Play&Game

Hey Kids,
Almost two weeks ago now, FinnAir flight AY812 landed in Helsinki.
I was on that flight.

Four hours later, I sat naked in a very small room, surrounded by a few other men, who were also naked and a fair bit older then me.

At the summer school about cross media (Trans-média, cross-média, média global: de l’album singulier aux écrans multiples), organised by the national French comics centre in Angoulême (Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image) also games popped up in various debates.
Benoît Berthou of university Paris 13 stated that while people are gradually reading less books, they are spending more time before a screen (in France the average is about 12 hours a week). For him cross media respond to a demand from the public. The cost for the development of game is about 5 million euro and involves about 100 people – which is quite different from the production of a book. He referred also to the sales figures of Blizzard Entertainment, the firm that launched World of Warcraft, with its 3,28 billion euro it surpasses the sales figures of the complete French book industry (about 2,8 billion euro). So it won’t be books that will be central in cross media enterprises, but rather games.
Books or comics about those games do only exist, because they help to sell the game even better. For example Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is in fact a creation of Ubisoft and the The Splinter Cell novels are written under the pseudonym David Michaels by different authors. So books, be it comics or novels, become more of a derived product, also in France a firm as Ankama started with a game, but gradually went cross media and created works in other media about the same universe.
At summer school also Nicolas Devos, the lead script writer at Ankama and responsible for the backgrounds and cohesion of the scripts for the online multiplayer game worlds of Dofus and Wakfu , was one of the invited guest speakers. He explained that part of their game is free accessible but with limited functionalities, for only 5 euro one can have all the functionalities. Nicolas Devos said that some 30 million people play Dofus in 9 languages, some 250.000 play it simultaneously. They started with Dofus and developed later a sequel Wakfu, with a tv-series (on French, German, Polish and Marokkan television) and various other realisations (comics, illustrated books). Devos explained that it was quite difficult to keep such a steadily growing universe coherent and to make sure that all the employees of Ankama know the finesses the fictive universes. On the other hand, Ankama was not afraid to let a Japanese animation studio realize a bonus episode for television. The result did not look like the Ankama universe, but the French considered it as a way of renewing their approach. At the start, in 2001, they were already inspired by Japanese models. Today Ankama employs some 450 people.

Under the LSM program (Limburg Sterk Merk: Limburg strong brand), the MAD-faculty in Hasselt and Genk (Belgium) obtained substantial fundings in order to stimulate the research at PHL and MDA through doctoral fellowships, starting next academic year 2010-11. In total it concerns 7 full-time PhD-fellowships for four years in arts & design research.

The proposed project and research question of the applicant will have to match the theme of one of the MAD-faculty research groups, among them Play&Game (see our mission statement under ‘About’). In addition, there has to be a potential for upgrading the Limburg region. There are several substantive criteria that the application must meet. The detailed call is attached in the documents below (in dutch).

Interested? Contact the Play&Game research group coordinators Dirk Kenis (PHL)
or Veerle Van der Sluys (MDA).

Documents:

Oproep doctoraatsbeurzen
informatiedossier doctoraatsbeurzen LSM-MAD
sjabloon aanvraagdossier doctoraatsbeurzen LSM-MAD op project
sjabloon aanvraagdossier doctoraatsbeurzen LSM-MAD op naam

During the C-MD “Play” master class at the MAD Faculty, master students were asked to create mini-games for 15 year old college students. These games were expected to cover a well-defined learning unit from their biology, math and French classes. Master and college students created the games in co-design and paper prototyping workshops. The learning units were converted into interactive prototypes that mainly aimed to motivate and engage the college students. Playability of the games was tested during user tests. The results of this master class were used in the Gimme, Gimme, Gimme a game project.

Very nice presentation on the meaning of game and play in the learning process: