Shaking Up Our Relations With Machines

Katherine Isbister, director of the Game Innovation Lab at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, gave a talk about human computer interaction and leveraging game mechanics to engage people into moving their bodies.

Presentation

• When people engage with computers, they are often in a hunched position, looking at their screens. A colleague of Katherine's compared this to people being in the threat position.
• People like the iPhone and one reason is that they need to stroke the screen to unlock it. This motion is comparable to petting an animal. It is warming and inviting, not vindictive.
• Engineers often make very dry interfaces, but we need more kinetically engaging human computer interaction.
• G-mail Tai Chi was created as an April Fool's joke, perhaps as a parody of a talk given by Katherine herself at GDC. The joke is that users would have to perform tai chi in front of their webcam to check their e-mail. But for Katherine, why not? It is a healthier way to interact with your computer.
• Studies have shown that multi-touch authentication (ie. using all your fingers to unlock your tablet) is not only more kinesthetically pleasurable, but also more secure.
• Physical movement in HCI may be awkward and confusing to people, but in the game space, it's okay to move around. Katherine has been working on several games for learning that involve large kinetic movement.
• Scoop is played with the Kinect, where players extend their arms out and solve math problems by cutting fractions. Hormones shift as you move more, which increase math confidence.
• Moveit/Yamove is a 2 player game in which both players hold a phone. They are given the name of a move to do and both players not only have to come up with a way to physically represent the move, but also do it synchronously. This game will be featured at No Quarter. When Babycastles took hold of this game, they turned it into a dance off game.
• Katherine is also working on a surveillance camera game based on the idea that public surveillance will soon become public utility. The game is played in the space outside of the Game Innovation Lab at Polytechnic University. Players gather as many people to crowd in the camera's vision space, which in turn controls characters in the game. The game itself is projected on a giant wall installation.

Question and Answer

• Schools tend to inhibit movement. They teach kids the value of sitting and focusing on one singular task at a time. But Katherine points out that bicycling has both properties of focus and movement.
• Katherine moved to academia because she couldn't stand the idea of sitting at a cubicle all day long. She needed the freedom to be able to move around throughout the day.
• Repeated HCI actions have transformed our bodies. An attendee recounts a girl he saw on the subway train, who spent the entire ride texting. He noticed that her extreme amount of texting throughout the years have transformed her thumbs into a weird unnatural position. Katherine mentions pictures of manual laborers of the 1930s who have grown unnatural muscles from their work at the assembly lines.
• She commends Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for a game that promotes large active movement. The game includes many fast-paced micro-games where the player is given a quick image of how to hold the controller and then is thrown straight into the game without any further instructions. Due to this nature, the player doesn't have much time to process a way to perform these moves in a not-so-embarrassing way.
• There are many interesting display devices in our future from touch screens to wall mounted displays to Google glasses. It often takes academia to take advantage of these technologies in interesting ways.
• What are other interesting postures besides the dominant and feeble? Synchronicity is a very powerful gesture.
• Will motion controlled games ever enter the realm of pro/competitive gaming or gold farming? Pretend swordfighting can be very taxing to the player; they can get easily exhausted after a few minutes of waving their arms wildly. It is difficult to have physical games be deep, long-session games.
• Games need to take advantage of the beauty of the human movement. When motion utilizes the movement qualities that are beautiful, a great spectacle can be provided by the game and the players themselves.
• Much of traditional game UI is antiquated. Joysticks derives its design from plane controls, as if a player of a game pilots the avatar. Radar display have a significant influence on game HUD.
• Is there a paradigm shift between casual and hardcore gaming? Physicality is often not the front-end for traditional games. Dance and exercise games have recently been big sellers. There is no reason why dance games can't be played by a controller, but it loses much of its power if it was designed for a traditional controller.
• Naomi Clark mentions a parody video of a Kinect version of Assassin's Creed, where the players do ridiculous movements to play as the highly-acrobatic assassin. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NufHsmITjM

ShopTalk Volume 01: Social Meets Mobile

At IGDA roundtable discussion, NY-based game developers discussed various topics related to social games, mobile games, and the cross between the two. There was a verbal NDA among the group, so no specific analytics or company details would be shared here.

