Martyn Jones

The Words that could Unlock your Child

Matthew Syed (author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice) provides a concise article on the BBC website about “The words that could unlock your child”.

Recent research shows that we all learn at roughly the same rate, but that high achievers spend more time practicing and studying. Genes do play their part, but the actions an individual takes (especially during childhood) have a greater impact on achievement. Practice during childhood will have such an effect that it will actually affect the development of the brain, allowing the child to specialise. Extra time spent practicing may be a result of extra tuition at home, or increased motivation to practice.

“Intelligence-based praise orients the receiver towards the fixed mindset – it suggests to them that intelligence is of primary importance rather than the effort through which intelligence can be transformed”

This view is backed up by Hetherington et al in Child Psychology: a contemporary viewpoint. The book suggests that children can respond to learning in either a helpless or mastery-orientated fashion. “Helpless” children view intelligence as being dictated by their DNA and are more likely to give-up after a failure.

If we coach children to believe that the amount of effort they apply is a greater determinant of success than any innate ability, we should be able to raise their motivation to continue practicing and studying. This will equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to solve problems and eventually supply them with the successful experiences they need to develop further.

Game Mechanics and Dialogue

Gamasutra has a hat-trick of articles from UCSC’s recent Inventing the Future of Play symposium.

In, “The Listening Player”, Emily Short (interactive fiction writer who made a large contribution to Graham Nelson’s radical new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7) talks about building game-play mechanics out of listening to dialogue. Drawing the user into passive sequences by requiring them to pick out subtle details and use intuition. Of course this needs careful attention to detail on the part of the game designers and content creators too, not to mention the pitfalls of the uncanny valley. This is a mechanic which looks to have been employed by Rockstar’s L.A. Noire.

Graeme Devine (The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour) talks about making the player the lead character in Drawing The Player Into A Story. Whilst believing that your are the main protagonist and that you have the power to cause or prevent change is one thing, I’m not sure that we need to be able to play as ourselves. I guess it depends to what degree this is meant. If a game supports multiple playing styles, it may satisfy a wider group of users. However, games are often a vehicle for escapism and so I don’t necessarily have to project myself completely into the game.

Marilyn Walker, Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Games and Playable Media program’s talks about Generating Natural Language For Game Dialogue. She asks if bigger and bolder games will require Interactive Fiction writers to pen thousands of more lines of dialogue, or if we can create tools to procedurally generate NPC speech. With authentically generated speech, we could create responses specific to the player’s current context. The obvious hurdle is creating dialogue that is as rich as that written by an Interactive Fiction writer.

Little Venice

Boys Building Games for Girls

IGN ran an article recently, “Girl Games and the Boys Who Make Them: Why men still dominate the video game business, and what it’s costing us.” The article addresses the issue of the growing number of female gamers, but the lack of female game makers.

Paul Gouge, President of Playdemic uses the term “binary satisfaction” to refer to the male often black and white differentiation of win and lose, or complete and incomplete. Instead of creating obvious win scenarios, Playdemic design for more sandbox experiences where the user has more freedom in deciding when to progress or finish. However, Gouge also warns that there’s a danger you may end generalising too much, pandering to the female player.

Jennifer Gee, Executive Producer on RockYou’s Zoo World suggest that men are more competitive in gaming where as woman are more social and favour opportunities for self-expression.

However, despite some subtle differences in game-play mechanics, both audiences seek high production quality throughout.