GAME LECTURES at Rensselaer Fall 2007:

Lecture: Cory Arcangel
WED NOV 7 - 7:30pm
West Hall Auditorium One of the world’s best known new media practitioners, game-hacker Cory Arcangel’s work explores computer programming, P2P, glockenspiel, Bruce Springsteen, Amiga home computers, 80s video art, and the Discrete Cosine Transform function. http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/
short reaction paper due: Nov 14

Lecture: Ernest Adams

THURS NOV 29th
(time and location TBA)
Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories
Design Consultant to Interactive/New Media Industries

Member, International Hobo game design consortium

Abstract: In this lecture Adams will take a second look at the role of challenges in gameplay - how they construct the player's experience and affect his or her emotional response to the game. Starting with a new proposal for determining the difficulty of a challenge, Adams goes on to question the assumption that games should be challenging at all, and make a case for other forms of computerized play beyond the traditional challenge-achievement-reward structure. The lecture also addresses the effect of challenges on storytelling, and discusses how different mechanisms for influencing the plot of a story produce different feelings in the player. The lecture ends with a suggestion for a unifying meta-approach to interactive storytelling that obviates all the debate about the "right way" to design games.