• What is a social game? This is a question that many game developers struggled with, but the ultimate consensus is that a social game is a game that lives on Facebook or has Facebook Connect. There are, in fact, many games that are actually more social than what we know as "social games" such as Johann Sebastian Joust or World of Warcraft. But developers and audience understand that we mean Facebook when we talk about social games.
• Are social games actually social? Although you are inviting friends to play and spamming friends with gift requests, there is no actual social connection. In Animal Crossing, you can create a meme that travels to a friend's town. For example, you can teach a citizen to say a bad word and that citizen might go to another town and bring along that bad word with him and spread it across town. This small bit, no matter how inane, represents a part of you and your self expression, and its migration to a friend's world makes the game inherently social.
• Although spamming friends with requests or filling up your wall with posts have no real social connection, it is still 1% social. One percent is indefinitely better than zero percent. 
• There are games where you can get someone's personality through the gameplay such as Draw Something. Some people draw stick figures, while others do elaborate art pieces to represent simple objects.
• Sometimes, just the fact that you're playing the same game as somebody else is social. You are playing alone together or having a shared experience separately. It is like going to a movie theater or studying by yourself at a library. Although there is no interaction between you and others, everyone is having a shared experience. 
• The Last Stand is a isometric 3D shooting game on Facebook. You gather resources and build shelters against the zombie horde. This is not a casual game and is aimed towards the hardcore crowd. Idle Worship is an example of a game in-between the casual and hardcore market.
• Many casual audiences think of games as they do of porn. They are shameful of them and feel guilty to play them. This is attributed to the poor stigma of games. However, many of these people still play games; they just don't want to be associated with the term. The majority don't want to be called a gamer, even though they've put more hours into playing games than their own children. One attendee compares this to people who read trashy romance novels, which by the way, has had a recent resurgence because of Kindles and the ability to hide what their reading from the public.
• Half of Facebook users play a lot of games, while the other half hate games and never want to touch a game.
• What about mobile connectivity with social games? Good idea is to not offer the same exact experiences across both platforms. Mobile app can be a companion to the social game. For example, have a MMO on your computer, but a monster/pet sim on your mobile device. You can level up and train your pet on mobile and its stats would transfer back into your main game.
• Energy as an abstract resource entered social game design as a way to limit play sessions. Generally, 20 minutes or less is a good length of a play session.
• What are the demographic differences between Facebook and mobile? Developers can gather a lot of demographic information from Facebook (gender, age, location, education, etc.), but generally, there is little to no data on mobile devices.
• According to one attendee, the more displayed your microtransaction popups are, the less likely a 18-24 year old male player would purchase. In many cases, they would downright stop playing the game. However, if they go to the store on their own accord without any prompts from the game, they would be likely to buy. On the other hand, 35+ year old females are more likely to purchase if they get those microtransaction screens, especially one at the session start when they open the game. Is it possible to get both demographics in the same game? Should get demographic data and build for your audience.
• Only 20% of people login to Facebook Connect or other networks (OpenFeint, GameCenter, Papaya) on their mobile devices. The real question is, are the 20% also the paying crowd? If they are, then only this 20% matters. It's possible there is a large overlap between the paying users and the logged in users as they are both the most engaged players.
• Facebook considers themselves as "social plumbing." They are the backbone of your social graph.
• Mobile games gets people faster and cheaper. The cost of user acquisition is much lower than on Facebook because there's no Zynga to compete with.
• What about gamification of real-life like Fitocracy? Using mobile device as a pedometer to track your running progress, which in turn gains points and levels up your avatar. It is also a social game where you compare/compete with friends' avatars. 
• There's nothing stopping big production games to be on Facebook. Gaikai (maybe OnLive too) announced that they would be bringing full-fledged production games to Facebook. The technology exists for hardcore games on Facebook, but the perception doesn't. There's a catch-22 where developers don't want to make hardcore games on Facebook because they think the audience isn't there for it, while the audience doesn't know that it exists to be clamoring for it.
• There are now many apps to let you stalk girls, sending you profile information of females in your immediate area. Many of these apps got shut down and sued, deservedly so. But this is also a warning that you need privacy and license agreements in your Mobile game. 100% of games need privacy disclosures, but only 13% of them have them. Facebook games are luckily protected by Facebook's own terms of service, but mobile devices have nothing of the sort.
• How do you handle the permanence of information and cross-platform synchronization? Should data be stored locally so that players can continue their experience even when they lose internet connectivity (on the subway train)? Should they be stored on the server so they can bring their accounts across platforms and also to prevent cheating? One solution is to just offer different experiences online and offline, and make sure to communicate that to the players. For example, when online, you can submit scores to the global leaderboard, but when offline, you can only submit to a local, personal leaderboard.

Winning Pitch Workshop: Part 2: Brand Games

The Winning Pitch workshop focused on developing an original social game design and creating the materials needed to communicate it effectively to a real client. In part 2, Naomi Clark presented various ways to effectively communicate a brand message in the form of a game.


Examples of games that teach

• International Racing Squirrels is a game designed to teach kids about finance. The player manages a team of squirrels who periodically race cars, also managing their savings accounts and credit cards.
• Ayiti: The Cost of Life is a serious game about living in poverty in Haiti. Players manage a family, making hard decisions such as whether to send the children to school for an education or to work. This game is incredibly difficult to complete without the deaths of family members, though it's possible to beat it without any casualties. This teaches players about the difficulty of life in a third world country.
• Power Planets, designed by Area/Code, is a game about teaching environmentalism and the idea that we need to maintain a safe planet for our children who would inheriting it. Players are given a rotating planet and they can choose to place trees, windmills, and other environmentally-friendly structures or power plants and factories if they need short-term gains. After a certain amount of time, players pass on their planets to another player, while inheriting a planet from someone else. They can choose to play with environmentalism in mind so that inheriting players have an easier start, or they can completely ruin other player's games by polluting their planets.
• Bioshock is an example of badly designed teaching. Players can either make the moral choice of saving the little sister's lives or the in-game beneficial choice of harvesting ADAM from the little sisters, effectively killing them. However, since the game gives you lots of ADAM later on for saving all the little sisters, it makes the moral vs. gameplay choice moot.

How to teach gamers

• The goal of the workshop was to design a game that would "make things better for people." How do we bridge the gap from playing a game to changing the player's behavior outside of the game?
• Product Placement - universally disliked by gamers, but incredibly effective. After many hours of play, unobtrusive ads will seep into the players' minds.
• Directly ask the player through a popup or post a call to action - the blunt approach, takes the players out of the game but sometimes is a necessary step.
• Overt representation - Trash Tycoon, a game designed by Naomi Clark, teaches players about taking trash and turning them into something special. In the game, the character literally walks around town, picking up trash to eventually turn them into prizes and other contraptions.
• Visualization of information - Infographics have been successful in displaying a lot of information in a visually engaging way. Use clever and eye-grabbing methods to display your messaging.
• Systemic representation - Killer Flu is a game about seasonal and pandemic flus and utilizes the inversion of roles. The player plays as the flu, trying to spread across a city and kill as many people as possible. However, the player will find that it's hard to spread rapidly and kill a huge group of people. This game was made in response to the false scare of bird flu.
• Parody and shock value - PETA's games, such as Mario Kills Tanooki and Super Tofu Boy, take familiar brands and juxtaposes them with ridiculous and shocking imagery. This easily grabs attention and sends the brand message across.

Uninteresting Choices

• When trying to deliver a message through game design, it's important to not fall in the trap of uninteresting choices like Bioshock did. This is especially hard when the brand message has a clear right and wrong answer (ie. always invest in insurance funds, always diet and exercise, etc).
• Think about the choice between hamburgers and vegetables. Ask any kid what they want to eat and they'll all jump for joy and say "hamburgers!"
• However, ask the kids what is the right food to eat and they'll reluctantly choose Vegetable. This is equivalent to Hamburgers giving you +2 points and Vegetables giving you +4 points in a game. There is a clear right and wrong choice.
• What if Hamburgers gave you +2 points now and Vegetables gave you +4 points later? There is a tradeoff here, but it depends on the game on how interesting this tradeoff is. Bioshock did it in a bad way. Too simple of a system will make this tradeoff uninteresting.
• What if Hamburgers gave you +10 points and the power to destroy your enemies, but you'll eventually die of a heart attack when the power runs out? Meanwhile, Vegetables gave you +5 points and no powers, so you have to avoid your enemies yourself. Now the tradeoff is unclear to the player and more interesting.

Winning Pitch Workshop: Part 1: Social Games

Led by veteran game designer Naomi Clark, the Winning Pitch workshop event focused on developing an original social game design and creating the materials needed to communicate it effectively to a real client. The workshop combined lectures and exercises with hands-on creative collaboration and culminated in a pitch session. Naomi Clark gave a presentation on the components that make a social game.


