Making Games Seminar. What did we learn?
Risto Haljas provides insights a very interesting event for all the game developers out there. Time to talk about the Making Games Seminar in Finland.
April 24-25 2018 were busy days for our development department as I and Georgi from the narrative side made a road trip to Tampere with Pinon from our barking and retrieving department. We all had a mutual goal - to participate in the Making Games Seminar.
Making Games (this year’s theme) was the 14th annual international spring seminar organized by University of Tampere Game Research Lab, with different theme and commentators each year. This year’s commentators were Annakaisa Kultima and Casey O’Donnell (who has given lectures and a lot of inspiration to Risto through Coursera.
In general, the seminar emphasizes work-in-progress submissions, late breaking results, working papers, and submissions from graduate and PhD students. The purpose of the seminar is to have peer-to-peer discussions and thereby provide support in refining and improving research work in this area.
The programme was packed - 19 different work-in-progress papers to be presented and discussed. As these are not published yet, we will give just a brief overview about the topics covered - from different aspects of game design to paratexts, from game jams to LARP, from different regions to some certain company analysis - all carrying the same purpose, to get a deep insight to game-related topics. And these are serious topics with serious emphasis on research. To be honest, the world is not the same anymore after getting all this information.
What was the most important take-home message? When designing a game with a purpose as we are doing, common game creation rules might not apply anymore and we are are in a need of more knowledge how serious game development differs from game development in general.
To conclude, we were really happy to participate in such an event, seemed maybe a little academical at first glance, but realising how much work and effort has put into these papers and organising this event, team Triumf sincerely is thankful and hopefully all the participants get their papers published. Team Triumf can assure, reading them will be a worthwhile!
The end of April wasn’t full of new info only for our dev side people. Riin was giving a poster presentation in Montreal and Kadri was pitching in the finals of the Medical Capital Innovation Competition in Cleveland. Stay tuned for these stories!
