Half way through GDIII and Richard Evans giving invited talk today

We are half-way through the Game Design III course in the Masters of Digital Games at Malta University. In this course we look at AI and computational intelligence approaches useful for game design. We also look tools for, and ways to conceptualize, game design, doing some hands-on work in workshops trying out tools and methods.

Last Seminar was about Interactive Narrative, so we looked at stuff like Tale Spin and STRIPS. For the theoretical grounding we turned to Ryans’ Avatars of Story. In the workshop we tried the story modeling tool that Ulrike Springer told me about at ICIDS. It turned out to be a very concrete way to demonstrate how STRIPS type planning can be used used when conceptualizing stories for games.



We also looked at some of the big applications that have emerged on the game scene the past decade, and I again noted that Richard Evans has been pioneering all over the place when it comes to systems that can result in emergent narrative. Then, the day after the seminar I got an email that the latest thing him and Emily Short has been working on, Versu, was released! It is a true interactive series of interactive narratives inspired by the storyworld of Jane Austen, and can be read/played on the IPad. In today’s seminar Richard will skype in and tell us all about it.

Today’s seminars theme is Characters and agents, so we will talk about what characterization and true character can mean for games. For that we are picking up an old article Steve Meretzky wrote for Gamasutra in 2003 - in that he manages to lightheartedly cram in many of my favorite theorists almost seamlessly. System wise we are reading papers about BDI, OCC, Brooks subsumption architecture. Classic stuff and how the roots of some approaches made games like F.E.A.R, the Sims, and Black&White possible. Then, in the workshop, we will have a stab at making some conversational agents. If we get time we will try a card game, Game Seeds, that can help generate character based games as a result of the game play. Or we leave that for next week’s seminar, which has the theme of procedural generation.

Disk management is Datorhantering in a Swedish OS

diskmanagement-is-datorhantering-in-swedish, a photo by mimmi on Flickr.

Not to self and others that might save time>
in Swedish, "Disk management" is "Datorhantering" in a windowsbased OS.
This is good to know when a hard drive doesn't show up in explorer, and one needs to format the whole thing.


diskmanagement-is-datorhantering-in-swedish

Teaching Game Design at the Masters of Digital Games at the University of Malta.

This fall I have been teaching a study unit on Game Design at our Masters in Digital Game at the University of Malta. This is the first year we teach the course, and we are starting with a small group of students. We can be flexible and find individual solutions in case our structure isn't optimal this first time around. Except me teaching at the masters' there is Rilla Khaled who teaches game design with me, there is Gordon Calleja and Costatino Oliva who teaches game analysis, and there is Georgios Yannakakis who, together with two teachers from ICT, teaches computing science for game development. We also have a fourth strand in the masters, which is commercialization and project management. This is taught by industry professionals, this year by the CTO of TRC.

I have been teaching game design and related subject since 2004, but somehow it always feels like it is the first time. During the summer of 2012 I planned this introductory course in game design, but as soon as got hold of the students' contact details I sent out a survey to them to get an idea about previous experience in both the playing of games and of developing them.

This is the short description of the course:

"The course address the role of the game designer, the structure of games, how to work with formal elements as well as dramatic, and ways to approach system dynamics. Students work in groups and conceptualize and prototype smaller games."

Concerns

I had several concerns while I was planning the course. How to balance theory and practice? Were to begin - which topics need we start with, and which can wait? How do we make sure the group dynamics work out? And what about creating a safe environment for experimentation despite that their work is graded?

I'll go through my main concerns, listing them, and describe how I aimed to solve them. Then, I'll tell you how it went!

- What to teach them - where do I start, and in what order should I place the content?

I decided to use a course book as a basic skeleton for the course. I had, unconsciously, already decided to use Tracy Fullerton's book Game Design Workshop, but just in case I would like to change my mind I browsed through the rest of my design library. I stuck with Fullerton's book because it is the one that put most weight on prototyping and play-testing, and does so in a very concrete way. This agrees with how I like to work in design. As recommended reading I added chapters from other books for certain topics, such as Bates' chapters on what project documents are useful in game productions.

