News

  • UC Santa Cruz offers professional degree in games and playable media
    Tuesday, May 21, 2013
    The University of California, Santa Cruz, has established a new master's (M.S.) degree program in Games and Playable Media offered from the UCSC Silicon Valley site in Santa Clara. This innovative professional degree program will give students a strong background in advanced technologies used in the development of computer games and other interactive media.
  • Noah Wardrip-Fruin Visits Drexel University to Discuss the Future of Game Research
    Monday, May 20, 2013
    There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in video games these days, and I don’t just mean within the digital space. There was a very cool lecture last week by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, associate professor of Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. He spoke at the URBN Center at Drexel University, giving his talk, “Growing the Tech Tree: Researching the Future of Gaming,” which posed thought-provoking questions to the undergraduate and graduate audience in attendance.
  • IFOG2013: Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder
    Saturday, May 11, 2013
    This story has game spoilers. Brenda Romero made a board game in her kitchen that she calls Train, but she never intended to show it to anyone. There is no easy way to explain why such a game should exist, and it’s certainly unlikely anyone would ever agree to sell it. But it is clearly the kind of game that pushes the boundaries of what you would consider to be an entertainment experience.
  • IFOG2013: How Imagineers build engaging stories into Disney theme parks
    Saturday, May 11, 2013
    Disney has found that it can improve the experience and engagement of its guests at its theme parks by building deeper stories and light adventures into the settings and rides. In doing so, it brought lessons from movies and video games into the real world of guest entertainment.
  • IFOG2013: Warren Spector wants game designers to work on non-combat A.I.
    Friday, May 10, 2013
    Noted game developer Warren Spector has a long list of things that game designers can do to improve storytelling in video games. But one of those the force behind Deus Ex and Epic Mickey wants is to improve the quality of non-combat artificial intelligence characters. These computer-controlled characters are just too dumb, especially in comparison to the more refined and flexible combat A.I. characters that try to kill you as the player. Once the non-combat characters are fixed, game designers will be able to make big leaps toward better stories in games, and that could lead to a wider audience — and a less bored community of hardcore gamers. Spector spoke at an interactive storytelling conference at the Computer History Museum. The event was sponsored by the Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The aim is to guide the next generation of video game creators. Spector’s annoyance with non-combat AI is a pet peeve.
  • IFOG2013: Use the storytelling tools that work for games
    Friday, May 10, 2013
    Warren Spector is well known for focusing on creating games where players can make meaningful choices. At a talk at the UC Santa Cruz's Inventing the Future of Gaming symposium, he set out to ask an important question, even perhaps the central question that defines his work: Can we level up game stories without compromising gameplay?
  • IFOG2013: Time to move on from the gameplay vs. story debate
    Friday, May 10, 2013
    As the director of UC Santa Cruz's Center for Games and Playable Media, Michael Mateas aims to solve the problem of game storytelling procedurally -- that's his mission, and the work the Center is undertaking is generally along this line. But in his talk this morning at IFOG -- Inventing the Future of Gaming symposium -- he didn't champion any one way of doing things. Instead, he urged developers to ignore the debate around whether games should have stories and get to work making the best story games they can. "We're really ready to move beyond these sterile debates on interactive and gameplay," he said, "In a sense, we've arrived."
  • Interactive storytelling symposium on May 10 explores the future of games
    Thursday, April 25, 2013
    Games have the power to transform the way stories are told. New ways to craft and deliver narratives using advanced game designs and technologies will be the focus of Inventing the Future of Games 2013: Interactive Storytelling Symposium on Friday, May 10, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
  • Jane Pinckard in: Threeview: Bioshock Infinite
    Tuesday, April 16, 2013
    We’ve heard nothing but near-universal love for BioShock Infinite, so we didn’t expect the game to be very polarizing. But one of our Threeview reviewers wasn’t as crazy about the recently released shooter (PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) as we expected her to be. At the same time, one of our other reviewers liked it a lot more than we thought. It just goes to show how little we actually know about our guest writers and their crazy opinions.
  • UCSC receives one of 23 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants from the NEH
    Monday, April 8, 2013
    The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 23 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2012 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 205 grants just announced by the NEH.
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