Interview: Dmitri Williams, CEO of NinjaMetrics
Isaac Knowles on Dec 4, 2013Amongst video game scholars, perhaps no one has been more prolific and had more impact than Dr. Dmitri Williams. Williams, a professor of communications at USC and CEO of game analytics firm NinjaMetrics, has fostered close ties with the game...
A loook at the subscription revenue model
Isaac Knowles on Sep 17, 2013Steel yourselves: This post is a little long. Much has been made of the riskiness of Zenimax Online’s decision [4] to have a subscription-based revenue model for Elder Scrolls Online, whose release is expected early next year. Naysayers point out...
Q&A with Riot's Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.
Jim Cummings on Jul 2, 2013As part of our coverage of this year's Game Developers Conference, I offered a summary of Jeffrey Lin's (Lead Designer of Social Systems for Riot Games) talk on research-informed design and his teams's work managing toxic player behavior in League...
Can games change minds?
Gabriel Recchia on Jun 30, 2013Pop quiz: For each of the following descriptions, can you name a person (fictional or real, living or dead) who meets the criteria? You have 30 seconds: go! Generous president Hispanic lawyer Visionary underwriter Female computer...
Pay-to-trade
Isaac Knowles on Jun 6, 2013With increasing frequency, developers are restricting what can be traded inside of new games. This is especially true given the rate at which social and mobile games are being released, but it is a trend that has crept into the more hardcore...
![[GDC] SpaceChem](http://www.motivateplay.com/wp-content/uploads/et_temp/swapz-300x233-33556_263x108.png)
[GDC] SpaceChem's Zach Barth on educational game d...
Gabriel Recchia on May 5, 2013In 2011, Wired UK and New Scientist described how “SpaceChem, a science-themed puzzler hailed as one of the year's best indie games, is aiming to make the leap from bedrooms to classrooms.” Today, SpaceChem is used by schools in the United...
Player Culture: The RealID Fiasco and the Magic Ci...
Lauren Collister on Apr 22, 2013One of the things I’m most interested in as an ethnographer is the interface between online and offline life, and how this line is increasingly blurred. I originally became interested in this when reading about the Magic Circle, a concept which...
7 Essential Resources for Understanding Motivation...
Travis L. Ross on Apr 4, 2013Motivation is an important topic for game designers and social scientists. Many herald the ability of games to motivate players through incentive systems, by fulfilling intrinsic needs, capturing attention, or hooking into evolved motivational...
Video games, violence, and common sense
Nicholas Matthews on Apr 2, 2013Media violence research waxes and wanes like many other research topics. Focusing events train the collective gaze of the world on single point. When Facebook changes how it shares our information, we discuss our tenuous grip on privacy. When...
GDC: Riot Experimentally Investigates Online Toxic...
Jim Cummings on Mar 31, 2013Riot Games has gotten a fair amount of press in recent months regarding their empirically-based research on the nature of “toxic” player behavior in League of Legends. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find standing room only for Jeffrey...
Self-determination theory at GDC
Gabriel Recchia on Mar 29, 2013In a previous article, I argued that theories of motivation that include a diverse range of motivators might be more useful to game designers than parsimonious theories that pick out a small handful of motivators as primary. Apparently, I have much...
GDC: A brighter future for collaboration between i...
Gabriel Recchia on Mar 27, 2013Motivate. Play. "seeks to form a bridge between the gaming and scientific communities, offering analysis and commentary on games from a social sciences perspective"--it's right there in our mission statement. As such, it's exciting (and somewhat...