Also on the list of recommended reading is Brathwaite's “Challenges for Game Designers”.
It has an excellent and condensed introduction chapter defining important terms and approaches. The remainder of the book contains design challenges/exercises for different types of games and game contexts.
Another one is Koster's "A Theory of Fun". This book has had a large impact on the vocabulary used in the area of game design. Koster just gave a speech at GFC Online (October 2012) taking the perspective of "ten years after" - that is, ten years after the publication of the book. The slides for the talk are here: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdco12/Koster_Raph_Theory_Fun_10.pdf.
Yet another great book on game design is Schell's The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. If I had not used Fullerton's Game Design Workshop as the main course book I would have used this one.

-  How to achieve a balance between theory and practice? Students need the practice to appreciate the theory, and they need the theory when working practically. (This is something Jesse Schell have been blogging about too)

I had seven seminars and seven workshops to work with. Part of the first one would go to overview and introduction, and the end would be the final seminar. I considered what they absolutely HAVE to know about the design, and what they MUST learn to do and think about when designing. I plucked those topics, and then added workshops where they would apply the knowledge in the topics. This meant that I was not using the order in Fullerton's book, but I could still use the full chapters for different seminars.

Given the large amount of time that it would take for the students to complete the assignments they needed to do in order to practice game design I aimed to only add the absolutely necessary texts as reading assignments. Besides the selected chapters in Fullerton's book I only added two texts as mandatory reading: one about Hunicke and LeBlanc's MDA model and the other about Dorman's Machination framework.

In the first seminar the students got to choose from the course literature about which texts to champion. This text, they would in one of the seminars present to their co-students and prepare a discussion about.

There is  a list of the topics we had at the seminars, and a list of workshops and assignments in the end of this post.

- How do I make sure that they early get practical experience of designing different types of games? (There is a risk of individuals getting so immersed in one idea or problem that they do not want to focus on anything else.)

It turned out that this particular group of students all were graduated computing scientists and many of them had partaken in game development projects. I decided that even though they would be able to create digital prototypes from start, I would encourage them to stay with pen and paper. This way they would be able to quickly try several different designs, and they wouldn't get distracted by coding problems. During the first three weeks they prototyped three different games. Then, they got to choose one of them to develop further. This game was play-tested and iterated for three more weeks.  I hoped that this would help them to have their focus on the core design as well as on the experience their certain design might result in for the player.

- How do I cater for good group dynamics in the student groups? (Or at least be prepared to sort out things if it becomes terrible.)

I planned for having two occasions for group division. In the first seminar I divided them into two groups using coin flips, thus making a random group division. Then, after having made their first three game designs they would be able to change groups for the second half of the course. This would make sure that if two persons who for some reason cannot work out their differences would be able to change groups. In the one of the game design exercises a beginning task was to fill in a Meyers-Briggs Personality test - I added it in as part of the exercise so that they might use personality properties of some kind of system as part of the design of a game that contains characters. I hoped for a secondary effect where they would be aware of each other's strengths as individuals when working in groups. In my experience shortcomings of others are easier to accept and overcome when one have concrete knowledge (or some kind of belief or interpretation) of others strengths.

- On Malta, student's work is graded. How would I make sure to create an environment where student feel that they can be creative, where they take risks, and where they are not mentally frozen by performance anxiety?

I divided the assignments I gave into those that would be graded and not graded. All the design exercises except the final deliveries were to stay without grade. At the same time, the final deliveries would report on and be a result on what they had been producing during the course. But then, they would have been able to pick one of three designs they liked best, and had been able to iterate that design several times.

How it went

I have the impression that the course went well. The students had a 100% attendance. They delivered 100% of their assignments, and not a single one of them was late. For me this is the very first time that has happened. The group of students was very small, and they all had responsibilities in the seminars, so that could have been a reason. But still: Highscore! They also volunteered for extra work, and went the extra mile of doing the extra exercises.  When the students had handed in their final assignments (an individual short-paper, a production report, a game design document and a game prototype) I was quite impressed by their work. They had managed to create games, describe how they did it, showing that they had understanding for the process. I had played the games with a colleague the day before the seminar, so I could get them some feedback on that too. Next year I'll schedule more time for playing the students' games though, in order to get time to explore all features. For their individual short papers I had asked them to define an important design problem and give suggestions for how to explore the same.  Here, they all had picked very interesting and relevant topics, which we spent most of the last seminar discussing these.

Ending discussion

I had created an online survey for the students to fill in, but some topics I wanted to ask them about face to face. In the last seminar we spent half an hour discussing the course. What had worked and what had not worked?

