Videos of the week: games

This week is certainly about games for me; no small coincidence that the book I'm reading at the moment is Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. Let's continue with exploring different facets of the games industry with these videos. First up is a panel discussion at the University of California at Santa Cruz about games and playable media, featuring  Jordan Mechner (best known for creating the Prince of Persia franchise), Tracy Fullerton (game designer) and Arnav Jhala (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz). They talk about the role of games in cinema.

Chris Hecker, game designer, talks about his latest game Spy Party in this talk at UC Berkeley School of Information's Design Futures lecture series. He's also put up a useful transcript of his talk on his site. An excerpt:

I outlined two approaches to creating games with more emotional depth: top-down and bottom-up, and I discussed why I think bottom-up is a better approach. Games need to be able to communicate with players using a wider and deeper set of emotions. Just like film and music communicate emotionally in completely different ways, but are both incredibly deep, I think games will be as different from other art and entertainment forms as they are from each other, but we have a long way to go.

Design Futures: Chris Hecker (definition six) - Design, Games & Game Design (feat. SpyParty) from Elizabeth Goodman on Vimeo.

Finally, a short interview with Jason Della Rocca, the founder of Perimeter Partners, a company that does some cool stuff - it's a 'consultancy focused on developing game industry clusters around the world in partnership with stakeholders from government, academia and the game industry'.