Only a Game

Beyond Victory (Game Days 2022)

International Hobo founder and chief consultant Chris Bateman is returning to the Game Days conference, with a keynote entitled "Beyond Victory" at 11 am on Saturday 5th November. The event takes place in the beautiful city of Košice in the Slovak Republic, and attracts game developers from all over Europe. Chris talk is described as follows:

Everybody likes to win, but not everybody is willing to endure frustration to get there. Discover ten different psychological motives that players seek - and learn how to satisfy them all.

Building on International Hobo's acclaimed '10 Player Motives' model, Chris' talk is a perfect introduction to thinking about how and why players engage with games - and what game developers can do in order to exceed the expectations of their players.

Tickets start at €20, and are available from the Game Days website.

The Virtues of Cyborg Players

Pleased to announce that I will be presenting at LCAD's Big Bend campus on Monday 25th March, 5-7pm on The Virtues of Cyborg Players.

I'm a visiting professor at LCAD, which boasts one of the top ranking Masters courses in games development, and it's always a pleasure to visit the campus there, not to mention meet up with my students whom I normally only get to interact with via the internet - a classic example of cyborg relationships today!

Here's the blurb and the address:

We need to learn to be good cyborgs - and game designer and philosopher Dr Chris Bateman suggests one way to discover how is to learn from the cyborg players of videogames. For almost forty years, players have been tested by their cyborg relationships with digital games, and while there are certainly some cases where matters have gone awry - the Pokémon GO player who steps out into traffic, for instance - the world of videogames abounds with cases where videogame players show how we might learn to be good cyborgs.

Laguna College of Art + Design
Big Bend Campus, Studios 13+14 (BB13+14)
2825 Laguna Canyon Road
Laguna Beach, CA 92651

If you're in or around California, I'd love to see you there!

Speaking Gigs for Chris Bateman May-July 2018

You can catch me in all the following places in the UK and Europe over the Summer…

Thursday May 10th: Cyborg Living (London)

The Book Launch event for The Virtuous Cyborg

Whether you’ve noticed it or not, we have become cyborgs – human-machine hybrids. Whether it’s Facebook selling our personal data to be ‘weaponised’ by Cambridge Analytica, or Google suggesting answers to questions like “are women evil?” to people who asked for no such thing, our lives are affected by the machines we are living with. Cybernetic networks are all around us – and thinking about ‘neutral tools’ is no longer helpful. You’re already a cyborg… join us to help find out what would make a good cyborg!

Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen
2-4 Hoxton Square
London, N1 6NU

http://www.hoxtonsquarebar.com/listings/superculture/28570/cyborg-living/

 

Tuesday May 29th: The Secret of Game Narrative (Košice, Slovak Republic)

How do you make the most of stories in games? Does your game need a narrative? Players agree that they value good storytelling in games, but what counts as a great game story depends in part upon the different ways that players enjoy games. This makes getting great stories into videogames much more challenging than any other medium. Award-winning game designer and narrative designer Chris Bateman invites you to discover how games tell stories. Once it becomes clear that every game creates a narrative, the question isn’t whether you need one but how much of your development resources you need to commit to supporting the stories your game is already telling.

Kino Úsmev Košice
Cassie Square 1
040 01 Košice

http://www.kinousmev.sk/page/7929/article/4111/otvorenie-kina-usmev

 

Thursday June 28th: Are You a Good Cyborg? (Manchester)

North West Book Launch event for The Virtuous Cyborg

A couple get married after a robot selected them as potential romantic partners. A politician loses an election in the aftermath of an erroneous story widely shared on social media. A teenager is run over as they cross the street while playing an alternative reality game. As humans let computers into ever more aspects of their lives, it becomes clear that there’s no such thing as a ‘neutral tool’ in the internet connected world. We've been living with robots - and acting as cyborgs - for quite some time now. Smartphones, laptops, fitness trackers, social networks, search engines... our world is filled with human-robot pairings, and it’s not always clear which half is pushing the buttons. The virtues of the kind of cyborg we have become must surely depend not only on who we are, but also upon the kinds of robots we use.

AutoTrader
First Street
Manchester M15 4FN

Link pending

 

Saturday July 7th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Moral Multiverse (Sheffield)

Part of Festival 23 presents Catch 23 

Grab your towel and set off on a grand adventure through the moral multiverse with award-winning game designer, philosopher, and Discordian Polyfather Chris Bateman as he invites you to rethink everything you thought you knew about ethics, get beaten up by 8-bit Aristotle, and face the Vogons in the never-ending tragedy of bureaucracy. Babel fish not required.

Yellow Arch Studios
30-36 Burton Rd
Sheffield S3 8BX

https://festival23.org.uk

 

Tuesday July 10th: What Players Want - Understanding Player Diversity (Brighton)

A Games Design Track session at Develop Brighton 

Everyone who makes games is in the business of designing for an audience, but understanding what players want has become increasingly difficult the broader and more diverse the audience for videogames has become. Combining cutting edge psychological research with practical game design techniques, this How To talk puts player enjoyment into a more concrete perspective. Don’t guess at your audience: understand them, and yourself, and learn to make better games.

Develop Brighton
Hilton Brighton Metropole
Kings Road
Brighton BN1 2FU

https://www.developconference.com/whats-on/2018-speakers/speaker-detail/chris-bateman

 

Further gigs will be added as they are confirmed.

Develop 2018: What Players Want

International Hobo’s founder Chris Bateman is at Develop Brighton this year with a talk entitled What Players Want: Understanding Player Diversity. This session is a culmination of more than a decade of work in player satisfaction modelling (not to mention game design experience from fifty published games), and presents a new way of understanding the psychology of videogames in terms of Player Motives. As well as helping clarify effective videogame design, the model can help studios make tough commercial decisions about which audiences they can or should be pursuing with a specific design concept.

For more details, see Chris’ speaker page at the Develop conference website.

Cross-posted from ihobo.com

Cyborg Living: The Virtuous Cyborg Book Launch

How often do you go out without your smartphone? What’s the longest you’ve gone without the internet?
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, we have become cyborgs – human-machine hybrids. Whether it’s Facebook selling our personal data to be ‘weaponised’ by Cambridge Analytica, or Google suggesting answers to questions like “are women evil?” to people who asked for no such thing, our lives are affected by the machines we are living with. Cybernetic networks are all around us – and thinking about ‘neutral tools’ is no longer helpful. You’re already a cyborg… join us to help find out what would make a good cyborg!

Thursday 10th May 2018, 6:30 pm to 9 pm

Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, 2-4 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NU - order your free tickets here!

• 6:30 pm Are You A Good Cyborg?
  Game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman takes us on a journey through the strange world we now live in, asking what the good life might look like for us cyborgs.
• 7:30 pm Cyborg Living Panel
  Lively debate about our relationship with technology, the internet, robots, and machines.

A special night as part of of Justin Robertson’s “It’s Alive!” Exhibition, and Book Launch Event for Chris Bateman’s new book The Virtuous Cyborg, from Squint Books. Order your free tickets here!