 It seems that the balance between theory and practice had worked well - the students had recognised that they were, in the workshop, practising the same skills and topics they had been discussing in the seminar the same day.

The workload seems to have been fairly well adjusted. I was worried that I had given them too much (see list of assignment and bear in mind that they had 3 other courses running in parallel). But they had appreciated the incremental nature of the workload, that they got week-sized chunks of work, and then one week to assemble the work into their final deliveries. They also said that they liked to have this 4 hour marathon (2 hours seminar, 2 hours workshop) rather than dividing their day. I had been worried about that too.

They were generally happy with the clarity of instruction, but would have wanted to learn more about table top RPGs before getting the task of designing one. Next year that could be a part of assignments.

They had really appreciated the guest lecturer from TRC, Jade Pecorella, who talked about how game design is communicated and documented in the projects where she works as a designer.

They had also liked the way they were each championing parts of the course materials, so that (no offence they hastened to say) not only the professor talks all the time, and that it is easier to learn when one has to explain to someone else.

It was difficult to squeeze out something negative of them, but that's what the anonymous survey is for. I told them to think about it as a play-test. If I don't know what's wrong, I can't fix it.  

The next course I will teach will be focussed on AI based game design and prototyping/sketching tools and methods. I really look forward to it. I need to make sure that even if this group are all computing scientists I need to design a course that is meaningful and useful for non-computing scientists too. By the way, there is a quite common understanding that computing scientists or 'coder types' would be less creative than others. This is wrong. Not that we would be MORE creative. Just that we are just as creative as the rest of the population. At least, this is my belief after having witnessed the process of game creation in this group that consists only of computing scientists. (Also - take a poet. Teach her how to program. Will she be less creative when she has more knowledge?)

Our students rock. It's an honour to get to be their teacher.

***************************************************************

List of topics

The list below is presented in the order they appear in the course.

Brainstorming and Conceptualization methods                  

The role of the game designer                       

The structure of games         

Prototyping methods             

Formal Elements                     

MDA - a formal Approach to Game Design and Research (paper)             

Working with Dramatic Elements                 

Play testing    

System Dynamics

Functionality, Completeness and Balance

Simulating Mechanics to Study Emergence (paper on Machinations)     

Revisiting Brainstorming and Conceptualization (creativity in the long run discussion)

Game Design Document (Communicating Game Design)

*****************************************************************

List of mandatory Assignments

Presenting chapters from the course book and papers to the seminar (in seminar and assignment) (graded)

Brainstorming Exercises (in workshop)      (not-graded)

Writing my first treatment (assignment)    (not-graded)

Making my first paper prototype (in workshop & assignment) (not graded)                   

Modifying a Battleship Prototype (in workshop) (not graded)                 

Making a Table top role-playing game prototype (in workshop and assignment) (not graded)

The first play-testing and writing a play test-script (assignment) (not graded)              

Play-testing using the other group as testers (in workshop) (not graded)                       

Writing the game design document (in workshop and as assignment)   (graded)

Writing your production report (assignment) (graded)   

Finalizing your prototype for delivery (assignment) (graded)                  

Writing your short-paper (assignment) (graded)               

The text seminar - presenting and questioning a colleague's text. (At the end of the course) (not-graded)

ICIDS Photo Diary Tuesday

 Tuesday morning: Michael, David and Federico initialize the conference.

I was first out giving an invited talk, and I could start before schedule given that everyone was in place - that was great, I didn't have to feel pressed for time and talk quickly in order to get to say everything I want to say.

I started my talk by telling about a letter I got this summer from a Masters' student in Canada. He had read the thesis on Story Construction I wrote in 2001/2002 and wondered about my thoughts on how the field have advanced during the past decade. Since I got that letter I've been thinking a lot about this, and realized that there have been huge strides made. Even though it often feels like trampling in the mud, and that the area just creates tool after tool that no author wants to touch, and that we just keep doggedly chasing after grails that we don't even know if they exist... We have found pretty cool goblets on the way, and that constant chase is what can keep us going. I named a few of the grails many of us keep looking for, then, I gave a recount on my journey, and what I found on the way. I told about the play-testing about the Pataphysic institute, of how players
- simultaneously use mental models of how a mind works and that of MMORPG role taking in battle,
- how they co-create boss monsters with the system, and how intense it can become when they play, and an autonomous entity in the game bleeds in meaning from the real world, but how that is re-interpreted in dialog when players cooperate to neutralise the negative feelings that these boss monsters represent,
- how players attribute intentionality to the autonomous entities despite that they even authored them themselves. Still, they read in and interpret their behaviour as if was something that would have its own will.

