Game design is typically presented as being benevolent and focusing on giving players positive experiences. However, this may not necessarily be true, for example due to commercial constraints. While it is often easy to find examples of questionable designs when looking at theme or narration in games, this presentation looks at how the gameplay itself can be argued to be dark or when players or others may perceive a game design as having "dark" problems regarding gameplay.
Staffan Björk is a full professor at the department of Applied IT at Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University. He has a PhD in Informatics from Gothenburg University and conducts research within the areas of gameplay design, pervasive games, and interaction design. He was one of the founders of the master’s education in interaction design that started in 2001 at Chalmers and is currently named Interaction Design & Technology. He is also responsible for the master’s education Game Design & Technology that will start at Gothenburg University in 2017. Exploring novel gameplay possibility through information technology has been a primary strand in his research, which often has been conducted within EU-funded projects such as IPerG and TA2. A common theme in his research is to develop a design language for gameplay design. A primary result of this work is the gameplay design patterns concept (see gameplaydesignpatterns.org for the pattern collection with nearly 600 patterns as of 2016) and the book “Patterns in Game Design” co-written with Jussi Holopainen. He has been active in promoting game research as a research discipline, being one of the founders of the Digital Games Research Association and has been one of the program co-chairs for the DiGRA conference between 2014 and 2016. In 2016 he was also one of the general chairs for the NordiCHI 2016 conference.
Refreshments are available in C60 from from 12.00 pm.
University of Nottingham School of Computer Science Nottingham, NG8 1BB
email: mrl@cs.nott.ac.uk