Our next meetup will feature select sessions delivered at the 2013 Game Developers Conference.  We will start with Jason VandenBerghe’s “Applying the 5 Domains of Play: Acting Like Players”.  I saw this talk given by Jason at EGCG and it is something every game designer should see:

Last year’s ‘5 Domains of Play’ presentation demonstrated how the facets of motivation in Psychology’s Big 5 (or OCEAN) correlate to player preferences for specific game elements. Science! This year, we are going to find a solid, universal, practical game development application of this model, or die in the attempt. Firstly, the 5 Domains model needs some work. Over the last year, we have simplified it to focus exclusively on the 8 facets that seem to be primary for gaming, found a place for Neuroticism/Threat (last year’s mystery), and have streamlined the whole thing to include a complete set of player archetypes (and the games they would play) for each set of facets. Easier to remember, easier to master, confusions removed, etc. That’s cool, but how do we apply such a thing to game development? The speaker believes that the answer to that question for this model (and every other psychological model for that matter) is simply this: developing accurate empathy. Fun fact: accurate empathy makes for better game developers and thus better games!

Following this talk and any discussion, we will watch one or two more GDC sessions chosen at the meeting by those in attendance.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n Tell where everyone can show a bit of their in progress game, favorite tool, mechanic they love in another game, or anything they find helpful and want to share with the group.