Fade to Play

The Winter 2006 issue of ACM Student Journal Crossroads is on Entertainment Technology. The articles are all written by students and provide articles about digital games as noted by Paula Bach in her Introduction.

This issue of Crossroads is dedicated to computer entertainment. Our feature article, “Interesting Complexity: Sid Meier and the Secrets of Game Design,” unleashes secrets of the great game designer, Sid Meier. Meier stresses fun and a keen sense of how games work. Knowing how to put together a “series of interesting choices” for the user is key to good game design. In addition to one of gaming’s greats, we offer three interviews with other big names in the gaming industry: Russel Kay, Colt McAnlis, and Pierre Pontevia. Kay, the creator of Lemmings, speaks frankly about his background and the gaming industry, while McAnlis offers practical advice for students wishing to pursue a job in the gaming industry. Pontevia, based in Paris, France, shares insights into the three elements needed for a startup, his company, Kynogon, and the company’s AI middleware called Kynapse. Kynapse is important for gaming for three reasons: path finding, team behaviors, and spatial reasoning.

Four other articles in this issue represent the vastness of the computer entertainment industry. Nick Datzov gives us a brief but intriguing overview of the installation of a computer in an automobile to play games, watch movies, or browse the Internet. Damien Marshall, Tomas Ward, and Séamus McLoone explore the past, current, and next generation of gaming interaction devices and methods, looking at the latest research. Caio Camargo writes about a trend in gaming called “modding.” Modding is gamer terminology for modifying a game, and Camargo explores this phenomenon and also talks with a successful modder. Chris Dondanville gives an overview of the Sims 2 expansion called Open for Business and presents some practical tips for succeeding with a virtual business in the Sims 2 life simulator.

Relevance: As an ethnographer in pervasive games, I am always interested in what I learned from digital games that I could extrapole.