What makes a game a social game? According to the audience, it's monetization, micro-transactions, addictive gameplay, constant rewards for the smallest tasks, social graph, asynchronous play, and leveraging obligations. Social games facilitate social interactions, but are not really social and one can argue that they're anti-social (due to spamming). They are free to play, but sell items. Many of them aren't very much games at all. There are many paradoxes here (social but not social, free but not free, games but not games).


Social games is the genetic marriage of persistent worlds and casual games.


From persistent worlds, it derives...

1. Earning, customizing, and building over months and years
2. Grinding (labor for rewards)
3. Offer rich multiplayer experiences and the ability to play "alone together"

From casual games, it derives...

1. Pick up and play mechanics, Low barrier of entry and easy learning curves
2. No Interface preconceptions, simple controls
3. Rewarding and positive feedback over punishments

Naomi identifies 5 main components of social games.

• Interstitial play patterns and asynchronous mechanics.
• The dominant play behavior is to play during breaks in quick 5-10 minute chunks.
• Persistence and the fact that events happen in between sessions cause retention, or the tendency for players to come back.
• Asynchronous mechanics is often called appointment gaming. Things run in the background and happen while the player is away.
• There are also asynchronous multiplayer games, usually turn-based and harkens back to playing by mail. These are not simultaneous. Real-time asynchronous games exist like Tetris Battle where the player plays against a recording of another player (like racing against a ghost car).
• Asynchronous RTS exist, like Travian and Urban Dead, by expanding timers and encapsulating events (one move can take a few days to complete). This makes them appear to be more turn-like. Real-time expenditure of turns levels the playing field between players. Players can't group together in the middle of the night and attack a defenseless player.
• Siege vs. tower defense games. These have asymmetrical roles as the attackers play in real-time but the defenders can play turn-based. They just set up their defenses beforehand and check back after the attacks.
• Asynchronous Action RPGs put gameplay in ellipsis. Mobsters 2 is like Grand Theft Auto but instead of getting an assassination mission, stealing a car, driving the car to the target location, and shooting a gun at the target, the player can do all this by clicking a button that says "Complete Quest." All of the intermediate steps are skipped over. The player spends resources to complete quests, a trope that has carried over to many of the standard Facebook games.

• Broad audiences with niches.
• Social games target casual audiences by having simple one-click interactions.
• Gameplay reinforces carrot on the stick, providing super rewarding and rarely punishing experiences. There are no traumatizing events to scare away audiences.
• Triple Town, a favorite in the gaming community, was actually considered too confusing by most playtesters, according to creator Daniel Cook. There may be many reasons for its confusion -- the game requires too much planning in the player's part, it isn't rewarding enough compared to other social games, it had a bad tutorial, the game is claustrophobic, the bleed out time is too long and mistakes lead to more mistakes, there's no direct feedback, and it was easy to forget your plans in between play sessions. However, the main reason for its failure was that people didn't understand they needed to plan ahead. Many playtesters played it like they were decorating a space and were confused when some of their plants disappeared into a tree. Dan Cook wanted a casual game, but ended up appealing to a more hardcore crowd.
• Profitable choices vs. more profitable choices. There are no bad choices, just good ones and better ones. The only way to lose at a social game is failure to show up.
• Crossover hits (a hardcasual game) exist such as Empires & Allies. These types of games tend to find a niche and have more dedicated players.

• Persistence and progress.
• Persistence of the world keeps players coming back. Changing the state of the game during holidays and seasons incentivizes players to come back and check on their territory.
• Castleville's persistence, and that of other ville-type game, is the city you've built yourself.
• Bejweled Blitz's persistence, and that of other arcade games, is the high score, though some games reset the high scores every week.
• Draw Something keeps the player's history and data (most used colors, etc.)
• Dreamland, designed by Naomi Clark, is a game where the protagonist enters a maze of her dreams and fights off her greatest fears. The persistence is found in the upgradeable bedroom that players can decorate. The bedroom serves no gameplay purpose other than being the main hub.
• League of Legends, a massively successful team-based competitive game, has persistence in the player's data and match history. Players can level up their accounts which allows them to unlock more heroes, skills, masteries, and runes that increase their stats.
• Triple Town's persistent elements are the score and coins.

