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...
Emergence (and some devastation) in Sim City
Jared Lorince on Mar 6, 2013I’ll admit. I was one of those kids. I never had the patience to start from scratch in Sim City, to take a humble town to a bustling metropolis, paying constant attention to the state of my citizens and my budget. No, I would eagerly wait...
Games, numeracy, and uncertainty
Jared Lorince on Jan 7, 2013Take a look at this word problem, quoted from Gerd Gigerenzer’s Calculated Risks. Before you read on, try to come up with a ballpark estimate of the answer; what does your gut tell you? The probability that a woman of age 40 has breast cancer...
Ethnography and Gaming: A Short Primer
Lauren Collister on Nov 18, 2012In this post, I am going to introduce the methodology of ethnography to this blog, and discuss some of the ways that ethnography can be a useful tool for understanding players of games and their motivations. Jared touched on ethnography in his post...
Interview with Evan Brown of the Carnegie Mellon E...
Travis L. Ross on Oct 8, 2012At GDC last March I spoke with Evan Brown a digital artist working for Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier that day Evan had participated on a GDC panel where he talked about the Augur Project at the Carnegie Mellon ETC. According to the Augur...
The effect of social networks on RMT
Isaac Knowles on Aug 29, 2012Back in January 2012, this paper was published in the journal Information Systems Frontiers. The authors explore several hypotheses of real-life demand for virtual goods, one of which I thought was worth a blog entry, all of which are worth reading...