Game Design at Ferienakademie 2010
Prof. Riehle is currently at the Ferienakademie 2010, teaching “serious game” design together with Prof. Bruegge of TU Munich and Prof. Siewiorek of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. Below please find our coverage of Dan’s talks.
The first talk was about the game industry:
Listening to Dan Siewiorek of CMU at Ferienakademie course 1 in Sarntal, Italy http://www.ferienakademie.de #FA2010
Dan Siewiorek of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center is talking about the Game Industry at Ferienakademie #FA2010
Dan: Electronic Arts is 6th largest software product company on the planet, 3 game firms in top 10 #FA2010
Dan: Furby (who remembers?) has four times as much code as the Apollo lunar lander #FA2010
Dan: Design of Pirates of the Caribbean game: Give every family member a role to play #FA2010
Dan: Design criteria for theme park attractions: (a) >3000 ppl/h (b) must run 365 days/year (c) … #FA2010
Dan: Marketing and shock effects: (a) cell phone with your fries? (b) free encyclopedia with your Kraft Singles? #FA2010
Dan: Avg console game: (a) >1M LoC (b) 12-18mth dev time (c) cost >$6M (d) earns more than movie (e) no patches #FA2010
Dan: Massive multi-player games are taken very seriously; vendors get sued over non-availability #FA2010
Dan: Girls don’t like first-person shooters but (by experience) they don’t mind hitting people with a pie #FA2010
Dan: recaptcha is a captcha doing good by supporting OCR on old books (wow, didn’t know!) #FA2010
Dan: People have played 80M hours of Solitaire on Windows – twice the amount of work spent on Empire State Building #FA2010
The second talk by Dan was about game design principles, courtesy of Jessie Schell:
Dan Siewiorek is now talking about Jessie Schell’s principles of themed entertainment and game development #FA2010
Dan Siewiorek of CMU’s ETC on game development: Know your story (including background research) #FA2010
Dan: Everyone (member of family) should have a role to play #FA2010
Dan: Know your audience (market research, user quirks and issues) #FA2010
Dan: Design for “good” interest curves – ups and downs but generally increasing to a max exit #FA2010
Dan: Design for surprises: (a) they are interesting (b) root of all comedy (c) root of all strategy #FA2010
Dan: Design to control expectations (and then meet them, of course) #FA2010
Dan: Lead gradually from the simple to the complex #FA2010
Dan: The art of entertainment is the art of indirect control (in-game incentives, user interface, visual cues etc.) #FA2010