Games: December 2003 Archive Page

Look at the room you're in. Chances are it has thousands of objects in it. Imagine having to write a description of every single one of those objects and its relationship to every other. Eeeagh! Instead, you winnow it down to the objects you'll actually need, plus a bit of scenery. In other words, the author does for the player what the autistic person is incapable of doing for himself. No wonder there seems to be a disproportionate number of autistic-spectrum folk in IF fandom: it must be wonderful to wander around a virtual world where surroundings can be completely apprehended without being overwhelming (which isn't guaranteed even for graphical adventures). --Adam Cadre --Autism and Interactive Fiction (adamcadre.ac)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Beneath the arena's grandeur lay a netherworld of gladiatorial schools and storerooms, all linked by corridors filled with pulleys and levers, animal cages and gladiators. | The system was run by teams of slaves who faced being fed to the animals themselves if their timing went awry.-Michael Leidig --Animal magic of Rome's Colosseum underworld (Sydney Morning Herald)

Well, that's one way to motivate your techies.

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players -- "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles.

[...]

Many a great game has poor visuals -- an entire generation of players grew up with blips of light, @ signs and even text-only games -- but there are few good game with bad controls. --James Newman --The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames (Game Studies)

Some good observations on the complexity of the player's identification with elements within the game world.

When my son Peter was about 2, he was spooked by one of those little coin-operated riding machines. He still enjoys sitting in them, but he never wants us to put in any money. The employee at the arcade near the shopping mall food court in Wisconsin got to recognize my face, and noticed that I never spent anything; at one point he would drop two or three tokens into a machine where Peter was happily watching the demo loop. When the familiar sequence was replaced with a "get ready to play" screen, Peter would put up with the interruption, or say "You play, Daddy." After the game was over, he would resume his enjoyment of the demo loop.

During the coin-operated videogame craze of the late 70s and early 80s, I spent about two dollars on Asteriods, but I would often go to arcades to watch. Often, after having watched somebody play two or three games, the gamer would invite me to push the fire button, so that he (always a he) could concentrate on moving and accelerating.

Looking back, I wonder whether maybe I should have reciprocated; I never did, and I never recall getting glared at for my stinginess. It was my perception at the time that the paying player was, at least in part, rewarding me for being such an attentive audience.

Gaming Culture and Theory -- Or; Will Somebody Please Pinch Me?Literacy Weblog)

About a half hour ago, I returned from a meeting with the dean of academic affairs, at which I was planning to pitch a new course that I'm calling "Gaming Culture and Theory." I brought a short stack of scholarly books along with me, intending to justify the academic value of such a course, particularly as Seton Hill University continues admitting more men.

But before I even made it to the chair, the dean said, "Just so you know, I'm going to ask you teach this course next January. Tell me, what will it be about?"

In return for teaching a course in the first few weeks of January (during Christmas break), I would get a lighter teaching load in the spring.

In order to accomodate the needs of students who want to go home for Christmas break, the dean wants me to teach the course online, and to commit to teaching it every other year (which is typical of electives at our small school).

I had already roughed up a syallabus that had us meeting in virtural environments for all of the second week and using blogs throughout the term, so I didn't have to think very much about that. She also asked whether the course would meet the university's "artistic expression" area requirement, and I said that I thought it would -- graphic designers could produce storyboards, English majors could write branching dialogue trees, programmers could produce their own Elizas, etc.

I decided to go with a cultural focus, rather than a heavy theoretical focus, because one of my goals would be to get students to begin thinking critically about the games they play (and about the rhetoric of gaming as it is represented by the mainstream media). Perhaps after I've taught more upper-class SHU students, I'll have a clearer idea of what kind of theoretical concepts to attempt, but something tells me a three-week intensive course offered during the January break is going to have to have a lot of hands-on game time. Since three weeks is probably not long enough for students to become fully invested in an epic MMORPG, I don't think I'll be able to work with EverQuest in class. And I want to include an exploring/socializing game, such as There.com, SimsOnline (neither of which I've played). I'm thinking of assignments such as asking students to use their avatars for cross-gendered role-play, to discuss such issues as sexual harrasment or body image in virtural environments. I'm not sure I could teach stand a course on the mathematical algorithms for generating the shadow for a stream of spurting blood, but the course will have to appeal to the gaming geeks in order for it to attract enough enrollment.