• Sociality (other players as context)
• "Alone Together." 70% of time spent in World of Warcraft is played alone. The concept of having people to play "next to" is like playing golf at a driving lane or studying alone in a library where others are doing the same.
• In Castleville, players don't truly cross paths with each other, but they always feel other's presence, whether in the leaderboard or in the footprint of their friend's actions on their own village. There are tacit pacts created for mutual aid, where players agree to send each other gifts back and forth.
• There are some real-time, simultaneous games like Zynga Poker, but these are usually played against strangers. Dungeon Rampage is an example of a real-time game that can be played with friends.
• There are many asynchronous multiplayer games.
• Idle Worship presents a new model of looking at players next to you (the world map).

• Free entry
• All social games follow the freemium model. There are usually soft and hard currencies, and the process of making the player run low on these resources are often called soft and hard chokes.
• In Tiny Tower, players can grind for hard currency, usually by transporting people in the elevator whereby they have a small chance of tipping you a hard currency. Zynga never gives away hard currency as a general company-wide rule so Dream Heights, a direct clone of Tiny Tower by Zynga, does not give away any hard currency. As a result, transporting people in the elevator in Dream Heights gave little reward and therefore is essentially useless, but is left in there purely as a result of a cloned system.
• Frontierville, being another Zynga game, does not give away any hard currency. Comparatively, Tiny Tower makes more money than Frontierville (higher ARPU), so the slow trickle of hard currency may arguably be a better monetization route.
• There is a group of advanced players who try to beat the house. They are complete grinders, focused on optimal play without ever spending money or submitting to viral requests.

Anna Anthropy's Book Release and Lecture

Anna Anthropy, also known as Auntie Pixelante in the blogosphere, is the creator of video games such as Calamity Annie, Mighty Jill Off, Lesbian Spider Queen of Mars, and most recently, Dys4ia. She recently released her book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. As part of her book tour, she held a talk at the NYU Game Center curated by Frank Lantz, where she discusses her advocacy of game creation by anyone, the games that are most interesting to her, and her identity as a queer transsexual game author. 

