Games: February 2004 Archive Page

The ability of players to interact with games has fundamentally changed them, Lowood said. Computer games, once seen as commercial products or a one-way communication between designer and player, are now seen as a much more open kind of medium that people can contribute to in other ways, he said. "So much of the content of a game is now generated by players. Games have become a platform that people can use creatively. As a medium, computer games offer many different opportunities for people to express themselves -- including artistic expression and political expression." -- Barbara Palmer --Computer games under sociological microscope in Cantor exhibit  (Stanford University)

I've followed Henry Lowood's work from afar -- his exhibit sounds fantastic. Wish I could see it.

Most non-arcade games that retain a rabid fan base years after they've become technically obsolote fall into one of two categories. They have a obsessively complex world that's been built up around them (Nethack, say, or tabletop roleplaying games), or they have a simple rule set with much greater depth in the gameplay and strategy than you'd expect on first glance (games like M.U.L.E., or the boardgames that many of my friends adore). Text adventure games don't really fit either of these categories, quite. As a classic piece of criticism and theory puts it, their goal is to avoid crimes against mimesis. They are telling a story (with puzzles, most likely), and it is the goal of the author to never once induce the player to think about the artifice and contraints of the system used to tell it.

A new type of game has sprung up in the past few years. Call it unfiction or alternative reality gaming -- the idea is that a narrative is strung together on the Internet (and possibly even to a limited extent in the physical world) which participants can unpack using exactly the same research tools and conspiracy-minded obsession over detail that they would for a real-life mystery.

-- Steve Cook --Interactive Fictions (Snarkout)

A usefully-linked summary of the history of interactive fiction, including the current IF revival.

BTW, the winners of the 2003 XYZZY Awards have been announced.

Games Galore

Two interesting Slashdot threads... one is "Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press", a response to the recent NY Times article on the upcoming Princeton conference, and another is discussion of Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century, a beautiful nine-part article on interactive fiction, featuring interviews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and IF Competition winners Dan Rapivinto & Star Foster.

Update: I just noticed that The Onion has a favorable review of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. (The link will expire soon.)

"Games are big, big objects," said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over." | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, "More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form," (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. "I am very nervous that I got it wrong," he said. --Michael Erard --The Ivy-Covered Console (New York Times)

I knew this article was coming because the author e-mailed me late Tuesday in order to ask whether I knew anything more about Mary Ann Buckles, who wrote her 1985 Ph.D. thesis on "Adventure." (I tried tracking her down a few years ago, and found someone who thought she might be a relative, but I didn't go further than that.)

This is an excellent article... the author notes that Espen Aarseth, whose book Cybertext is a seminal work in studying games as games (rather than as kinds of literature or film) is only 38. Erard really manages to capture the newness and multidisciplinarity of the field with the following description of next week's Princeton conference ("Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism"):

A lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two lecturers and six graduate students will present papers with titles like "Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600 Games" and "But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a 'Close-Playing' of Super Mario Brothers."

It's very exciting to be part of such a young field (though I count three professors on the videogame conference program, not two).

My job description, as a generalist at a small liberal arts school, rather than a specialist at a research institution, simply doesn't leave room for the kind of intense research that I was able to do as a grad student (oh, those 16-hour days in the library). My dean didn't actually burst out laughing when I mentioned a desire to get a course release so I could play more computer games, or funding to purchase a game console and some of the latest titles -- which would, of course, be part of the new media lab, and which I would let students check out, for academic use. ;)

I used to do a much better job keeping up with interactive fiction, but I find that this year I'm so busy that I'm waiting for the XYZZY Awards to be announced, so that I can catch up on the winners I haven't played yet. Fortunately I found CliFrotz, which lets me play Z-machine games on my new PDA, so I've been working on some of the multiply-nominated games already.