Then I went on to note that we have indeed achieved to come closer to some of the grails we thought about ten years ago. For example, we know now thanks to the Sims series, that it indeed is possible to have a sandbox world as a basis for performing actions that in turn can be a sequence of event that, when retold, actually becomes an engaging narrative. The blog stories of Alice and Kev is an example of that. Another dream, an authoring environment that can take the rules implied in language and use them in a functional way is manifest in Inform 7 and its constant development. And "the book that writes itself", generative planned stories, we are coming along in that area too. Of that, Richard Evans' and Emily Shorts Versu is a prime example. Richard talked about this the day after. It felt really nifty that we had worked together on our talks the day before, because then I could just talk about this, our past grails and where we seem to be now, grail-wise, because then, on the last day of the conference, Noah gave a talk on the future of digital interactive narrative. Along the conference I noted that one of the grails that shine most brightly is that of the automated game master. That is, something more than the state of the art/general idea of an automated story manager. An automated game master would also use the game mechanics afforded in a game world together with judgements about how to use plot-points, story-beats, levels of dramatic tension and what-not. Of course, the idea of automating, or having support for the human game master of a table top or live action game is not new, it was just, as topics go, quite a shiny one.

ICIDS was a single track conference, which I was thankful for. I get so frustrated of this condition that you have gone somewhere to be, and to see, and to participate, but then anyway ending up feeling that one misses crucially interesting talks all the time, because one has to choose. (GDC solves this by having the GDC Vault where the talks are recorded, that's the only reason I don't go nuts there).

Below are some pictures of how the day in this blissfully single track continued. The conference program is available here: http://icids2012.vicomtech.tv/files/Program.pdf

In the evening, we had a delightful time. I took a picture of myself and Hartmut, and tried to take it the same way as last time I saw him, which was seven years ago when we were both at Georgia Tech. We were about fifteen-twenty people, and we did dinner the way that seem to be the local custom: to go from different bars and have a pinto at each one. Many interesting conversations, I was for example very intrigued to hear about Uli Spierling's work of using the STRIP planning language as the base for a prototype that let authors experiment with interactive Storytelling.

2012:

2005

ICIDS Diary, Monday

 I run into Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Richard Evans at the hotel, and it turns out that all three of us still need to work some more on our talks. We have a working session in the lobby, before joining the others for dinner.
 
I have this idea to try to use less walls of text and more illustrations than I normally do. But I'm afraid that I'll forget what to say unless I have the text available, so I have decided to try using index cards.
 
For dinner David Oyarzun, the general chair, takes us into San Sebastian, and we have a brief stare at the cathedral. We find a place in a former bull-fighting that can accommodate all of us. I think we are around 15 to 20 persons. On the bar a selection of pintos are served from which we can select. In the Baskian parts of Spain tapas are called pintos, and are a bit more elaborate (or that's what people tell me, I wouldn't know).
 
We don't stay too late, and back at the hotel Noah is kind enough to listen me practicing the talk I am to give the next day and giving me some good advice. I had overdone the picture part, that's for sure. We also came up with a title! "The Grails of Interactive Storytelling". Luckily there is still time for revision.


ICIDS: The Fifth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

A prototype from WRPG'12

 

In the afternoon of the WRPG workshop (see previous post) we sat down to do some prototyping. Anne had brought lots of colorful prototype materials, such as glass tokens and modeling clay.

We started with throwing out ideas for questions to explore. Some of the ones I remember were:

•  Use Mark's general proposal for how to first think about a concept, and see how it can be represented as a game mechanic. Then break out said game mechanic, implement it in isolation, and see if it really do represent the concept in question. 
• Given the rich body of work in philosophy regarding how we as humans are to act – isn’t it curious that most systems governing agent action selection is based on utility and maximizing the agents own success? What other ways can we use for creating principles for agent-action selections?
• Experiment with constitutive rule systems rather than restrictive ones. 

We spent perhaps half an hour brainstorming questions until we formulated what question to work with:

How can we model a non-utilitaristic ethics system? 

With non-utlilitaristic* we meant that the agents would be motivated by other things that being motivated by their own success (measured by context and utility).

