Chaim Gingold

Chaim Gingold

Traveler, Spaceship Earth
Design & Tricksterism

In Game Studies, I analyze Wario Ware -- like the talk I gave at EGW one year.

I've jammed with the Indie Game Jam, and talked about Lightweight Prototyping at the 2005 GDC Experimental Gameplay Workshop.



Earth Dragon	Be a dragon! Destroy things! Breathe Fire!	iPhone game.	More information here.



Human Play Machine	A talk about the human capacity for play.	How do we play? What capabilities do we engage when we design games? For GDC'09.	Virtual handout available here as a zipped .pdf (170kb) Slides in the original keynote (162mb) or .ppt (102mb).



Spore	I was the design lead for all of Spore's Creators, including the Creature Creator.	...and contributed design and prototypes all over the project.	Everything from Sporepedia, cell game, and space game to animation authoring tools.



Spore's Magic Crayons	My GDC'07 talk on how to design player creativity tools and toys.	I draw upon many examples from Spore, and my experience designing Spore's Creators.	You can download the slides in .ppt format here.



Advanced Prototyping	Chris Hecker and I gave a talk at GDC'06 on advanced prototyping techniques.	The .ppt slides are here or here (13.3mb).	A lot of our examples came from the game Spore. GameSpy has a nice article that summarizes our talk.



Lightweight Prototyping	I do a lot of prototyping for Will Wright and his team at Maxis.	I gave a presentation on the topic at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the 2005 Game Developers Conference.	Slides in .ppt format.



Masters Thesis	Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds	Discusses the structure, construction, and aesthetics of game worlds, branching possible worlds, point of view in games, and the design of Comic Book Dollhouse.	Read Online .pdf (14mb) Feedback invited.



Network Dynamics	Demonstrated by Will Wright during his GDC 2003 talk, Dynamics for Designers.	One of the prototypes I wrote while working with Will Wright as a Maxis intern.



Dust	Sandbox. Shy, playful bunnies.



Tree	Procedurally grow trees.



Leaf	Another morphogenesis inspired experiment.



Traffic	Who are these critters?



Fireflies	Neural network inspired firefly toy.



Multicrisis	Game prototype.	3d stunt double: Yotam Gingold



Gumis	Game designed and written for Janet H. Murray as part of a research assistantship.	Final graphics by Maryann Westfall and Candace Chandler; Additional programming and sound design by Amon Millner.



Squares	Interactive polyptych.	Place props into the space to generate variant stories.



cworld	Animated, interactive storyworld experiment.	cworld and Squares both use Multitalk, a story generation language I wrote.



Comic Book Dollhouse	Play and author interactive comic books.	Masters Thesis project. Committee: Michael Mateas; Janet H. Murray (chair); Sha Xin Wei; Will Wright.	mac; pc v0.2 Documentation



Soude	Author easily posed hand drawn puppets.	A subset of Soude is used in Comic Book Dollhouse for character graphics.	mac; pc Note: The Windows version doesn't support loading/saving yet. Send me threatening email.



Emotisketch	Author animated, expressive, hand drawn faces.	Begin by drawing free form shapes and deforming them with muscles. Then, map muscle deformations to semantic features (i.e. left eye open/closed), so your face can be animated and puppeted.



Paper	Space for digital comics which doesn't simply remediate the printed page.	Arbitrary reading order; recursion; zooming; fluid motion; emergent layout; panel insertion and deletion.



Sketchy	Drawings magically come to life.