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