Guest: Kimberley Åhage, project manager & associate eSport program manager DreamHack (Wikipedia, Dreamhack official website, Dreamhack open) & Blizzard (Wikipedia, European website). 

Title: eSport, the younger generation creates a new business 

Talk: 

+ What is eSport?
+ Why eSport?
+ The business behind eSport & the new rising opportunities
+ What eSport did that money & politics never could 
+ What created eSports 
+ Next gen 

About: I have worked several years in the gaming industry and was the first female to be employed by Blizzard Entertainment in the European eSport division as an associate eSport program manager. I'm proud to have produced some great eSport shows including streams & content for both Twitch.tv, Youtube.com & TV6play along with Swedish Television (SVT). Creating and hosting events & productions involve unique and exciting marketing campaigns, work & business models. 

Website: http://www.kimberleyahage.com

Literature: See the literature webpage

Guest: Linda Kiby, CEO at Warpzone Studios AB.

Title: Where do we go from here? 

Talk: Right now "everyone" in the games industry is talking about VR (and not much else). But is VR actually arriving and is it our only hope? The answer might not be so straightforward. What other interesting things are happening in games and in the computer games industry right now? Get the inside scoop! Linda will also talk about how computer games are created, including the differences between the big-budget AAA games and smaller productions.

About: Linda has worked at Avalanche Studios and Paradox Interactive as a Level Designer, Techical Designer, Technical Assistant (Community Manager, IT-Manager, Tech Support, Localization Manager, Installer Maker), Assistant Producer, Producer and Executive Producer. Linda is now in the middle of starting up a brand new gaming studio. She is also a former Media Technology engineering student who graduated from KTH 10 years ago.

Literature: See the literature webpage

Guest: Anton Albiin, Project Manager at the Association of Swedish Game Developers. 

Title: You've never been this lucky 

Talk: A Student intent on working in the games industries nowadays has unprecedented privileges in terms of access to education, grassroots events, networks, and 100's of profitable computer game companies. But how did the Swedish games industry take form? And how can an inexperienced student become a part of it? This talk will give you an introduction to all that stuff, and much more in terms of the computer games industry.

About: Anton has a background at Mojang AB and HR and nowadays takes care of game industry stuff surrounding Events, Education, HR, Diversity, Investment, Startups and Finance.

Literature: See the literature webpage.

Guest: Daniel Ström, CEO and creative director at Guru Games

Title: Storytelling vs Mechanics - The mechanical hen or the storytelling egg? 

Talk: Games are a medium apart from all others, despite researchers & academics fighting over whether it is primarily literature or movies that lies closest to games. Games are more than any or both as they constitute a mashup of mechanical interactions, visual cinematics and good old fashioned writing and storytelling. At times, these aspects seem to be completely at odds with each other. I will argue that narrative and mechanics do not have to be enemies, but, different and unique rules apply to games when we combine storytelling and player interaction.

About: Daniel Ström is the CEO and creative director at Guru Games, the company behind "Medusa’s Labyrinth" and "Magnetic: Cage Closed". He founded the company together with a group of friends back in 2013, after having studied game design at the University of Skövde. He teaches part time at that university and his teaching focuses on game writing and design.

Guest: Daniel Pargman, Associate professor in Media Technology, Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design, School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Title: Theory and method of Design Fiction – what this course is really about 

Talk: We are doing "Design Fiction" in this course. Design fiction is the use of narrative elements and scenarios to envision, explain and raise questions about possible futures. I will discuss the term and the practice of envisioning the future through narrative scenarios (i.e. envisioning the future through convincing and compelling stories).

Literature:

1) Daniel Pargman (2014). "The Future of News and ICT for Sustainability 2029". This paper was submitted to the workshop "Alternate Endings: Using Fiction to Explore Design Futures" that was held at the CHI 2014 conference.

2) A great example of near-future design fiction explorations are the British television series "Black Mirror". If you have the time, please watch the episode "The Entire History of You" (48 minutes). All seven Black Mirror episodes are available on YouTube and Netflix. Do watch other episodes if you have the time. My personal favourite is "Fifteen Million Merits"

3) Optional: read Daniel's longwinded-but-hopefully informative and entertaining blog post about a one-day Design Fiction workshop at the CHI 2014 conference (see above). 

