GAME – Page 56 – The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland

2019/11/18 - Mon2020/03/30 - Mon - Comments Off
Blog, Publicity

Grave Call won Audience Award at Play19 in Hamburg

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).

2019/11/11 - Mon2019/11/11 - Mon - Comments Off
Blog, Guest Lectures

Dr. Jeffrey Wimmer: Games as third places revisited

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.

Games as third places revisited

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:

Oldenburg, Ray (1991): The great good place. New York.
Steinkuehler, Constance & Williams, Dmitri (2006): Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as ‘third places.’ In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11 (4), article 1.
Wimmer, Jeffrey (2014): „There is no place like home”. The potential of commercial online gaming platforms for becoming third places. In: Quandt, Thorsten/Kröger, Sonja (Hg.): Multi.Player. Social Aspects of Digital Gaming. London: Routledge, 111-123.

2019/10/07 - Mon2022/12/21 - Wed - Comments Off
Blog
game jam

My First Jam 2019

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:

let all our students hang out and get to know each other,
mix students up so everybody meets- and work with new people.

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)