Conversation with Frank Lantz

• She refers to the game industry as an engine that speaks only to itself. It's a male-dominated, market-driven, violence-focused industry that continues making the same types of games. Since it's mainly gamers themselves who enter the industry, it becomes a perpetual cycle of recycling game ideas and engaging in the same conversations.
• Current game education such as those in Digipen, Full Sail, and more specifically, Guildhall at Southern Methodist University in Texas are "essentially useless." They reinforce the industry myth that getting a job in a big developer or publisher is the only avenue to get into games. People can definitely make games on their own or in a small group, without much technical knowledge. Anna herself left Guildhall and made Calamity Annie on her own.
• Game development is not monolithic. Everyone should dabble in games even if they're not familiar with gaming at all. There are so many game editors and tools that allow people to create their own games without any technical knowledge. These include Gamemaker, RPG Maker, Knytt Story, and ZZT (a text adventure creator).
• Frank attributes NYC's punk gaming scene to Messhof and Anna Anthropy, two very distinguished creators and voices in the community. But both moved out to the west coast, much to Frank's dismay.
• Games that are less polished and less thought out are more interesting and speaks more about the creator himself. Games that digress from the mainstream tend to be more weird and engaging. For example, Cactus Block is a platformer where the player places the platforms with the mouse. However, in quite possibly a design decision that took 5 minutes, a cactus could randomly appear instead of a platform. This design choice, however, makes the game and the dynamics a lot more interesting. It becomes a game of chance and the player has to second guess every platform that he places. The player has to plan carefully to accommodate for potentialities, maybe clicking in a less optimal place so that a random cactus wouldn't appear and block a crucial location.
• There is a story to Tetris, whereby errors compound into more errors until the builder is overwhelmed. This is a story authored by its mechanics.
• The current state of gaming requires an advanced gaming literacy. An XB360 controller has 10 buttons and 3 directional controls, which requires many years of experience to pick up or a high learning curve. People should forget about hardcore games and just pick up something easy and responsive (casual games, indie games).
• Anna as a creator wants to do everything herself during development of a game (art, music, programming, design, writing), but finds it increasingly hard to do as games get bigger.
• She sold Dys4ia to Newgrounds for a rather low price, because she thought she would not be able to make money off this game otherwise. However, it became her biggest hit. Fans were so receptive of it and sent her completely positive feedback (although there was some share of hate mail and death threats as well, which is "par for the course"). Dys4ia is a Wario Ware style game that chronicles her experience of taking hormones as a transgender. This game is unique in that it is quite possibly the first purely autobiographical game made, or as some people say, a diary entry in the form of a game.
• There was a larger presence of outsider artists at GDC. Pirate Kart is a compilation of over 1000 indie games and was submitted as an IGF entry to bypass the submission fees. Games were being made at GDC and were added to the Pirate Kart compilation on the spot.
• She calls IGF awards an "absurd and grotesque spectacle." Games don't fit comfortably in an annual format, since games take years to make. The IGF award ceremony itself was so bizarre. Once, Jessica Chobot ran a skit where she made fun of indie developers, not in a laughing-with-them kind of way, but quite viciously.
• Frank mentions that the awards given at the end of a Global Game Jam event are his least favorite part, but he understands the need that people have for recognition.
• Anna says that the way that Ludum Dare handles competition is the best. If you participate in the jam, you can get awards and you can give awards. Those that don't participate don't get to vote or win. The awards can be anything; Anna herself got an award for "Best Monsters."
• "Games industry is haunted by the spectre of monetization."
• Indie Game the Movie had a weird part in the beginning where game journalists were interviewed. They each gave praise to the games in the movies, ie. "Braid was the best indie game of the year. It made so much money." It's weird that we always want discrete outcomes. We want to be told "This game is quantifiably better than that game." But scores and grades are holding us back as an industry.
• Anna advocates the creation of games by everyone and anyone. Frank, playing devil's advocate, asks if there is any value to that. If someone who's never listened to music before says, "I have an idea for a great band," it's definitely a fruitless endeavor and the end result would be terrible. Anna argues that we shouldn't fall into video game tropes. Games should be and can be anything.
• One triple A game that Anna likes is Saints Row 2. The game has the best character customization, where the player can do anything and be any gender. The player can be a masculine guy in a dress or a hot girl with a deep voice. This is closer to the real world where anyone can be any gender as well. Developers shouldn't lock out players from certain choices, whether it be fashion, demeanor, voice, etc., based on the avatar's gender. The developers of Saints Row 2 consciously decided to never gender the player. In one scene of the game, during a heist, an abstracted look of the map layout was shown. All the enemies were shown on the map as an icon of their faces, but the player was shown as a chess piece, thus being genderless.

Q&A

• How do you make personal games in a team? As a creator, you have to describe your vision to the team members. It's not bad to merge collaborator's personalities. It becomes a conversation between collaborators. Anna, however, admits that she likes hierarchy and likes to boss her collaborators.
• There is an expressive power of creation as an act in and of itself. Indie games are more personal and shows more of the author.
• There is a divide between games made for the player (like Street Fighter or Starcraft) and games made for the creator (like Jason Rohrer's games).
• Portal antiseptic theme is interesting because it expresses how Valve as a developer makes the game. They put testers in a lab, test the game repeatedly, and change everything that they're doing wrong. This is analogous to Portal's story.
• Anna previously worked on a multiplayer game called Mindfuck. It's a two-player game where each player has one button. Points increase as long as neither player presses their buttons, but the first person to press it wins all the points. It is a game about gambling and predicting your opponent's moves.
• Anna is presenting a new game at Babycastles at the Project Secret Robot location. It is a 4 player game where 3 players have cyanide pills and the other player plays as a vampire. The 3 players have to predict who the vampire will attack next. The 3 players wear bras with a button hidden inside them. At the end of the round, if they've pressed the button an odd number of times, they don't take the cyanide pills, but if they've taken it an even number of times, they take the cyanide pills and kill themselves before the vampire gets to them. The point is to overload the vampire with information to confuse him in attacking a suicidal victim.
• Anna's definition of game is "an experience created by rules." She wants the definition to be broad and all encompassing as much as possible. We shouldn't divide digital games from physical games, entertaining games from those that offer negative emotions.
• "PAX is a place where the audience and industry meet to confirm that the status quo is good and to keep with the status quo."
• Anna wants more discussion about gender or about queers in games.
• She wants games to be more like Youtube. With Youtube, everyone and anyone can make a video. They didn't need film education or knowledge of film history. They just needed a webcam. Although most of Youtube is crap, there are gems that pop up from the sea. We don't know what games would look like at the hands of a large group of creators.