Guest: Björn Thuresson: teacher, researcher and manager of the KTH Visualisation Studio.

Title: VR, AR and beyond 

Talk: What’s behind the current hype for Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)? Which more specifically are the technologies? What are their affordances and shortcomings, and, what happens next?

Bio: Björn Thuresson has a background in cinema and media, both from a practice and a research perspective. He’s been going back and forth between academia and industry and has during the last few years built up visualisation as an academic subject at KTH and set up a large network of company collaborations. He is also running the KTH Visualisation Studio as a lab environment for realising and building future technologies.

Literature: Please have a look at:

• http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/why-virtual-augmented-and-mixed-reality-are-the-4th-wave-of-tech/
• http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/htc-vive-mixed-reality-vr-how-to-explained/
• https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/42250/facts-vs-fiction-cybersickness

Guest: Annika Waern, professor in human-computer interaction at Uppsala University

Title: Pervasive games and revolutionary play

Talk:  When we play games in the everyday world rather than in dedicated environments, we start to change those places. In this talk I will discuss the interplay between play and reality in pervasive games; games that pervade life and public space - often through the use of technologies. My core focus will be if such games harbour a revolutionary power - if they can bring about changes in us or in society?

About: I have been researching games from a design research perspective for a long time, focussing on pervasive games: games that are played in the everyday world (think Pokemon Go). As a design researcher, my focus lies in understanding what makes such games different and what makes them work. I was co-author of the book ‘Pervasive Games: Theory and design” and I was voted in as one of the ten inaugural distinguished scholars of DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association.

Website: annikawaern.wordpress.com

Literature: Please read my latest blog post, "Why is Pokemon Go such a hit?"

NOTE: We all meet in M37 which is the bigger of the two seminar room. It  will be crowded and many will have to stand but it will only take 10-15 minutes before you are divided into smaller groups. Please be on time! Late arrivals will have fewer options! Here's how you prepare for the seminar:

A) Read through the 20 short future-related topics below. We have harvested these topics from your essays, from our guest lectures and from literature.

B) "VOTE" HERE for your three favorite topics/technologies. These are the topics you could imagine yourself exploring during the project phase, or, that you at least would like another group to work with during the project phase. Your vote is a vote on interesting topics - not a pledge as to what you want/will work on during the project phase. 

NOTE: perhaps we were better at formulating certain topics than others - your task is to see through and beyond the short descriptions and imagine what these topics could be developed into!

C). You are hopefully inspired by several of the topics, but you might realize that we have missed an excellent topic that really should have been on this list. Invent a title and write a short text about that topic (1-3 sentences) as a comment to this blog post. This will help us generate topics for the next seminar!

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Further see the Instructions for Seminar 2

Guest: Jin Moen, inventor of Oriboo and former founder and CEO of Movinto Fun, Collaboration Manager at Uppsala University Innovation

Title: Everybody dance now! - Motion-based games

Talk: The talk will cover three main topics:

1) Creating Oriboo - the design process and vision behind an innovative motion-based game concept.

2) Motion-based games - still looking for the killer app?!

3) The game industry - from a startup perspective.

About: Oriboo (fka BodyBug) was a spin off concept from Jin's PhD project in Human-computer Interaction that was carried out at Interactive Institute and KTH. The project combined her two educational backgrounds as dance teacher (BFA) in modern and contemporary dance and MSc in Engineering physics from KTH. During 8 years she worked as founder and CEO of Movinto Fun, the company that developed and commercialized Oriboo. Today, Jin work as Collaboration Manager at Uppsala University Innovation.

Website/source: fb.com/oriboo (in Swedish), oriboo.com

Guest: Jan Christofferson, administrative officer at the Swedish Media Council

Title: Violent computer games and aggression 

Talk: There has been a lot of research carried out in order to assess the relationship between violent media and aggression. The results are inconclusive. Furthermore: what is aggression if it is not manifested in actual violent behavior? How has aggression been defined in the research that has been conducted? This presentation discusses the results from the Swedish Media Council’s survey Violent computer games and aggression – an overview of the research 2000-2011. 

About: Jan Christofferson is administrative officer at the Swedish Media Council, a government agency with the remit to promote the empowering of minors as conscious media users and to protect them from harmful media influences. 

