima Labs moving to GAME!
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Nakajima Labs moving to GAME!


Professor Masayuki Nakajima and his famous Nakajima Labs moves from Tokyo Institute of Technology to Gotland University GAME! Nakajima Labs has been doing bleeding edge research and development in convergent media at Tokyo Tech since 1975, and they will be fully established at our campus by March 2011.

Prof. Nakajima has run several international research teams, published 20 books and more than 250 scientific papers with a focus on Artificiell Intelligence (AI), augmented reality and virtual worlds. One of his goals for the new lab at Gotland University is to continue working on his “Autonomous Agent System: K4”.

K4 is a unique AI that understands both speech and body language. With a simple microphone and video camera, K4 allows you to communicate with a computer just as if it were another human being. With our advanced Motion Capture studio, GAME provides an opportunity for Nakajima Labs to improve the AI’s own body language – giving the artificial person an even more human expression by utilizing natural motion as a part of its communication.

One of the first projects for the team will probably be to translate the Japanese language engine to English. 🙂