Month: March 2012

Crytek Nottingham Presentation

jholopainen / / Research

On Monday 5th of March Tom Feltwell, one of our MSc by Research students was invited over to Crytek Nottingham by Principal Programmer Mark Tully, to give a presentation about his research in the area of game data analysis. Tom described his arrival at the Nottingham office: “With the sun shining I took the train over to Nottingham from Lincoln and was welcomed into the concrete and glass behemoth that is the Crytek Nottingham office. Signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) before entering the inner sanctum, I was able to see all of the up and coming delights that are being worked on by the 100+ strong team!”

Tom works full time within the School of Computer Science and is pursuing a Masters by Research in Automatic Analysis of Spatial User-Generated Data in Games part time. He is working to analyse game data captured from the 2007 shooter Red Orchestra: Ost Front 41-45. The data is collected from play sessions taking place at the University (Fridays, 4.00pm Comp Lab B) and doing some automated analysis to isolate the effects that changes have on game play. Full details about his research will be published in his paper he is submitting to GAMEON 2012.

Tom Feltwell giving presentation to Crytek Nottingham staff.
Tom, admiring the lime and charcoal colour scheme.

Tom says: “Initially I was told I would be presenting to the programming team, numbering 20 or so. As the time got closer to 1:30pm, more and more people turned up, until I was faced with a nerve racking sea of industry professionals! Thankfully the talk was really well received and the questions weren’t too taxing. I had a good chat to various team members who had a particular interest in the area, and in some cases were actively working on data analysis of Crytek titles. To top the day off I was treated to a full tour of the office!

It was a real pleasure to get feedback about my work from industry professionals, and I had a fantastic time. I look forward to further collaboration between the University of Lincoln and Crytek Nottingham!”

Announcement: Research seminars, Richard Bartle, and MMOs

jholopainen / / Announcements

It is with great pleasure to announce that Professor Richard Bartle, best known for being one of the pioneers of the massively online game industry, is coming to the University of Lincoln to give a talk about his recent video-games related work. His talk is entitled “How to Cheat at MMOs without Cheating“. Richard Bartle summarises the talk as following:

“Player Type theory has a long history of use in MMO design, and is accepted as a standard model of player behaviour. In this talk, I explain how different player types view what a virtual world “is”, and how this affects their opinion of whether an activity is or is not cheating”.

The talk will be given on Wednesday, 14th March 2012 between 15:00 – 16:00  in the Cargill Lecture Theatre, which is situated in the Main Building of the campus. No registration is required, just pop to the lecture theatre on time. We hope to see you all there!

Update! For those of you who have missed the talk, Bartle uploaded his lecture slides on here. In his blog, Richard describes his talk as follows:

“For the rest of you, the basic premise is that different types of player have different ideas as to what an MMO is “about”, and play to an unwritten set of rules consistent with those ideas. Anything that breaks those rules, they regard as cheating (or at least with great disapproval). Players of different types don’t have any conception of these unwritten rules, though, and therefore have no concerns about breaking them.”