Guest: Krzysztof Krzyscin, Technical Art Director at CD PROJEKT RED

Guest: Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, Game Director at CD PROJEKT RED

Title: Video Games Tech Evolution

Talk: Driven by constant improvements in their underlying technology, video games are the fastest evolving kind of software. This talk will present a global overview of the changes we adopted to across 13 years of franchise development of the computer game "The Witcher", with a special focus on engine changes, rendering and the content creation pipeline.

About: Krzysztof Krzyscin is a passionate gamer, raised on games like original Fallout (1 and 2), Quake and of course Dune (on Amiga!). He has develop games since 2004, starting as Environmental Artist in small indie company - making outsource assets for The Witcher (2006). Later, he worked on a few unannounced Star Wars universe games in Free Radical Design (UK). He joined CD Projekt RED in 2009, as Senior Environmental Artist, later assembling & leading Technical Art team (shipping The Witcher 2 on the PC and XBOX 360 platforms). Right now he is in charge of the Technical Art department, covering all projects (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC, XBOX ONE, PS4, upcoming Cyberpunk 2077), and acting as Head of R&D, researching content pipeline improvements, exploring new shading and rendering techniques and guiding performance and optimization related tasks.

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz started his professional game development career in 2005. His deep knowledge of games landed him a position in CD Projekt RED as a tester. Not much time passed before Tomaszkiewicz was recognized as an avid designer, who, thanks to his hard work, later became the lead of quest designers. Currently, Konrad holds the position of Game Director at CD Project RED.

Website: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/

Guest: Peter Zackariasson, Associate Professor in Marketing

Title: Business models in the video game industry

Content: The video game industry has developed from a pastime of tinkering with technology in the 1950s and 60s to a multi-billion dollar industry by the turn of the century. To understand the enormous success of this industry one has to turn to economical, technological as well ad cultural explanations. In this lecture we will explore the archeology of game development and the different market configurations that has enables this medium to construct a persistent attachment in main stream media.

Bio: Peter Zackariasson has studied the cultural industries since 2001 with a focus on the video game industry. The result of this research can be found in numerous article, books and papers. His recent books are: "Video Game Marketing: A student textbook", "The Business of Gamification: A Critical Analysis" and "Arts and Business: Building a Common Ground for Understanding Society".

Website: For more information see www.zackariasson.com

Literature: See the literature webpage

Guest: Pontus Rundqvist, Project Manager and Business Developer at DreamHack AB.

Title: DreamHack – esport broadcasts under the hood. 

Talk: There is a lot of talk surrounding what esports are and how big it has grown in recent years, but, how are esports "done practically"? What has made it possible for DreamHack, with its humble beginnings as a local Swedish LAN party 25 years ago, to transform itself into a global production company with a worldwide audience? This talk will in particular focus on environmental factors such as technological advancements (players, distribution networks, bandwidth), how DreamHack has created new formats for both web and linear TV as well as explaining the live audience experience of watching esports.  

About: Pontus Rundqvist has been working as a Business Developer and project manager at DreamHack since 2014. He filled roles such as interim social media manager for DreamHack in both the US and EU as well as running the internal DreamHack developer team – producing features for productions and festivals. His professional role also includes bringing broadcasts and productions to Monster Energy DreamHack Studio. 

See the Instructions for Seminar 3

Guest: Daniel Pargman, Associate professor in Media Technology, Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design, School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Title: Massively Multiplayer Games 

Talk: This lecture will be about two things:

1) A talk about Massively Multiplayer Games (e.g. World of Warcraft and similar games)

2) A walkthrough of what will happen in the course during the coming week (formation of project groups), the remainder of the start-up phase and the project phase (that ends on December 16 with the final presentation).

Literature:

See the Literature webpage.

Guest: Mikolaj Dymek, Associate Professor at Mid Sweden University.

Title: Gamification – New Game Rules of Media and Communication? 

