Week 9

Week 9

Why We Play Games—Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story—Nicole Lazarro, XeoDesign

Somewhat rambling article about a small study examining the role of emotion in game play—specifically emotion that is not tied to story. The author identifies four “keys” that evoke emotion in players:
1.Hard fun – the challenge of strategy and problem solving produces positive, enjoyable emotion
2. Easy fun—the chance to explore and play and satisfy their curiosity in an absorbing game produces emotions of excitement and pleasure.
3. Altered states –refers to how games can alter the player’s mood and change his or her internal experience in an enjoyable way.
4. The People Factor – refers to playing with friends and the emotions produced by teamwork, competition, and social bonding.

I found this article kind of hard to read because it was not written well, but it did make an interesting distinction between emotion tied to story and emotion tied to game play. I am not generally a fan of games –either making them up or playing them – so I don’t have much to say on this topic. Although it may be interesting to consider why I am not a fan of games. I resist them, often finding them boring, though sometimes when pressed to play I am capable of enjoying the experience. Maybe it has to do with a tendency to be internally oriented, and games force an extended engagement with something outside of myself. I like to relax by reading, which is a more self-contained, internal experience. I just sort of revert to my inner world whenever possible, I guess.

Why We Play Games Together: The People Factor – Nicole Lazarro, XeoDesign

A companion piece that outlines 7 ways to produce emotion during group game play:
1. Support player interaction—build in mechanisms that allow players to affect one another, even help one another
2. Put on a spectacle – make the game interesting to watch as well as play, which will encourage interaction, especially among players at different levels of expertise
3. Include tools to communicate emotion and to enable users to create their own meanings
4. Use non-player characters that display emotion and inspire emotion in players
5. Create emotionally expressive tools and objects as part of the game
6. Emotion cycles, feedback, chains—take into account how groups of players process emotions, how one person’s emotion affects another, and how situations can be created specifically to form feedback loops and interactions
7. “Save money,” by which she means that developers should include user testing early in the development process, so you can get it right the first time. Early inclusion of user feedback is the only way to know what works and produce the best possible” entertainment appliance.”

Week 8

Digital Acting – George Maestri

This article explores the relationship between acting and animation – and how studying acting can be valuable for an animator. It will help the animator learn how to create a character, understand a character’s motivation, clarify a character’s objective or intention in a scene, create empathy for a character, the importance of simplicity, and much more. This knowledge will inform the animator’s work.

This is something that never occurred to me. I suppose that if I thought about it, I would assume that a scriptwriter writes characters, scenes, and story, and an animator simply illustrates the writer’s creation. This article made me realize how important movement is to acting and character, and thus how much the animator’s work contributes to the creation and expression of a character or scene.

Also, as an ex-dancer and choreographer, it is interesting to me to think about the movement conventions that are used in animation, how emotion is translated into movement, and how a character’s objectives are broken down into actions/movements. It seems to me that an animator takes on some of the functions of a director in live-action film or theater, who blocks out scenes and tells the actors how and where to move. I never really analyzed animation in this way before, or really gave it any thought at all.

The Animation and Interactivity Principles in Multimedia Learning—Mireille Betrancourt

This is a scholarly exploration of the effects of animation and interactivity on learning. The author offers three main ways animation is used for learning:

· To support visualization and mental representation of concepts to be learned

· To produce a cognitive conflict, for example, in scenarios where learners are asked to choose the correct animation of a process or phenomenon from several provided

· To enable learners to explore a phenomenon interactively in a process that involves generating and testing hypotheses

She states that research on the effects of animation on learning has yielded inconsistent results, and that the real issue is determining when and why animation is more effective than static graphics. In some cases, animation can actually hinder learning: “It may induce a shallow processing of the animated content, and consequently leads to what can be called the illusion of understanding. Then the elaboration of a mental model is inhibited by animation.”

Animation should be used only when it is needed, such as “when the concept or phenomenon depicted in the animation involves change over time and it can be assumed that learners would not be able to infer the transitions between static depictions of the steps” and when learners are novices in a domain and would not be able to form a mental model of the concept without being helped by an animation. Care must be taken not to use animation when it would actually be counterproductive to learning goals.

This seems to be mostly dealing with animation used to convey concepts or processes, and not animation when it is used to engage the learner, possibly be adding entertainment value or humor to a piece of communication. The latter is also an important component of education, and the role of animation here shouldn't be forgotten.

Week 7

Raymond Scott -- Electronic Music Pioneer -- by Jeff Winner and Irwin Chusid

Interesting article about the fundamental contributions made by a musician named Raymond Scott, whose creations from the 1930s were used as musical riffs underscoring classic cartoons, and whose work laid the foundation for all sorts of developments in electronic music. This is something that one just doesn't think about -- the sounds that are such an integral part of something as basic as a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It becomes part of your memory bank at such an early age that it's kind of like the sound of the wind outside or the sound of cars passing by. If you don't actually try to create a cartoon yourself you would probably never think about how the effects are created, exactly how the story is told. And a lot of it happens with sound and music.

Music and the Brain -- Norman Weinberger

I was especially interested in this article because when my daughter was in elementary school, she actually took a class called Music and the Brain. It was an experimental curriculum designed to take advantage of the benefits of musical training, which was supposed to relate especially closely to the development of math skills and "numeracy." The class was simply a class in keyboarding skills and reading music on a pretty basic level. I think it was for 2nd and 3rd graders, and the idea was that learning musical skills would help kids learn math skills. I don't recall the class making any special impact on my daughter, but would be interested in finding out whatever happened to that program and if they ever proved it to increase mathematical intelligence or skills.

This article covers a lot of ground in exploring the role of music in human life, history and development, particularly as it relates to the human brain. Modern imaging technologies have made it possible to study what happens in the brain when a person makes or listens to music. Studies have shown that exposure to music and musical training change the way the brain responds to music. They have also shown that music activates the same parts of the brain that are involved in the response to food, sex, and addictive drugs. The way that music affects emotions has also been explored. Music is a powerful form of communication, and the article discusses how it makes its impact.

Playing by Ear: Creating Blind-Accessible Games by Gavin Andresen in Gamasutra.com

Another topic I never would have thought existed -- computer games for the blind, and how they use sound to replace the information that graphics usually conveys to the computer game player. This article describes the creation of a game designed to enable both sighted and blind people to play together. This involved creating audio navigation cues so that visually impaired players would receive the same information as sighted players. Text and menus were read as well as displayed. Sound cues were devised to convey where the player was in space and what was happening. Audible landmarks were created to help orient players. The sound design required for this is intricate and complex, and not all problems were immediately solved.

The point was made that designing products for people with disabilities often creates advances in design for people without disabilities as well. The innovations in a program like this can be used to enhance any computer game with more interesting and communicative sound.

Grooving to the Rhythms of Language from The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing by Thomas Armstrong

The close relationship of language and music is the topic of this chapter. The author shows that it can be advantageous to consider the rhythmic and musical properties of language in the teaching of reading and writing. Different types of writing can be related to different types of music and choosing an appropriate type--one that appeals to a young reader -- is one way to excite more interest in the written word. In addition, there are many literary works that deal with music in one way or another, and these can be lively additions to classroom reading. In this way musical intelligence or aptitude can be put to work in the service of developing literacy.

What's interesting here is the sort of cross-pollination of various types of intelligence. By now, we are used to hearing about the different types of intelligence, but we don't necessarily think about their interrelationships. The implication is that strength in one type of intelligence can be leveraged to help develop another type that may be inherently weaker in a learner.