We decided to have a world where there is stuff. And that agents can own stuff.
We outlined some of the affordances.

It is possible for an agent to want to:
- Have.
- To not have.
- To give
- To take
- To share

 We started to outline some principles, such as:
- Everyone should have everything
- Utilitarianism (action to maximise ‘goodness’, no matter to whom the goodness goes to, as long as it is maximized
– according to common or individual view of what goodness is)
- Everyone should have an equal amount of stuff.

 Then, we started to put more and more principles and wants onto playing cards in order to use them as constitutive rules. Here are a few of them:

 

Some of them were principles of ethics, such as “give to the rich” or “everyone should have an equal amount.” Other where more gamey, such as “you only want green stuff”. Other cards we had to discard, because they went outside the affordances of the game. Such as “You should be tidy” was not possible for an agent to do. Green stuff was possible to use because we had green items on the table, and agents could acquire them. …And even though we agreed to not equip our agents with needs and desires outside approaches to ownership of stuff, we made sure to grab some cookies for them in the break.

 We divided ourselves so that we had 3 agents, played by Emmett, Anne and Jonas Linderoth. Elina and I formed a player-team, and Jon and Mark formed the other. We decided that each play team could give 3 rule/principle cards to one agent, and two cards to the third agent.

Each play team could instantiate one agent each, and both have impact on the third. The cards were closed teams couldn’t see each others’ cards. Each team could choose from half of the total deck, not knowing what cards were in the other teams half of the deck. Once the agents got their rule cards they could start acting (turn-based).

Anne, Emmet and Jonas started acting, and we threw down a list of possible actions:

 

We were also curious about how Jon’s Designscape method would work in practice, so we tried the method during the workshop. Jon would occasionally ask us about how we rated the different design aspects of our game.  Three times during the process we gave a rating between 1 and 6 on how much we trusted certain design aspects. Here are the aspects we rated:

1 Players explore the ethical principles of the agents
2 Building your own ethic system Agent
3 Your agent can interact with others agents
4 Evolution from survival to music taste
5 Your agent can pick up values from other Agents
6 Underlying ethical principles as guidelines
7 The agent interaction format
8 Global rules of interaction
9 Agents that are your own, others and shared

With Jon's tool it would be possible to see a 3 dimensional representation on how we subjectively rate them, with a time progression, something like this.  For the second round we had the list of actions, and we also wrote some new cards for rules. We took out some cards that had been difficult for the agents to use. Those were cards that described principles or rules that the agents lacked ways of implement, as they were not afforded by the list of actions or by what things were available on the board. Oh, we also tidied up the table and placed on a board what would be able for the agents to take/give/destroy. For the second round we also ordered the rules for the agents in priority so that they would know how to prioritize among their principles/rules/goals. Here is a picture of Jonas' agent (made by Mark and Jon) in the second round:




There were a couple of fun instances. When Emmet suddenly reached out and took a bite from Jonas’ cookie. (he was destroying an item). Jonas being really happy about it, because he then got another unique item, something he had in one of is cards. Another, Emmet suddenly throwing a bag of blue stones over his shoulder again following his agent's "destroy-item" principle. We laughed a lot.

 

What I was especially happy, and positively surprised, about was how we almost magically implemented so many of the ideas that we talked about in the beginning of the session, in our initial half-hour of brain storming. We had actions AND action selections being pretty much constitutive given the cards. The agents did express different types of principles, even if it was so limited in terms of affordances. The ownership aspect was well chosen, and it was good that it was done so early in the session, which actually only lasted for three hours. It was also nice with the different decks of cards for the play groups, using some some similar mechanics as Dominion and Fluxx - that is that rules and afforances can change with the composition of the deck or cards in "the hand", or in our case, the principle card our "agents" got as instructions for how to choose to take action. We even implemented someones comment about creating a player "robot", authored by the co-players (that would be the agents).

Shared cognition bonanza. What a great group!

---

*non-utlilitaristic is, I see in retrospect, a bit unfortunately named, since one naturally associates to utilitarianism, where the it is considered good to strive for the maximum overall goodness rather than maximizing the goodness for self. It was exactly -ism like that we wanted to think about how to implement. We used the term because we were thinking of utility - normally one strives to make agents that maximize their own success given different parameters. Those parameters can change depending on context, giving different action choices different values. What we meant with the naming (that we didn't discuss like this in the workshop) was that we wanted agents that could make choices that could follow other principles of action that maximizing value and/or success for individual agent. ...and yes, one could argue that in that case one would put that as a success criteria for the agent and that would end up the same - but it is beside the point. Point: agents with different ethical systems.

