Patreon and Porn Games: Crowdfunding Games, Reward Categories and Backstage Passes


Lankoski Petri Dymek Mikolaj
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where pornographic games are funded; even the most successful game developer in terms of the number of members is developing a pornographic game. We looked at 42 developers and their Patreon pages in order to examine the effects of the Patreon crowdfunding model on videogame development. Especially we studied membership rewards. As a result, developers were not only selling the game, but rewards we much about Community, Influence, and Recognition. Regulating Content Access is used regularly but often the latest version of the game is made available to everybody, just later to the members funding the development. We propose that certain rewards are similar to backstage passes in the music business and suggest that Patron pornographic games funding deviates from the crowdfunding model is not following mainly product-oriented commodity logic but a more community-oriented concept.

 

Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters


Lankoski Petri Björk Staffan
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Descriptions of humans require several qualities for people to experience them as believable: human body; selfawareness, intentional states, and self impelled actions; expression of emotions; ability to use natural language; and persistent traits. Based on these we analyze non-player character Claudette Perrick in The Elders Scroll IV: Oblivion to detect how these qualities can be created in the interactive environment of a game. We derive the gameplay design patterns Awareness of Surrounding, Visual Body Damage, Dissectible Bodies, Initiative, Own Agenda, Sense of Self, Emotional Attachment, Contextual Conversational Responses, and Goal-Driven Personal Development, which point to design choices that can be made when designing believable non-player characters in games.

 

Characters in Computer Games: Toward Understanding Interpretation and Design


Lankoski Petri Heliö Satu Ekman Inger
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

Interpretation of characters is a fundamental feature of human behavior. Even with limited information available, people will assign personality – even to inanimate objects. Characters in computer games will be attributed personality based on their appearance and behavior. The interpretation of these characters affects the whole game experience. Designing the protagonist character in computer games is different from the design of static characters (e.g. film or literature), because the player’s actions will affect the nature of the character. There are, however, many ways to control and guide the actions of the protagonist and thus the character’s nature. By setting goals, scripting pre-defined actions and choosing what kind of actions to implement, the game designer can restrict the player’s freedom. This, together with the characterization of the character, will affect the interpretation of the character.

 

Approaches to Computer Game Design


Lankoski Petri Heliö Satu
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

From the player's point of view, action is an important feature of a game. Action can be created and directed by raising expectations, building up motivations and setting goals for the players. An important tool for setting up motivations and goals for the player are well-defined characters with distinct natures and needs. Those will create the basis of conflict in the game. Expectations, which guide the choices of players, are the expectation of gaming, genre and also intermediality as a whole. Space and architecture can be used for communicating the genre, thus creating some expectations and removing others. On the other hand, by using the design of space and the rules of the game the players can be guided into using the space in a manner that endorses the gaming experience.

 

Designing Sound for a Pervasive Mobile Game


Ekman Inger Lahti Jussi Nummela Jani Lankoski Petri Mäyrä Frans
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

We examine the role of sound design in designing pervasive mobile games. As a case study, we examine the sound design process and solutions of a working prototype game called The Songs of North. The goal has been a design that allows sounds to be used as a primary information channel facilitating the use of physical movement as a main game mechanics. We discuss insights from the sound design process and also generally consider the role of sound in producing immersive gaming experiences.

 

Building and Reconstructing Character. A Case Study of Silent Hill 3


Lankoski Petri
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Characters are in an important role in many games. A good player character is likely to leave good lasting impression about the game. It has been argued that creating the personality for a player character is problematic. However, there are multiple methods used in games to inform a player about the nature of a player character: predefined functions, goals, possible and impossible actions, and more traditional audiovisual means. In this paper the player character of Silent Hill 3 is analyzed using presented categorization. This paper shows that the classification is a useful analytic tool, but it needs to be developed further to include belongings and space as elements describing a player character. The categorization also highlights aspects that need to be addressed when designing player characters.