The following guest article is by current MIT Game Lab student Sam Van Cise and is crossposted at his site and Gamasutra.

In the wake of the meteoric rise of Fortnite, many people ask how it compares to PUBG, the extremely popular predecessor in the battle royale genre. While many will not make a claim as to which is “harder” or “more skillful”, the question is an interesting one and worth exploring. Most people defer to saying “Fortnite has building which makes it completely different” and stop the comparison there. Some will go as far to say that it changes the battle royale genre entirely, adding a completely new skill to master. Recently in his appearance on the H3 Podcast, Ninja (the Twitch super-star) has made the claim that building in Fortnite creates a higher skill gap between players, and ultimately a more “skillful game”.

We all have Superpowers – personal, often surprising strengths that lie at the core of who we are – but we rarely live them in our everyday life, our jobs and relationships. Many people don’t know what their Superpowers actually are. They are still hidden and have yet to be discovered. In our workshops, we work with unconventional methods from game design and creative sectors to get to the bottom of everyone’s Superpowers.

We’ll see how to use playfulness in a team. How can you empower them using playful levers? Together, we’ll practice by taking examples and try to use the playful design methodology to do this. We’ll choose together practical use cases you can encounter in your daily routines at work and try to make a change in order to make them more playful!

When you’re designing something, it’s important to take the user experience into account. What I’m offering you in this class is to come with a project you have in mind (a technology, a product, a service) and to empower the experience with the playful methodology. You will see how you can use the playful value proposition, and if you don’t have an idea in mind, I have several interesting ones for you.

Serious games are games that have another purpose than just pure entertainment. In this class, we will test a serious game about Blockchain, and try to assess it and find guidelines for when you’re developing that kind of game. After that, I will share tips with you to design your serious game! Don’t hesitate to come with a topic in mind.

The Game Makers Guild has a special opportunity this month. Mikael Jakobsson is a Research Scientist at the MIT Game Lab who has a longstanding professional interest in co-located collaborative games, both video games and board games. While these games allow for unique and very rewarding gaming experiences, they also come with some inherent pit falls that designers need to be aware of. In the case of board games, there is a well known issue referred to as alpha gaming or quarterbacking. This issue is especially prevalent in co-op games.

Congratulating the Escape Room Jam participants!

As a fledgling graduate student in media studies, much of my time is spent doing readings and work for class. Much of this involves catching up on the literature and history of the field, learning about related disciplines and media, …

A Perspective on PAX East and the Escape Room Game Jam Read more »

You might have heard of the rapidly growing trend of escape room games. In escape rooms groups of 3-8 players voluntarily get locked into a physical room. These live-action team-based games offer a variety of fascinating insights into game and level design, player cultures, business models, and technologies. We would like to enrich the discussion by asking how these games could be played in a competitive tournament style – as a (e)sport.