Programme
| 09:00 | Registration - coffee and croissant |
| 09:30 | Welcome and Introduction to PLAYER by organizers: Ene Katrine Rasmussen, Simon Løvind, and Kristine Ploug |
| 10:00 | The Gamer Motivation Profile: What We Learned from 250,000 Gamers Nick Yee |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:30 | Different Cultures, Different Video Games Mahdi Bahrami |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30 | Designing Better Games for An Older Audience Bob de Schutter |
| 14:30 | The Player Defines the Game Anne Mette Thorhauge |
| 15:00 |
Reaching The New Audience - How To Write About Games for The (So-called) Non-gamers - And Why That's Important |
| 15:30 | Creative Europe MEDIA: Support for Development of European Video Games Ene Katrine Rasmussen, Head of Office, Creative Europe MEDIA Desk Denmark |
| 15:40 | Drinks & Networking |
Programme descriptions
The Gamer Motivation Profile: What We Learned From 250,000 Gamers
Gamers are not a monolithic group. Understanding how gaming motivations vary across gamers provides actionable insights for game design, production, and marketing. By analyzing data from over 250,000 gamers, Quantic Foundry has identified a robust model of how gaming motivations cluster together and are related to each other. In this talk, you’ll learn about the 3 key motivation clusters we identified, how these clusters are related to basic personality traits, and how these motivations do and do not vary by gender and age. Via case studies and specific findings, you’ll get an overview of how empirical assessment of gaming motivations is possible and can surface market opportunities that are hiding in plain sight.
Speaker: Nick Yee – Co-Founder and Analytics Lead, Quantic Foundry.
Nick Yee is the co-founder and analytics lead of Quantic Foundry. For over a decade, he has conducted research on the psychology of gaming and virtual worlds using a wide variety of methods. At Stanford University, he used immersive virtual reality to explore how avatars can change the way people think and behave. He was a senior research scientist in Ubisoft's Gamer Behavior Research group where he combined data science and social science methods to generate actionable player insights for different game development teams.
At Quantic Foundry, he leads the research and development of new tools for quantifying the motivations of game audiences. He is the author of "The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don't".
Different Cultures, Different Video Games
Cultures are rich sources for game ideas. In this talk Mahdi will explain how he designs new game mechanics inspired by the culture of his hometown of Tehran.
Speaker: Mahdi Bahrami – Game Designer and Programmer.
Mahdi Bahrami is an Iraninan game designer and programmer. Mahdi's field of interest is designing experimental games where art, science and culture intersect. Bahrami has had multiple games honored in the Independent Games Festival over the past few years. His most recent game, the Islamic art-inspired puzzler Engare, won an IGF Student Showcase award, and appeared in the popular Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC the same year
Designing Better Games for An Older Audience
Are you interested in developing games for a huge upcoming audience of retirees born during the baby boom? This talk discusses the findings from a decade of academic research on this topic and has some surprising findings. Most importantly, it concludes that older gamers are much less interested in game design that is focused on brain training and physical exercise than what popular media would have you believe. It therefore introduces a series of design guidelines that are derived from many interviews, surveys, gameplay experiments and design workshops with older adults. By doing so, we hope to challenge industry professionals to move beyond largely ageist and stereotypical game design aimed at this audience, and to promote game design that leads to genuinely meaningful play experiences for older adults.
Speaker: Bob De Schutter (MFA, PhD) – is the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Applied Game Design at the College of Education, Health & Society and the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, and a Research Fellow of the Scripps Gerontology Center of Miami University (Oxford, OH).
Bob De Schutter's interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include game design, the older audience of digital games, and the use of digital games for non-entertainment purposes. He has been invited to teach in Europe, North America and Asia, and his work has been published in leading publications of several academic fields. Bob has served industry as an independent consultant, public speaker, developer and entrepreneur, is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association, and has founded and chaired the Gerontoludic Society as well as the Flemish chapter of the Digital Games Research Association.