Below the Sinkhole You are about 75 feet into the cave. There is a dim light at the east of the passage. There is a methamphetamine lab here! >EXAMINE LAB Nothing extravagant -- about average for this area. You see some cookware, solvents, and acids. Looks like someone has just finished cooking. >_

--There is a methamphetamine lab here! (Bowling Green Daily News)

OK, for those who don't get it -- this news story about a meth lab found in a cave made me think of the classic game "Colossal Cave Adventure," which I'm researching in prepraration for a conference in a few weeks.

Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain....

"My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme... But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my wound. | I mean, at some level I knew she was working on me, but I wasn't thinking about it because I was inside that SnowWorld." -- patient Mike Robinson, in a story by Becky McCall --Real pain dulled in virtual worlds (BBC)

The researchers are also using a simulation of the events of 9/11/2001 to desensitize survivors of the attacks to the trauma they experiencded that day.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming. The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig. 2). This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer, and the effect of calcium intake on bone mass ( [Bushman & Huesmann (2001)]). As a society, we have taken massive and expensive steps to educate the public about these smaller medical effects, but almost none to deal with the larger violent video game effects. --Craig A. Anderson

Update: This link to the table of contents page lets me download PDFs. Your mileage may vary. --An update on the effects of playing violent video games  (Journal of Adolescence)

This is not your usual hand-wringing, scare-mongering article in a parenting magazine.

I hope to see the game-playing public and games researchers consider the implications of this report seriously, and not merely shrug it off as yet another example that, where gaming is concerned, "they" don't "get it".

Of course, those who argue that television shows, music, or books are positively correlated with increased violence (or what have you) risk being labeled a censor. The common refrain from the gaming community -- it's the parents' fault, not the games' fault -- is as much of a cop-out as the parent who prefers to blame games (or some other media, or a peer group).

Is it possible to have discussions of taste and ethics concerning videogames, without either moralizing recklessly, or being recklessly accused of moralizing?

Via TerraNova, where the discussion started out very good but at the moment looks like it has resulted in more of the same old same-old.

After a conversation with Mike Arnzen, I've been on the lookout for scholarly works that are critical of gaming and gaming culture. Here's a good one, according to Reality Panic: "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing".

More than 150 Lego builders and collectors converged on Portland over the Presidents Day weekend for BrickFest PDX, a celebration of all things Lego. While plenty of individual work is on display, the big draw is the chance to interact with like-minded folks.... In one of the smaller conference rooms, a team of 10 guys, mostly young men and two preteens, attempt a speed record for assembling an Imperial Star Destroyer, a 3,000-piece Star Wars monstrosity that usually takes a single builder about a week of spare time to construct. The team wants to do it in less than an hour, but the record is 13 minutes more than that. --Marty Cortinas

--If You Come, They Will Build It  (Wired)

Sorry, the title just doesn't... click.

Conference ConundrumsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hooray... I just heard that I got near-full funding for both Princeton videogame conference (where I'll be presenting a paper on Will Crowther's original "Adventure") and the San Antonio 4C-s (where my paper topic is "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs"). Because the 4C's is a long conference in an expensive city, I might not be able to afford to go to the whole thing, but I present early and there's that blasted "stay overnight on a Saturday and get a cheaper airfare," so I'm going to have to wrestle with this one a bit. I'm hoping to share a room with a former colleague from the University of Toronto, but he may have had to book already... we'll see what happens. I've got the next six hours of my day booked absolutely solid...

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation "Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds" seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

"There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it," Juul said. But, he added: "I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood." --Nick Wadhams --Academics get serious about video games (Mercury News/AP)

It's not news that academics have been studying computer games, but it is news that the study of computer games is developing into a scholarly field of its own (rather than being situated within existing fields, such as literature, cinema, artificial intelligence, and so forth).

Besides Juul, this article also mentions Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins, and Gonzalo Frasca. It also mentions next month's Princeton conference on Form, Culture, and Videogame Criticism.

Today being Groundhog Day in U.S. (and elsewhere?) reminds me how the movie Groundhog Day suggests a model for how interactive stories could work. However, rather than write up my own essay on the topic, I'll link to others who have already discussed this, found via Google... --Andrew Stern --Groundhog Day and IF (again) (Grand Text Auto)