My parting shot was a request that I be given a budget to fund my own exploratory research on the pedagogical uses of virtual environments. Sure, she said, put it in the proposal. (Which is easy enough to say, but still... she didn't burst out laughing, which is a good sign.)

Where to start... EverQuest is probably out (though maybe I should investigate a little further before deciding...). Star Wars Galaxies? Deus X 2? Grand Theft Auto?

(Somebody, pinch me!)

Okay, okay, back to my long-enough list of short-term goals.

No matter how tricky or convoluted the map becomes, you will always have a clear picture of how to get from one part to another. Accurate mapping cannot be overstressed if one is to become an above-average adventure game player. Top players map at least 50 percent of their game-playing time. --Roe R. Adams III --Computer Gaming Methodology (Digital Deli)

Boy, that brings back memories. Back in my day, we didn't have this fancy camera-floating-along-behind-the-PC, 3D realtime-rendered automapping. What we had was a piece of paper and a pencil. That's the way it was, and we liked it!

Also of note farther down on the same page is a sidebar on dragons in computer games since Adventure. (The article's from a 1984 book, so the list isn't long.) And, while I'm at it, I found an interesting discussion of comptuer therapy (starting with Eliza, but moving on a bit.)

I'm working on a bit of computer history myself, or will be when I finish grading (tomorrow!). Historical research 101: the older your source is, the more valuable its observations; they haven't been tained by the passage of time, which tends to filter out the unpopular or unusual opinions and replace them with commonly-accepted wisdom.

Reading a decision novel is much like walking along a path: when you come to a fork in the path, you must decide on the left path or the right path. You cannot leave the path. Decision books look a lot more like novels than interactive fiction. They are cleverly woven stories that overlap at certain points and they are a far cry from being interactive. They do allow you a choice, a "decision," but what happens if you want to do something that is not one of the preconceived choices? --Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank --Interactive Fiction and the Future of the Novel (Atari Archives)

A classic article from the 1984 book Digital Deli, which is available online at the wonderful Atari Archives website.

I'd have to disagree with their claim here. It's true that interactive fiction (text-adventure games) offer far morie decisions than "decision novels" (the best-known of these were the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels -- made up of one-page stories with a multiple-choice question at the bottom: "If you pick up the telephone, turn to page 10. If you let it ring, turn to page 14").

But an IF game still offers only a finite set of solutions. A good programmer will account for all sorts of attempted actions, typically by writing funny refusal statements (such as, when a frustrated gamer types "bite tree," the game might respond, "That would be worse than its bark."). But even if a game recognizes a lot of attempted actions, only a very small number of actions will actually affect the outcome of the game. Yes, you can type whatever you want in response to the ">" prompt, just as I could take a Jane Austen novel off of my shelf and start turning pages at random. The Austen novel is optimized for the reader who starts at page one and turns pages sequentially, just as the typical interactive fiction game is optimized for the gamer who knows the conventions of the genre (or who is willing to learn them as they are taught by the author during the early stages of the game).

This classic article, co-written by one of the founders of Infocom, naturally emphasizes that company's improvements over Will Crowther's original two-word parser. Despite the article's bias, or perhaps because of it, it offers an excellent introduction to the structure and possible future of interactive fiction.

Of course, improved graphics displays and the rise of CD-ROM games would kill the commercial value of the genre -- but the whole computer gaming market sort of imploded in the late 80s anyway, mostly due to the failure of dozens of independent computer platforms.

On an only barely related note, one of my students wrote that until she visited the office of the student newspaper (which uses Macs) she hadn't seen an Apple comptuer since elementary school -- that is, not outside of "old movies." (By the way, she's a CS major.)

Who really killed Hamlet's dad? What does King Richard III want with a horse anyway? And where did the gravedigger get that gorgeous pink dress? Avenge your father, defeat your evil uncle and ascend the throne of Denmark in William Shakespeare's long undiscovered text adventure. --Robin Johnson --The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Online Residence of Robin Johnson)

Very nice, Scott-Adamsesque implementation of Hamlet as a text adventure. Doesn't shoot nearly as high as Graham Nelson's verson of The Tempest (game | my review) but the JavaScript interface looks very smooth. I've got a long-dormant work-in-progress that features a character with a speech impediment, so I was amused to see Johnson's treament of Ophelia.