Workshop on Research Prototyping in Games - Morning sessions

 In the end of May Elina Ollila, Anne Sullivan and I held the Workshop on Research Prototyping in Games [http://wrpg.fdg2012.org/], in Raleigh, NC in junction with the FDG conference.

I started out in the morning with the welcome speech, presenting the scope for the workshop, as well as the schedule. We also did a short presentation round gauging what expectations everyone had for the day. In short, the scope of the workshop was to address how actual hands on prototyping work can, as a method, potentially yield knowledge that would not otherwise emerge. The work process can also yield new interesting questions because often, the resolution of one problem can reveal new interesting problems. For this workshop we asked for submissions of prototypes that are built specifically to explore certain problems or areas of investigation. We gathered a program committee consisting of equal amounts of persons working in the industry and universities respectively, all with extensive experience in the area. 

The first speaker was Mark Nelson, presenting Prototyping Kant-inspired Reflexive Game Mechanics. Mark presented varieties of two prototypes in order to illustrate Kant’s maxim that one should only do actions that one thinks can be made into universal rules. For example, if one steals, then one would see that as something that would be OK for everyone to do, or even should do.

One Prototype Mark showed was a Pac Man style game where it was possible to break down the walls, and where each hole in the wall became permanent. The other prototype was a variety of chess where it was possible to change the rules, for example get a pawn to behave as a knight. 

In both cases Kant’s maxim was exemplified in that an action was propagated as a rule change, elevating the action to a universal rule. Something that was rewarding to see was that other aspects of game mechanics became interesting in a new way too as a side effect of the exploration of Kantian rule. (Such as how power-ups can be considered to be rule-breakers in some contexts.) 


I kept thinking about constitutive rule systems, something that Richard Evans mentioned at a seminar on AI for games in Dagstuhl a few weeks ago. Most rule systems are restrictive rather than constitutive, meaning that the whole rule system is there from the beginning, but that different actants within the system are restricted to certain parts of the rules. Like in a computer role playing game, a character of a certain class can do what the class dictates, depending on the circumstances, being restricted to a part of the rule system. Constitutive rules on the other hand are, as the name suggest, constituted during play. One example is the card game Dominion, and another is the system Evans and Short are building where a character's action potential is defined by what social practices they are currently engaged in. At least that is how I understand the terms. I might be wrong. I digged, after a reference from Richard E., into a paper by John Rawls on the topic: "Two Concepts of Rules" (1955). 


To me it seems that what Mark is doing is to take a fixed restrictive rule system, chess, and add constitutional rules to it. In play tests it turned out, not surprisingly, that if rules could be freely changed the game quickly became unplayable (too large combinations space), while that with a few restrictions it was more playable... writing this I remember someone in the audience talking about some interesting chess-hybrid, but the name escapes me. Anyhow, I appreciated Mark's talk a lot; to me it showed that prototyping using computational processes can actually illustrate philosophical stances, which is awesome. Other interesting work in the area is Julian Togelius work on the same maxim by Kant. I also have a fuzzy memory of Richard Evans using his B&W code in an experiment to simulate something...philosophical (argh - beating memory with a stick, but it doesn't help).

Our second speaker was Emmet Tomai, who presented An MMORPG Prototype for Investigating Adaptive Quest Narratives and Player Behavior. Emmet showed the prototype which is built in Unity 3D, using the SmartFox Server 2X and MySQL. Emmet and his colleagues are investigating how it can be possible to improve "trade-off between the ability for authors to tell motivating narratives and the ability for players to change the world", which in my humble opinion is one of the most important issues of gaming to address. And in order to do so they need to build something own from scratch. My applauds! In this phase they are experimenting with different types of quest generation. (Very close to what Anne is doing.)  I'll be following their future work as closely as I can.  

After the break we had two speeches about methods for prototyping. Jon Manker presented his game prototyping the tool DesignScape, which we actually tried out in the afternoon prototyping session, and Elina gave an overview of different prototyping- and assessment methods.

We went to lunch together, talking about what to prototype in the afternoon. I'll write about that in the next post.