Category: GGC Updates

Den snabba framväxten av Gotlandsbaserade spelföretag kan få stor betydelse för Gotlands framtid. Har högskolan lyckats med att utveckla en “hub” av entreprenörer kring spelutbildningen? Det kan förefalla så, men vad krävs för för att spelföretagen ska stanna kvar och utvecklas och därmed bidra till öns ekonomi?

Paneldeltagare:
– Stefan Person, Tillväxtenheten – Region Gotland
– Rickard Elgán, Högskolan på Gotland
– Max Tiilikainen, Meow Entertainment
– Phillipe Bolay, Out Of Bounds
– Robin Flodin, Zeal Studios
– Johan Zillén, Science Park Gotland

Moderator är Johannes Wadin – alumn från spelutbildningen med gedigen erfarenhet ifrån den internationella spelindustrin, och nu senast grundare av företaget Tapeduck.

English description:
Gotland – a chunk of Sweden separated from the mainland by some quantity of Baltic Sea – can be a fairly isolated base of operation. The game education bring competence and continuously produce promising student start ups that could have a tremendous impact on the future of the island. But how do we enable this talent to stay on the island after graduation?

We’ve invited some of the local game companies and other parties interested in an industrious Gotland to talk indie development, start ups and how we can make Gotland a game developers Mecca.

Panel:
– Stefan Person, Tillväxtenheten – Region Gotland
– Rickard Elgán, Högskolan på Gotland
– Max Tiilikainen, Meow Entertainment
– Phillipe Bolay, Out Of Bounds
– Robin Flodin, Zeal Studios
– Johan Zillén, Science Park Gotland

Moderator is Johannes Wadin – former GAME-student with experience of the international game industry and founder of Tapeduck.

Whole books have been written about Hamlet’s famous six words, “To be or not to be,” yet not one page has been published on the implications of Mario’s even more economic proclamation, “It’s-a me, Mario!” That literature is an art form worthy of analysis is a fact we take for granted; we teach novels in school, we memorize poetry, we sit in book clubs and try to figure out what it all means. But what would happen if we turned that lens of “close reading” onto video games?

A different kind of art form, games may not always be as serious as Hamlet’s brooding over life and death — but they have just as much offer the scholar (or even the average player) who takes them seriously. Katamari’s roll becomes a metaphor, a character’s CGI rendering becomes a symbol, and enormous unexplored worlds of interpretation open up to us in games we may have played again and again but we have never really read.

Note: the Mario as Hamlet picture was created by Benjamin Burger.

Predictability in game AI has often been cited as a drawback to gameplay and especially replayability. In some genres sports games, for example randomness is a necessary component to generate believable results. Often, it simply provides needed variety. Sometimes, however, randomness in game behavior can cause problems if it fails to align with the player’s expectations. This lecture will show examples of the sometimes quirky ways that people perceive randomness, show the pros and cons of using randomness in game systems, and give concrete techniques for mitigating some of the problems that truly random sequences can generate.

It is almost equally a design talk as it is a programming talk.