Percorrer por autor "Zagalo, Nelson"

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    Beats & units : a story-game design framework
    (Lusofona University, 2023) Zagalo, Nelson; Oliveira, Ana Patrícia; Cardoso, Pedro; Vairinhos, Mário; Escola de Comunicação, Arquitetura, Artes e Tecnologias da Informação
    There are no recipes or rules to develop games, any more than there are to develop stories. When we try to define a game system that not only has to create a balanced experience, but also has to tell a story, which can engage players in creating empathy and meaning, everything gets complicated. We faced this problem when we had to develop a serious game with the goal of promoting discussion and awareness among children around nutrition: FlavourGame. In this regard, we needed not only to design game mechanics that would feel complete and progressive, but also to create a narrative that provided meaning to the game experience, in order to ensure an underlying layer to the context of nutrition. For that, we had to develop a framework that could help the team in guiding the telling of the story while designing the progression of the game. In this article, we present the full framework as a story-game design approach to be employed in the creation of serious narrative games.
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    Game Design as an Autonomous Research Subject
    (Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2021) Neves, Pedro Pinto; Zagalo, Nelson; HEI-LAB (FCT) - Digital Laboratories for Environments and Human Interactions
    This paper examines the methods and systems of game design from the standpoint of existing method proposals failing to establish a common basis for systematizing design knowledge, which this paper aims to help resolve. Game design has often been subsumed by game development and associated disciplines, and game design methodology has often been subsumed by game analysis. This paper reviews related work in defining game design as an autonomous research subject and then divides the methods and systems of game design into complementary methods and core methods, with only the latter, consisting chiefly of design patterns, attempting to systematize how game design knowledge is generated. Seminal game patterns have been descriptive rather than -prescriptive and so have failed to find the requisite practitioner adoption to fulfill their role as a living method. One recent pattern approach has sought to resolve this issue by promoting pattern usage generally over the adoption of a particular language. This paper outlines an alternate and possibly complementary approach of a novel, practical basis for game design literacy for helping core methods work as a basis for systematizing game design knowledge. The proposed basis sacrifices descriptiveness to prescriptiveness to shape methods in that direction
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    The systems and methods of game design
    (Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2021) Neves, Pedro Pinto; Zagalo, Nelson; HEI-LAB (FCT) - Digital Laboratories for Environments and Human Interactions
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    Uncovering literacy practices in the game total war: shogun 2 with a contract-agency model
    (Lusofona University, 2020) Neves, Pedro Pinto; Morgado, Leonel; Zagalo, Nelson; Escola de Comunicação, Arquitetura, Artes e Tecnologias da Informação
    This paper showcases how the Contract Agency Model can be used to uncover literacy practices in videogame’s own terms as a complement to existing, more ‘indirect’ games literacies, using as an example the videogame Total War: Shogun 2. The paper first situates the Contract Agency Model within approaches to videogames and within approaches to media literacy. The paper then identifies three interesting literacy practices in the videogame, which also exemplify the eight levels of abstraction of the Contract Agency Model. The paper concludes by discussing the model’s implications to media literacy and videogames, namely that videogames effect a second-order mutual signalling with their players – agency as a conversation of commitment to meaning – that is humanizing of those players, and that the model can uncover this as an implicit contract of bio-costs, as a ‘direct’ literacy of videogames, i.e. a literacy in videogames’ own terms.
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    Videogame Agency as a Bio-costs Contract
    (Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2018) Neves, Pedro Pinto; Morgado, Leonel; Zagalo, Nelson; Escola de Comunicação, Arquitetura, Artes e Tecnologias da Informação
    This paper presents a novel descriptive model for agency in videogames as communication. Literature pertaining to interactive works including videogames has identified the need to overcome dyadic perspectives of communication in such works. Research specifically to do with agency has called for agency to no longer be confused with freedom of action, for an integrated perspective of the player and the system, and for that relationship to be viewed as a conversation. The transactional model in this paper achieves this by proposing a nested hierarchy of levels of communication that operate as an implicit contract, negotiated between the system and the player, where the object of the transaction is bio-costs, effected through the signalling of the attainability of understandings. The paper describes research antecedents, a research agenda, the basis for the model, the model itself, examples of how the model can be used to describe videogame designs, and future research