Games: May 2004 Archive Page

Should you happen to find yourself captivated watching slender Lara bound lithely through Tomb Raider's dark, moist-looking caverns, you will do so without quite forgetting that Lara is, in a sense, you. Like the stranded Marine in Doom, the progenitor of first-person shooters, Lara awaits your input before she makes her decisions. Lara and Doom's Marine both look where you look, and their bodies intrude on the screen to stand in for yours. A primary difference is that the sole bodily presence of Doom's Marine is a hirsute arm, gripping a phallic, super-lethal weapon that bobs stiffly in time with his stealthy walk. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't rather be Lara. She is far more nuanced. Self-possessed in her hip-swaying walk but spry and potent when she leaps and scrambles, she has the build of a rock-climber and the carriage of an elegant socialite. --Mike Ward --Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi (Pop Matters)

As Mike Vitia notes in a recent comment, this pre-Jolie article is dated now, but it's well worth reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

I do find it limiting when I consider the set of assumptions that cinema experts bring to videogames. For example, Ward here waits until near the end to dicsuss the controls (keyboard in this case, when most dedicated players are probably using a hand-held controller).

The perception and use of an avatar - as the primary means of agency in online environments - might be expected to be shaped by the motivations for participating in the environment. In particular, goal-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as tools/pawns to achieve goals, thereby encouraging a preference for 3PP that objectifies and externalizes the avatar, whereas relationship-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as representations of themselves in a social environment, thereby encouraging identification and treating the avatar as the self through 1PP. This would also be supported by the age differences given that younger players tend to be more achievement-driven. In other words, I argue that more fundamental motivational differences are driving the gender and age differences. --Nick Yee --It's a Matter of Perspective (Terra Nova)

Interesting data... Male users were more likely to prefer third-person perspective, while female users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective. Older users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective, while younger users were more likely to prefer third-person.

How much of this is simply becasue it's much easier now to render 3-d worlds on the fly, and to rotate these worlds or make parts of it transparent, so that the player's perspective isn't blocked by walls or other obstacles? Thus, those of us who played graphic games in Ye Olde Days were playing on systems that forced designers to conserve resources whenever possible, and hiding the player (except for an animated shield or sword sweeping through the frame) freed up precious resources for the animation of opponents.

Of course, if it's true that the old gamers included a higher proportion of men, is it significant that new gamers are more likely to prefer the perspective more frequently favored by women? Does it matter whether the men are playing perhaps a half-naked elf babe, as opposed to a muscle-bound, attack-abosrbing brick who wasn't designed with aesthetics in mind?

I just noticed in the discussion at Terra Nova that women are actually more prevalent among the older gamers. Go figure.

I've been playing Morrowind in brief snatches... when I'm up close and in person with the bad guys, I find it disorienting when they slip around behind me or sidestep. I haven't thought of switching to 3PP for battle sequences, because I'm playing a mage and thus would prefer to shoot fireballs from a distance. Still, the occasional rat who scurries about my ankles is annoying enough that maybe 3PP would help.

It looks like the charts on the site were initially posted incorrectly; they've been corrected (according to Yee) but that makes some of the first comments confusing.

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which will be artistic contributions themselves. --Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short --Mystery House Taken Over (Turbulence)

This proposal is one of several that garnered $5000 from the 2004 Turbulene competition. Congrats!

You can choose to fight evil alone, or you can join a gang of good guys. As humiliating as it might be, you could become a sidekick apprentice to characters with more developed skills. So far, the player community is welcoming; there aren't many foul-mouthed teens and crabby veterans. Newbie-friendly areas exist, and subscribers so far welcome the uninitiated. Do-gooders won't have any trouble forming their own Justice League or X-Men. --Scott Steinberg --Wanted: Heroes to Rescue City  (Wired)

But the surprise for Xbox was Advent Rising from Majesco, a super-stylish "Star Wars"-meets-"The Matrix" action adventure, which is being written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, best known for the "Ender's Game" series of novels. When writers of his caliber want to work on videogames, it's more proof that electronic entertainment is no passing fad. --N'Gai Croal
--Technology: Your Next Videogame (http://msnbc.msn.com)

You are a student. That should be enough to depress you in these tough economic Liberal dominated times, but you are troubled by a weightier burden - ITEC802. What you though would be a nice little romp in the woods has turned out to be tougher than finding weapons of mass distruction.

You want your life back. --Dave's Stupid Adventure Game Final (IETC 802, Macquarie University)

A final exam in this programming course is to create an interactive fiction game... the excerpt is part of the game's prologue. The original file is a PDF.

