Maniac Mansion is one of my favorite point & click, no, dare I say NES, dare I even say video games in general. It taught me the meaning of “It won’t budge”, the dangers of microwave ovens (there’s a reason we don’t have hamsters), and probably inspired my weird sense of humor (I still quote its sequel Day of the Tentacle on a regular basis).
A couple of years ago I started messing around with cheap synthesizers. For my first attempt at a complete song I chose to cover a Maniac Mansion song, the game’s protagonist theme (Dave’s Theme or The Boys Are Still Back, by David Hayes). It wasn’t a great cover, but it reignited my love for music making (first time since 1993). I made more game covers followed by some original work, but after 3 years, I came full circle. Today, thanks to my 11 year old daughter’s fearless singing, and yours truly taking courses at the music academy to get actually better at this thing, we bring you Hey Dave.
Hey Dave can be categorized as fan fiction. We listen to Dave’s ex, who isn’t too fond of Dave heading to the mansion. Not just because she knows it’s dangerous and Dave might die, but maybe because she isn’t such a big fan of Sandy, Dave’s girlfriend who has been kidnapped by Dr. Fred. And Dr. Fred, well, he’s not a bad guy. He just got brainwashed by an evil meteor. Gotta love the 80s and its plots.
My original NES Maniac Mansion box, still in amazing condition (33 years old?)
I do want to thank Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick and Tim Schafer for creating some of the best games out there and their attempt to keep the genre alive. Playing Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle are still some of my favorite teenage memories. If it wasn’t for those games, I might not have gotten so obsessed with video games. I would have never aspired to get a PhD like Dr. Fred and I would probably be living in my parents’ attic collecting stamps…
An early version of Hey Dave was performed live at our music academy. Our daughter’s first public singing performance (she plays the violin, but dad requested singing and she nailed it).
Currently Hey Dave is only available on SoundCloud, but I’ll probably be sharing it on other platforms soon!
While we wait for more Maniac Mansion games I’ll just sketch and pitch some ideas. What about a cross-over with other LucasArts IPs?
I lost count. I’ve been blogging since 1999 and have been sharing pretty much anything and everything for the last 26 years. The blog, my opinions and topics have changed so much in all those years (I guess people DO change) that I often just get rid of it all every couple of years. I do back up of course, to throw it on the digital pile of memories that will collect electric dust for decades to come never to see the day of light ever again.
With all the things going on in the world, I feel it might be better to keep my digital self mostly on European soil (my physical self as well if we follow European guidelines for travel), so I’ve been cleaning up not only this website but also my social media presence and any websites that’s hosting things I thought was a good thing to share. I deleted my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account years ago, but I’ll be keeping my recently new Instagram for music purposes.
Random picture of cherry blossoms that I took with my new Polaroid camera. Part of the digital detox, which is the bigger picture behind my social media culling.
But I do miss an outlet, and even though it’s best to keep opinions to yourself, I do want to share a thing or two once in a while. Therefore, this blog/site. Once again. Rebooted.
Expect posts on research, video games and of course my music. Not much to see for now… Just short posts that linked to stories on Medium. I had moved all my blogging there (after a viral deepfakes post made hosting this blog expensive) and well, that’s gone now too.
Anyway, not sure if blogging is still popular. We now all want those 3 seconds video reels on those easy to digest social walls. But here’s to the few who surf the web with a real purpose and full awareness. Welcome fellow human!
Last month, Laura traveled all the way to Canada to present our work on enhancing the game stream discovery experience 🔍🎮 at the CHI PLAY conference. Based on an online survey among game spectators, our paper outlines three design goals that could enhance the exploration experience on game streaming platforms such as Twitch.
Want to learn more? Do check out our poster and paper below, or send us an email!
Laura Herrewijn and I had the honour of organising the first E3: Enhancing the Esports Experience workshop at the CHIRA conference in Rome🇮🇹 last week. Inspiring papers and talks, and what a bunch of wonderful people to connect with. (also, what a great city and amazing food!🍕🍝)
Thanks so much ❤️ and see you at the next one in 2024! 🕹️
Here’s an overview of the papers presented. Shoot me a message if you’d like the full texts!
