In recent years, Dr. Vered Penueli has seen how an Israeli identity is formed in the development of computer games, despite the global nature of the industry. In first-year student games, this is even more evident. “Penueli testifies to this as the head of the master’s degree in digital game design and development and the head of the Games Center at Shenkar College. According to her, cultural heritage has become a very popular research topic in the gaming world.
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“In certificate studies, students are taught to enter the casual gaming industry, which is an industry whose target audience is the whole world.” On the other hand, she says that graduate students try to develop an Israeli character for the games they design. “It’s part of the fun, that students come for two years and realize they’re going to do something very creative. There’s a sense that they’re going to be snatched up by the gaming industry in a second. They have a chance to do something they can’t do in a commercial company – write a different story.”
Do they enjoy going into a hyper-casual or social casino company later, which is less concerned with telling a story?
“Graduates really like working in these companies. There are also graduates who work at Plarium, there is more emphasis on telling a story. There are also a lot of graduates who enjoy developing something dynamic and immediate. They approach me and say, ‘You see, I developed a game and suddenly 40 million players “We play it. I think the Israeli dynamics are different from those in Europe.”
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Raid Shadow Legends of the Israeli company Palarium
(Palarium)
Because of this pace of life, game developers in the country are more focused on games with a fast pace of development, like hyper casual?
Israeli industry has a very fast business vision. These are its advantage and ability. The gaming industry complains that there is no in-depth research and almost no indie creators. But the advantage of Israeli industry is the dynamism, the speed. In fact, our students are blown away by it. There are always those who want to work in a slightly slower company; At the time they wanted to work in companies that do educational games, but today that has changed. Even when they do something like that, they get into a cool technology company that has a lot of data in it. The data changed the rules of the game. “
Penueli reached her current position in 2009, when she returned to Israel after completing her doctorate at Brunel University in England, where she researched the social influences of the gaming field. About 30 miles south of Brunel lies the town of Guildford, which during the 1990s became a fertile cushion for a variety of game development studios, such as Media Molecule acquired by Sony; Lionhead Studios purchased by Microsoft; And Criterion Games, acquired by EA.
“It turned out that Guildford was a gaming powerhouse that no one knew about,” Penueli recalled. “I said, ‘There’s a really fascinating industry here. Why don’t women play in it?’ ‘In fact, the question of women led me to think about diversity in games. It was a super-profitable, but completely niche industry, like comics. Today the question seems very clear because it has been asked for a long time: How can the games industry be made accessible?’
“Once you ask such a question, you start asking what are the things that characterize the gaming industry? For that I received a doctorate. I came to study the medium, to look at it through a different lens. As people realized it is possible to do a degree in theater and look at it from academic angles.”
(Collaboration between a master’s degree in game development and the fashion design department at Shenkar)
Penueli presented her vision to Professor Yuli Tamir, then president of the college. “Tamir told me that until we offer the degree to MLAG, we will be able to start certificate studies at Shenkar. I saw that well, from the very beginning brilliant students came to the college. Most of the lecturers in the class today were initially students, some of whom have been with me for 10 and 12 years. “In 2013, Penueli established the first incubator of its kind in Israel for computer games, Play Lab, although the experiment was unsuccessful.
Why did the greenhouse fail?
“What we soon realized is that it is difficult for students to become employees in such a short time. After students learn to develop a game, they are forced to leave and work elsewhere. We wanted to give them another three or four months to finish the games they developed and then bring in Israeli distributors, strengthen the industry and share in the profits. The model was right. Maybe if we were more insistent, then we could. But we needed deep pockets.
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Prof. Yuli Tamir, former President of Shenkar
(Photo: Amit Shaal)
“One of the problems in the industry at the time was that there were talented people and they had a place to develop skills, but there were no distributors here. Today there are companies in Israel like Crazy Labs and Playtica, but they also develop games and distribute them.”
“However, because the gaming industry has become global, game distributors from all over the world are looking for game developers.” Once you upload a game to the widget store, you are already approached by distributors. The whole model has changed thanks to the hyper casual. Penueli is convinced that if Shenkar had deeper pockets in those years, “then we would have cracked the model. But it was really inside the academy and it was not built for it. I do not rule out going back to it. It will still tickle us. We will make it more accurate next time.” .
Penueli argues that the common denominator in graduate work of graduates in digital game development is in providing an emotional response, whether in encouraging teamwork or bridging intergenerational gaps. “Today most children acquire their social skills in play games, school is a babysitter, but they do not learn those skills there. All the quarrels and conflicts of my eight-year-old take place in the games themselves.
“Parents and teachers are not there, they have no idea what is going on. We need to understand that our job is to provide means to teach social skills within computer games. Also financially, companies lose a lot of players because they leave the game because of quarrels.”
“One of my favorite games in the final show is ‘Subjects,’ by students Rebecca Thamesos and Alon Kfir. You can advance a plot when the dynamics between PC and NPC change. “
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Final theses of graduates of Shenkar. Right: “Voice Detective”, “Kill the Beat” and “Subjects”
(Shenkar)
“Time Again” by Hava Dagan Gur, Yaron Kantor and Ofir Ben Dor is a virtual reality (VR) game designed for seniors, who sometimes face feelings of loneliness. The game is based on studies that claim that the mood and mental well-being of the elderly population can be improved through communication with children. The game explores whether interacting with a virtual child character might create a similar effect on older people.
Two of the games, “Trippin ‘Troll Trucker Tales” and “Kill the Music”, encourage teamwork between players. Another game, “Yonos,” explores theories from the world of behavioral economics in the world of horror and science fiction. Four players have to decide together how to save humanity from a mysterious plague that has turned humans into half-pigeons.
“Detective Voice” is a play by Kira Weizmann Shapira, Miri Noodleman, Yuval Shai Michaelis and Bar Dotan. Weizmann Shapira is hard of hearing, and during the game the team tried to “gamify” (“play”) for hearing tests for children. The group changed the test frequencies to be more pleasant for children, and managed to shorten the test duration from 40 minutes to only 10 minutes.
Penueli’s phone rings in the middle of the interview. She says the conversation is related to the opening of a new Shenkar curriculum to be held in Dubai. Penueli promoted the initiative alongside Oded Chai, head of the Department of Foreign Studies and Continuation at Shenkar.
Why in Dubai?
“Dubai is a place where you can work with India, Europe and America. It is a good crossroads. We found a partner there who makes a great impression. The study model through Zoom has also changed a lot during the Corona. AMS (events in which participants try to create computer games from scratch; We want to open the master’s degree in game design and development to as many countries as possible. Even in graduate school today, there are some courses taught exclusively in English, and we have student exchange frameworks. The global issue is very important to us. “