“The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers”/EGL students featured in Games and Culture
Celia Pearce’s report, “The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers,” as well as studies by EGL grad students José Zagal and Betsy DiSalvo, are featured in the current issue of Games & Culture.
Jesper Juul talk March 31st
SPECIAL TALK:
Hardcore players of casual games:
Locating the “casual” in casual games
who: Jesper Juul
when: Monday, March 31st
where: TSRB 132
when: 1:30-2:30 pm
what: Casual games are usually described as relaxing games to be played for short periods of time, but studies have shown that many players of casual games play more than 10 hours a week. In essence, it seems that casual players play in “hardcore” ways. In this talk I will discuss the problematic distinction between “hardcore” and “casual” players by examining the new field of casual games and answering the question: Should we talk about casual games or casual players?
more: Jesper’s blog, The Ludologist, can be found at
http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist
http://www.jesperjuul.net
Clara Fernández-Vara
clara.fernandez[at]gatech.edu
Clara’s research concentrates on the development of videogame theory, focusing on adventure games and the design of players’ experience with the aid of storytelling. She is particularly interested in cross-media artifacts from the standpoint of textual analysis and performance.
GDX at SCAD Atlanta
If you are in the Atlanta Area, it’s worth checking out this years Game Developers Exchange conference. It’s hosted by Savannah College of Art and Design and this years speaker list looks great. Georgia Tech students can register for only $25!
Charles Isbell
Charles L. Isbell, Jr.
isbel[at]cc.gatech.edu
Assistant Professor
Laboratory for Interactive Artificial Intelligence
Intelligent Systems Group
404.385.6491
School of Interactive Computing
College of Computing
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Charles.Isbell/
Although he tends to focus on statistical machine learning, his research passion is actually artificial intelligence. He likes to build large integrated systems, and tends to spend a great deal of time doing research on autonomous agents, interactive entertainment, some aspects of HCI, software engineering and even programming languages.
Amy Bruckman
Amy Bruckman
Is an Associate Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, and a member of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center. She does research on online communities and education, and founded the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group.
Her research applies the “constructionist” philosophy of education to the design of online communities. Constructionism advocates learning through design and construction activities — learning through working on personally meaningful projects. The Internet has a unique potential to make constructionist learning scalable and sustainable in real-world settings, because it makes it easy to provide social support for learning and teaching. In electronic learning communities, participants can help motivate and support one-another’s activities. One focus of her current research is studying open-content publishing environments (like Wikipedia) as constructionist learning environments.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/
Email -
Ashwin Ram
Ashwin Ram
Associate Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Director, Cognitive Computing Lab
Artificial intelligence (AI) for interactive games, including real-time strategy (RTS) games and interactive drama/narrative.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin
Brian Magerko
My research explores artificial intelligence approaches to story management, synthetic characters, and logical representations of story for interactive narratives. My current work is focused on four separate domains: 1) the use of interactive narrative for training and education, 2) intelligent director agents and coordination with synthetic characters, 3) story representation and authoring tools, and 4) the study of real-world interactive drama and improvisation techniques. My interests include:
* intelligent agents
* user modeling
* intelligent tutoring systems
* cognitive architectures
* interactive drama
* narrative theory
* serious games