Title:Initial Developments of Teamwork and Mental Health Focused Minigames for the Purpose of Esports Training Authors:Danielle Langlois , Simone Kriglstein Abstract: Esports professionals have to cope with a lot of stress and really need to be in sync with their teammates in order to perform at their highest capability. As part of an ongoing project, we are working toward a battery of minigames aimed at helping esports professionals train their teamwork skills and improve their mental health. Proposed ideas include modules focused on meditation, teaching coping mechanisms for difficult social scenarios via visual novel, and synchronized breathing exercises. Each of these has pros and cons. With these ideas, we hope to further workshop and develop engaging minigames which can later be user tested.
Title:Power to the Spectator: Towards an Enhanced Video Game Stream Discovery Experience Authors:Laura Herrewijn & Sven Charleer Abstract: Game streaming platforms like Twitch could benefit from more user control and transparency in recommendations. In this paper, we highlight the importance of allowing users to customise their streaming experience through three design goals: Social Interaction, Captivation, and Knowledge Acquisition, the latter addressing both skill improvement and serendipity. We discuss the preliminary results of our on-going iterative and user-centred design process aimed at improving the exploration experience for game spectators. More specifically we report on the results of co-design research to explore the parameters necessary for game spectators’ enhanced control over their game stream discovery experience.
Title:Gamers’ Eden: Gaming houses, their fuctioning, and their role inside the Esports Ecosystem Authors:alessandro franzò Abstract: The current paper aims to analyse the complex array of practices entailed by teams and esports professionals by looking at one of the most peculiar phenomena of the esports field: gaming houses, i.e. the “co-operative living arrangement[s] where several players of video games, usually professional esports players, live in the same residence” (‘Gaming House’, 2022). These structures represent ideal hives to nurture new talents and workspaces for new-fangled professions (Bányai et al., 2020; Freeman & Wohn, 2019), allegedly constituting the prototypical breeding ground for an esports professional (Can, 2018). Representing one of the first attempts to assess the role of gaming houses as emerging esports spaces based on new forms of playbour (Goggin, 2011; Kücklich, 2005) and production of and by users (Hyysalo et al., 2016), the paper comprises an innovative literature review methodology to shed light on how the technological, material, and social elements are enacted through gaming houses’ activities, which mirror the ones entailed by digital platforms (Alaimo et al., 2020). As a matter of fact, through the three moves of encoding, aggregating and computing users’ interactions (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2017), gaming houses (re)produce virtual and analogical goods, translating consumer practices and reshaping the gaming industry by constituting spatialised nodes in the broader esports ecosystem (Hölzle et al., 2022; Yström & Agogué, 2020). Finally, the contribution will critically engage with what is insiders depict as ultimate professionalising tools to see how their socio-material network may represent a privileged empirical ground for assessing how the esports ecosystem adopts new paradigms of work-life balance and users’ production (Hyysalo et al., 2016; Scholz, 2019), thus leading to a further reflection on the nature of play and working practices in our contemporary network society (Castells, 1996).
Title:The Communication Effectiveness of AI Win Prediction Applied in Esports Live Streaming Authors: Minglei Wang Abstract: AI win prediction is widely used in the live streaming of Esports games, with the assumption that it is capable of significantly enhancing the viewing experience and providing valuable information to spectators. However, there is very little empirical research to demonstrate the actual attitudes and feelings of spectators towards AI win prediction. This paper describes an ongoing study from the perspective of communication effectiveness that aims to bridge this gap and explore some possible influencing factors, which could provide a scientific basis for better presenting AI prediction information in future Esports live streaming, thus further improving the viewing experience and engagement of spectators. This study has not yet officially begun on a large scale, so this paper primarily reports primary results from in-depth in-terviews, as a pilot study for the formal survey experiment. The perceived usefulness, the balance between credibility, accuracy, and dramatic effects, and the anthropomorphic image are mainly discussed.
Title:Using Audience Avatars to Increase Sense of Presence in Live-Streams Authors:Tomáš Pagáč , Simone Kriglstein Abstract: Social interactions and the sense of presence are important for the spectatorship experience in live-streams. In large audiences, communication gets harder and viewers participate less. This paper explores the possibility of representing an audience using animated avatars to increase the sense of presence and potentially move some traffic from the chat window to the avatars. We discuss the motivations for and the challenges in creating an audience avatar interface.
Thank you Celia Hodent for inviting me to co-author the chapter on “eSports UX” with Laura Levy and Taylor Wright.
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