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Celia Pearce, assistant professor from the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, leads her university's Emergent Game Group. She helped kick off the IMGDC early Saturday morning with the panel “Designing Non-Standard MMOs with Standard Tools.” During the talk she demoed her team's game, Mermaids -- an experimental online multiplayer adventure that breaks many conventions. Near the end of the conference we caught up with Celia to discuss her philosophy for teaching game design, attendee response to her game and the lessons she learned from meeting other indie MMO makers. Tell us about what you do at Georgia Tech. Celia Pearce: I'm part of a digital media graduate program. We want to train a practitioner/theorist. We're not really a trade school. A lot of game programs are really focused on creating producers for the mainstream game industry, but we're trying to create more of a critical thinking game designer – somebody who's well-schooled historically and theoretically in the games studies field, but who is also a good practitioner, creative and technically skilled. How does Mermaids embody that program? CP: One of the great things about our program is that we have this project studio format which enables a faculty member to essentially lead a research project that students work on for credit. With Mermaids I wanted to make a game project that I jokingly describe as “unfundable.” It doesn't really have any educational content and it's not really something that people would consider a marketable product. The idea was to really unpack some of the foregone assumptions and conventions about multiplayer games, and make something that was really new and different. It has a few features that are pretty innovative, especially after being here, although there was a lot of innovative work discussed. The two main ones are the swimming navigation – the player actually swims around in an underwater world. The other was the gesture based interface that allows you to cast spells by drawing. Two others really resonated at the conference. We were really trying to do away with leveling and point systems, which, from what I can tell, is one of the sacred cows of multiplayer game design. The other one that really blew me away in the last session was right now was we don't have any player death in our game. Apparently we're the only people in the universe attempting to do this other than the Myst Online people.
Or Second Life. CP: But in a game it seems like its not in anybody's imagination spectrum to think about a game where a player doesn't die. What are you taking away from this conference? CP: I have to say this has been incredibly valuable, these two days. Part of it has been the talks that I've seen. Particularly Brian Green and Richard Bartle's talks which were just chock full of historical information, as well as really incisive perspective. Both of them are coming from a historical point of view. They've been here since the beginning, so they can talk about how things have developed. Richard Bartle talked about this being a moment of flowering for virtual worlds, which I think is true, especially now that I've heard him say it. In general, just seeing what other people are doing and what they're thinking about. Also, it's been really useful for me to get feedback from this community about my project and see what the response is. I was frankly expecting to have people throw tomatoes at me. I really thought they'd say, “Oh she's making this silly Care Bear game with no killing and nobody's going to play that.” I was actually surprised at how many people here had positive feedback about the game. People have referred to it in the past couple of days when discussing the breaking of conventions. It's been very rewarding to see that its become part of the discourse here. |
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