Szonja's posterous

SF Meetup

Here are the slides (in Hungarian) of my 5 minutes lecture from yesterday's SF Meetup in Budapest.

 

update:

sound: 

Avatar - a late reflection

I know I'm a little late, but finally we've managed to get a baby-free night and tickets for Avatar. 

Ph.D. thesis topic changed

hooray! I've managed to change the topic of my thesis: the image of science and the scientific world concept of virtual worlds (instead of the history of virtual worlds), so now I can dip into the questions of sci-fi and fantasy, AI, computability, etc.

5th International Media Conference

On History in Virtual Worlds

Today I gave a short lecture in house at the university (BME) of an article I've created in the summer. The article will later be published in the Journal of Virtual World Research, after some modifications. Here are the slides in Hungarian, and the manuscript in English.

FROG09, Vienna

Less Game Design and more Game Research for now: Here are the slides of my lecture given yesterday, at the FROG 09 conference, in Austria. Fortunately, it was quiet a success, I had plenty of questions, and a really nice women told me I was one of 3 or 4 lecturers who saved the 3 day long conference for her. Surprising, being aware that I'm the most untalented person of the world when it's about speaking in front of a lot of people:) 

Far and Away - A Hungarian Fairy Tales Game

I've finally decided to focus on Hungarian folk tales for my one-month design project. The game is not perfect yet, I'm planning to continue playtesting for a while to make it better, but a playable version has been finished as the course is drawing to an end. The rules and the components can be downloaded here. At the moment there is only a Hungarian version of it, hopefully an English version is coming soon.

Game Design Project starts, lvl 11 Challenge

This week at GDConcepts, we start a one-month project to create a finished game. Here are the constraints:

I could leave this entire project open-ended, but in order to get you started I’m going to give you some constraints. Remember, constraints are your friends.

If you’ve never designed a complete game before this course, follow this set of constraints. Create a board game, card game, or tile-laying game (that is, it must either have a board, cards, or tiles as physical components). It may have more than one of these components, and it may involve additional components beyond these (such as dice or pawns). You may choose any theme you want, as long as it is original – do not use an existing IP (intellectual property). In short, if your work would violate someone else’s trademark or copyright, don’t do it. You will undoubtedly work with other people’s IP at various points in your own career; take the opportunity now to do something original with your own IP.

I’m going to place two more restrictions to help you. First, you may not make a trivia game, or any other game that relies on large amounts of content (such as Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Apples to Apples, or Cranium). This is purely for the purpose of keeping your scope limited; if you have to generate 250 cards with unique trivia questions on them, it will leave you far less time for playtesting the game mechanics. I would put Trading Card Games (like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon TCG) in this category as well, since it requires so much time to create a large number of cards.

Second, you may not use “roll-and-move” mechanics in any form. Do not throw dice and then move a pawn around the track. Do not use a spinner or a teetotum or card draws or any other random-number-generating device to determine what a player does on their turn. There are several reasons for this prohibition. First, the mechanic is highly overused, and it is practically impossible for you to make a game that will not feel like a clone of Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry!, Chutes & Ladders, or any of the other myriad games that rely on this as their core mechanic. Second, the mechanic essentially makes the key decision each turn for the player, so the game is making interesting decisions but the player is not. By divorcing player intentionality from the game’s outcome, you usually end up with a game that is not particularly fun to play (no matter how fun it is to design).

If you have designed one or more complete games before but still do not feel like you are a strong game designer, follow this set of constraints. Follow all of the Green Circle constraints above. In addition, add one of the following constraints. This is your choice, based entirely on your area of interest within game design:

Design your game such that it has a strong embedded narrative that is interactive in some way. You will have to think of ways to tell a story through the player actions of a board game, and how to integrate narrative and game mechanics. If you are interested primarily in RPGs or other forms of storytelling, do this.

Found in my notebook

Damn, I didn't have money those days:P

 "Tuesday, August 07, 2007
8:55 PM

 Vizuális környezetbe helyezett community site. Az emberek a saját
életük módosított változatát hozhatják létre. Saját adatokat
tölthetnek fel, ismerősi fa, stb. e-mail és chat, voice-chat. A sok
ismerőssel rangokat lehet elérni, vannak rendes professionok. Rendes
városok, stb. Egyben a játékok a személyes infóban fontos szerepet
töltenek be, karakternyilvántartóval."

 Rough translation:

 Community site in a visual environment. People can create a modified
version of their own lives. They can upload their data, there is a
tree of connections, e-mail, chat and voice chat. Ranks can be earned
by gathering connections, and there are "normal" professions as well.
There are cities, etc. Games on the site should be important in a
user's profile. There should be a character database.

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