Talk: Mikolaj Dymek’s lecture is about gamification – the use of gaming mechanisms in non-gaming environments – in the broader context of business. As a business strategy it has been almost euphorically received by the corporate world since it seemingly delivers the Holy Grail of  “playful work” by means of highly controllable, usually software-based game components ushering in a new world of fun and rewards that replaces the established world of predictability and requirements. Fuelled by strategy consultants and self-proclaimed gurus with “twitterable” claims, the gamification trend bubble has possibly already burst, and the world of corporate trends has moved on to the next big thing.  However, regardless whether it is called “gamification” or not, the application of game design elements in non-gaming environments, is enduring fad cycles and deserves stringent analysis and research.  This lecture will explore definitions of gamification, analyse several prominent business cases, and finally critically analyse the concept with contemporary theoretical perspectives. 

About: Mikolaj Dymek is an Associate Professor at Mid Sweden University where he researches marketing communications. He is also a consumer PR analyst and is co-editor of a new volume of work on the business of gamification, and co-author of a student textbook on video game marketing, both due in 2016 from Routledge.

Literature: Se the literature webpage

Description: 

Gemma Thomson, CEO & designer at Box Kaleidoscope

Title: The "Whys" and "Hows" of Gender Inclusivity in Games

Talk: Campaigns to include more women in the act of game-making, to support those who are already in the industry, and to improve gender diversity in the games themselves have gained a lot of attention in recent years - achieving significant traction and ruffling quite a few feathers along the way. But what is actually being done to improve gaming for those who identify as something other than "male", and why? We'll explore the motivations behind these efforts, from safe spaces to female and non-binary indie auteurs, and consider what affect this will have on the future of our medium.

About: Gemma is founding CEO of indie studio Box Kaleidoscope, as well as a game designer, part-time lecturer and former chair of Diversi. After graduating from a games design degree in the UK, she began her career designing a variety of games at Playniac, before turning freelance and making a move to Sweden to continue game jamming and indie development. Here she's furthered her efforts in non-profit work, particularly in the area of gender diversity, as co-founder of LadyCADE and TjejHack.

Literature: Se the Literature webpage.

Guest: Staffan Björk, Professor in interaction design at Gothenburg University

Title talk 1: Computer-Augmented Board Games

Talk 1: The development of early computer games have surprisingly many connections to board games, but computer games began to diverge from board games as CPUs became more powerful and user interfaces became richer in detail. However, the ubiquity of smart phones and tablet computers have opened up possibilities for a reunification of the two through board games that make use of computational technologies. This talk will present the concept of computer-augmented board games together with commercial examples and several research experiments using technologies others than smart phones and tablets to juxtapose board games and computer games.

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Title talk 2: The Dark Side of Game Design?

Talk 2: A Discussion about Dark Gameplay Design Patterns

Talk: Game design is typically presented as being benevolent and focusing on giving players positive experiences. However, this may not necessarily be true, for example due to commercial constraints. While it is often easy to find examples of questionable designs when looking at theme or narration in games, this presentation looks at how the gameplay itself can be argued to be dark or when players or others may perceive a game design as having "dark" problems regarding gameplay.

About: Staffan Björk is a professor in interaction design at Gothenburg University and has focused on game research since 1999. He has been involved in projects focusing on pervasive games as well as introduced gameplay design patterns together with Jussi Holopainen as a way of having a vocabulary for gameplay design and analysis.

Literature: Se the Literature webpage.

Guest: Anna Swartling, Head of Centre of Excellence Experience design at SEB

Title: "Project TEAM work"

Talk: Successful projects depend on a well functioning project teams. But what does that mean in practice? At this lecture, we will examine and discuss these issues together. We will primarily focus on team work, leadership and communication issues and conflict management.

Comment (from Daniel): This is a lecture that has nothing to do with this year’s theme, but all the more to do with creating successful project groups (and thereby successful projects) during the project phase. This is a lecture where everyone should listen up and pay close attention to what Anna says. You fail to do so at your own risk as this might increase the chance that your project group won't work out the way you want - and with detrimental effects on your satisfaction about your project, about the course, and perhaps also about your grade. Do remember that everyone in a project groups gets the same grade - so being able to handle problems in the project group can be vital both to your wellbeing and to your resulting grade from the course. Furthermore do note that KTH uses the whole spectrum of the available grade scale - you are in no way "guaranteed" to receive A's or B's or indeed even C's or D's just because you manage to hand in something (rather than nothing) at the end of the term.

