My last post was over a year ago having just returned from DiGRA'19 in Kyoto. Covid-19 decided to come along and plonk itself squarely in the middle of everybody's best-laid plans, including mine. But still, there are numerous successes to report amongst the chaos!
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is available on PS4, XBox One, and Switch via the Amnesia Collection
Yes I'm a bit late to this news, given that the Amnesia Collection actually released on Switch last year, completing its multi-platform console release, but better late than never! Machine for Pigs is also still attracting over 20,000 related video views per day on YouTube - good going indeed for a 7-year-old game I'd say.
Empathy Games, Values-driven Design, and Interpretive Play Publications
My PhD students have had a productive year too with multiple co-authored publications. Adam Jerrett, recently appointed as a new games lecturer on our team, has published his first two papers proposing an Empathy Spectrum for games analysis and design, alongside an extensive analysis and consolidated discussion of the wide-ranging literature around values-driven design in games.
Meanwhile Matthew Higgins, alongside working away furiously on the final stages of his thesis, successfully published a paper in the 2020 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS). This focused on the core component of his research: the notion of interpretive play and the psychology of optimal arousal during play.
References
Higgins, M. & Howell, P. (2020). Interpretive play and the player psychology of optimal arousal regulation. In: Bosser AG., Millard D.E., Hargood C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12497. Springer.
Jerrett, A. M. L., Howell, P. & Dansey, N. (2020). Developing an empathy spectrum for games. Games and Culture. Advance Online Publication.
Jerrett, A. M. L., Howell, P. & Dansey, N. (2020). Creating meaningful games through values-driven design. In proceedings of DiGRA'20: Play Everywhere.