Nothing and Some More

I don't know if it's a a well orchestrated PR campaign or not, but Will Wright talks everywhere about his new game Spore and his vision of videogame design. The funny part is that Spore does not seem to be ready to be launch (but more will be told at E3).

PR act I: The guest editor of Wired: he wrote the intro/editorial Dream Machine

Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. Just watch a kid with a new videogame. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn't a random process; it's the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play.

PR act II: The "exclusive" interview to Game Developer Magazine (not online but you too can get GDMag (paper version) for free)

The game industry is at what feels almost like a painful transition point, where we're just on the verge of being mass-market but not quite. On the other hand, time is on our side there. The people who are not playing games are getting older every day and are going to start dying off. The average age of players goes up about four to six month every year.

On his sources of inspiration:

Sim City was actually in some sense inspired by the works of Jay Forrester [ author of Urban Dynamics, which used computed data to chart urban decay/prosperity]. Sim Ant was inspired by the work of Edward Osborne Wilson [zoologist and author of The Ants]. Sim Earth was inspired by the work of James Lovelock [pioneering environmentalist and author of The Gaia Theory]. The Sims was inspired by Christopher Alexander [architectural theorist and author of The Nature of Order: an Essay on the art of Building and the Nature of the Universe], Abraham Maslow [psychologist and originator of the hierarchy of needs theory and author of Towards a Psychology of Being] and a few others.
Spore is kind of somewhat Frank Drake [creator of the Drake Equation, which offers a possible number of civilizations in the universe] and somewhat Charles and Ray Eames [famous designers who believed in modern design as a vehicle for social change.]

On the painful reading of these sources:

I love reading, and I read a lot of academic stuff that, well, it takes a while to get through the language barrier. Because they're academics, the first thing they do is build a wall around themselves of language that no one understands as a way of inflating themselves. But what they talk about, like the essentials of urban dynamics, is really cool and interesting, but not out of a textbook.[...] I try to find these things in academia that I think are just fascinating and I become basically a translator

More links: The stupid fun club, more on the stupid fun club and the Reality Robot experiment:

The other project of the Stupid Fun Club is a reality-based show in which people would be filmed reacting to a life-size, remote-controlled robot. They walk down University Avenue, sending their 250-pound “Reality Robot” into cafes, art stores and shopping centers. "We really want to know when people encounter robots, what do they do."
The robot is, frankly, deranged. Equipped with a microphone, speakers and artificial-intelligence software it’s just babbling things like “I feel your pain” and “I like to drink beer.
In one experiment, they built a robot that looked like it had been knocked over by a car and then put it on the footpath, where it would plead for help from passersby. "Almost all the women got really creeped out by it and would walk away really fast. The men would ignore the talking and start stripping it for parts!" he explains. "The only people to help it were the mixed gender couples. They would come over, pick it up, converse with it and try to reset it. And we’re filming all that."

PR act III: The keynote at the Game Dev Conference: What's Next in Content, not really! or Why I Get Too Obsessed with My Game Research (some live blogging attempt of the Wright keynote, more notes on Will Wright's keynote and Will Wright bits & bobs)

More GDC coverage What's next and the Game Developers Rant, second edition and Grand Text Auto: GDC 2006: “We Own the Future and It’s Ours Not to Fuck Up” and Water Cooler GamesGDC 2006 Rundown.

And there is a GDC 2006 Wiki

During the GDC the Serious Games Summit happened. Some of the keynotes I found:

You Can (Not) Be Serious on Second Life:

Therapeutic uses for the world were also mentioned, including a Second Life island for adults with Asperger's syndrome, who can then experiment with interacting with each other. According to [Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale], the people in program reported that they were better able to overcome their fears of connecting to other humans in game, and were also able, in some cases, to translate that skill to the real world.

A New Kind Of Game by Jesper Juul

The player is punished for not using the correct tactics, allowing play in a very narrow way, and meaning that there's a very narrow audience, potentially. However, he suggested, the economics of the arcade game necessitated such difficulty. He then argued that video games "have not entirely escaped the idea of the arcade game", that you have to punish the player harshly.
Next discussed was the 'new kind of game', and Juul compared The Sims 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, arguing that they are "practically the same game" in terms of goals and play styles, despite the fact that one title is family friendly and the other pointedly not so.[...]
In concluding, Juul suggested that user-generated content is vital, though quipping with regard to 'serious game' use, perhaps for corporate training, if considering openness: "A language is only a language if you can offend somebody with it".

And Behind the Game: What's Wrong With Serious Games? a conversation between Ben Sawyer, Henry Kelly and James Paul Gee

Finally, Gee referenced the need for killer apps in the serious games field. He used SWAT 4 (Sierra), a game of special weapons and tactics, as a representative of a killer app, but recommended that future games should move away from crime and killing. Sawyer joked that we “can't have a killer app without a bullet point,” but drew attention to projects such as PlayStation's EyeToy and remote health care devices that fall in the serious games field.

More on serious gaming on the Serious Games Initiative portal

During the GDC, the The 2006 Independent Games Festival happened. Gamespy has a good overview of the finalists, and you can download the demos.

The goal of the Game Innovation Database is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames.

Usability and Games: 17 Excellent References via a comment from Slashdot quoting Digg

On Slashdot, a reader asks about Exposing Children to Technology.The average answer seems to be not to expose too much to computer.

what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?
Pencils, pens, paper. Printed books--good, old, classic books. They'll learn computers and all that--you can hardly do anything these days without using one. What they need are the basic skills they won't get through computers, and that is accomplished through reading good ol' books and writing.

EDUCAUSE Review has an issue on Digital Game-Based Learning.

Digital Game-Based Learning: It's Not Just the Digital Natives Who Are Restless

A review of the digital game-based learning (DGBL) literature shows that, in general, educators have adopted three approaches for integrating games into the learning process: have students build games from scratch; have educators and/or developers build educational games from scratch to teach students; and integrate commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games into the classroom.

LeMonde: Le jeu vidéo acquiert ses lettres de noblesse: Michel Ancel, Frédérick Raynal et Shigeru Miyamoto sont devenus chevaliers dans l'ordre des Arts et lettres.

Et Emmanuel est de retour !!!