About: Anna Swartling is currently working at the SEB, the second largest bank in Sweden. She manages all UX work at SEB and directs their 14 person strong (and quickly growing) Center of Excellence Experience design. Anna recently moved to SEB after having worked as a usability architect at Scania, one of the premier truck and bus companies in the world and holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Anna has long experience of team work and leadership from a variety of different positions and businesses, including from KTH school projects (computer science), as team manager, project manager for computer systems development projects as well as from being an actor and a director in amateur theatre productions, as chairwoman of several boards and from research projects.

Literature: Se the Literature webpage.

Guest: Marcus Toftedahl, Phd student in socio-technical systems, Lecturer in game development. University of Skövde

Title: The Sweden Game Arena in Skövde

Talk: During the last 15 years the small to mid-sized Swedish town of Skövde has developed into a game development hub. Today more than 500 students are studying game development in one of several educational programmes (bachelor, master and vocational). In addition to this, more than 40 game studios are developing games for the local and the global market. This presentation will be about the journey of Skövde as a game development city – how did this happened what will happen next?

About: Marcus has been working with the game development educational programmes at the University of Skövde since 2009 as a lecturer and as a game developer. Marcus is currently doing a PhD focusing on the processes behind creating games as a local “indie” games company while at the same time working in a global marketplace.

Literature: Se the Literature webpage and the Skövde Game Development 2016 showreel.

Guest: Milad Barosen, Co-Founder of Milou Group.

Title: Root thinking, Shared Economies and the Future of Housing

Talk: Milad's talk consists of two parts:

1. Systematic root thinking in creative processes. 

In previous talks in this course I have introduced "systematic root thinking" as a tool to explore and define a type of future(s) as well as how various typologies of the future may look different depending on how you investigate the root. 

Daniel's comment: This part is really great and very useful for all project groups in the course to listen to!

2. Sharing Economy & How we will live 

What do sharing economy trends suggest about the future of living environments? Housing crises across the world’s metropolises are reaching various tipping point and Stockholm just entered the Guinness book of records in terms of how long you have to wait to find rental housing. Spotify’s recent open letter to the Swedish government warned them of the possibility of Spotify relocating their business elsewhere for lack of housing solutions for incoming "talent" (system developers etc.).  But taking a step back, how did we live and what can be learned from the past, and, what would cities look like if they (for example) had been planned by farmers instead of real estate developers?

The lecture will show examples of root thinking and how it expands our perception of concepts of the future on an experimental level, while bringing onboard current market trends and what is happening in our live-work-and-learn environments. The past and the future are inextricably linked together by the present, so what happens when you change one of them in an "interesting" (provocative) way? In order to look into the future we will expose the consequences of the exception and create temporary realities where we allow for critical discussions to take place that challenge our taken-for-granted - invisible? - assumptions. The lecture aims to involve, discuss and debate so please feel more than welcome to jump in!

About: Milad Barosen is a Swedish-Iranian architect and entrepreneur operating between New York and Stockholm. His new-found company, Milou Group, currently explores innovative business models at the intersection of ‘live-work-learn-play’ environments. Having worked internationally across a wide range of architecture, urban design, branding and marketing projects, Milad’s work is today driven by an entrepreneurial approach and by shrewd storytelling. He has lived and worked in Stockholm, New York and London where he received his Masters from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL.  Milad has previously taught at the KTH and LTH School of Architecture in Stockholm and Lund and a recurrent guest lecturer in the KTH Future of Media course.

Guest: Tjarls Metzmaa, Förbundssekreterare at Sverok (Sveriges roll- och konfliktspelsförbund/Spelhobbyförbundet) [Secretary of The Swedish Gaming Federation]

Title: Gaming - a way of life

Talk: You will be exposed to the life of gamers in Sweden and globally. We will indulge ourselves in all things nerdy and explore why gaming nowadays stretches so very far beyond the games themselves.

About: Tjarls is the Secretary of Sverok (The Swedish Gaming Federation) - "Sweden's largest youth organisation". Sverok organizes 101.000 members in 3600 gaming clubs. Tjarls is a no-holds-barred-nerd who devotes both his professional career and the rest of his life to spreading the nerdy way of gaming and gamers to the the rest of society.

Literature: Se the Sverok's English-language description of who they are and what they do. The English-language Wikipedia page can also be useful for reading up on Sverok and their activities.