First, words have rules. The mansion of the Word Wizard has many rules. The game of Ad Verbum also has rules. Much of the problem-solving and puzzle-unpuzzling of the text is in recognizing the rules in play and using them to get out of sticky situations. In fact, the player (via text) and adventurer (via sound) are warned by a mysterious and booming, sonorous voice before entering a room, ?You may be very, very frustrated if you walk in there without reading the WARNING.? -Edmond Chang --Words Matter: Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum (ENGL 668k: Digital Studies)

A student paper submitted for Matt Kirschenbaum's class.

These games aren't much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it's significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush's economic policy across to "the kids". But it's hard to say for certain because, so far, the RNC has not talked about the games to the press and they didn't respond to a request for an interview.

However, others are talking about this new campaign strategy - in particular, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two game designers/ researchers who contribute to Water Cooler Games, a blog set up in October to track the development of "video games with an agenda". "I believe in this medium as a more efficient means of communicating social and political messages," says Bogost. "So I'm encouraged when anybody tries it, whatever their political persuasion."

Unfortunately, the games aren't that good, says Frasca. "They look like they were programmed by Bush himself." In particular, Tax Invaders, with its South Park image of bullets flying out of George Bush's head, seems ill conceived. "Knowing his trigger-happy approach to international politics," says Frasca, "this is something that may well backfire." --Jim McClellan --The role of play  (Guardian Unlimited)

When recruited athletes make up such a substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a risk that there will be too few places for other students, who want to become poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that, without realizing what is leading to what, the institutions themselves will become unbalanced in various ways? For example, will they feel a need to devote more and more of their teaching resources to fields like business and economics -- which are disproportionately elected by athletes -- in lieu of investing more heavily in less "practical" fields, such as classics, physics, and language study? Similarly, as one commentator put the question, what are the effects on those students interested in fields like philosophy? Could they feel at risk of being devalued? --James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen
--How the Playing Field Is Encroaching on the Admissions Office (Chronicle)

An old article, but on a subject that weighs on my mind from time to time.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. -- higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game -- the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled. --Clive Thompson --Game Theories  (The Walrus)

There isn't really anything new in this article, but it's told in an engaging way, which would make it a great introductory piece. Via KairosNews.

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

• 100% of entering college freshman play games
• 65% call themselves regular game players
• 48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"
• 32% play during classes

With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them. --Education Arcade, day 1 (Water Cooler Games)

Glad to see Ian is braving "The Dangers of Academic Blogging" to give his ground's-eye view of what looks like an important conference. Perhaps Wired will have more later, but at the moment I'm not impressed by its coverage.

One panel featured Wagner James Au, James Paul Gee, Warren Spector, and Brenda Laurel. What a line-up! I'd also like to have heard what Royal Shakespeare member Tom Piper had to say about a collaboration with MIT.

What's the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it?

Recently, I've decided the answer is yes, even if you're reduced to tears by a hellish game, it can be worth it to plug through. Why? For the same reason it's often worth struggling through many other pieces of art or entertainment that we consider "difficult." Anyone who's slogged through the experimental swamp of Ulysses knows that it seems like a pointless chore at first. But if you're patient, the literary payoff is powerful?er, so I've been told?perhaps all the more so because you've worked hard for it.

[...]

Each game offers a different flavor of achievement. The quick-hit delights of Mario Kart are similar to the joys of a detective novel or a romance paperback, while the intense, grinding slog of Ninja Gaiden creates a sort of exhausted exhilaration, like finally reaching the end of War and Peace. Neither one is better than the other, but too many people miss out on the latter merely because the barrier to entry is so high. -- Clive Thompson --Tough Love: Can a video game be too hard? (Slate)

As a graduate student in 1980, Ms. Buckles became captivated by computers, and spent three to four hours a day using e-mail, a form of communication little known at the time outside universities and government. Although she didn't play Adventure, she saw it as an emerging literary form that deserved attention, and she began interviewing people about their experiences. "When I started, I thought, 'This is so fascinating,' " she said. "I knew I was a pioneer." --Michael Erard --Let Down by Academia, Game Pioneer Changed Paths (NY Times (will expire))

The "big finish" to my Princeton videogame conference paper was a reference to what Buckles is doing now... we corresponded briefly via e-mail after she surfaced on ludology.

I wouldn't call Adventure a video game, but I like what Erard has done with the story of Buckles's dissertation. I do think the chief weakness of her study is that she wasn't writing from the perspective of a player, and I can certainly imagine why her German literature professors were puzzled by her choice of a subject. Still, she was a trail-blazer, and it's nice to see her get some attention for her hard work. A sobering final thought, which puts my recent conversation with Eyejinx into context:

Established game researchers are familiar with the gantlet. "The response to Buckles's work from her literature professors was rather typical, I am afraid," Dr. Aarseth said. "And probably still is."

At the same time... it's overwhelming how much attention the sleepy field of text adventure studies (which used to be an obscure corner of literary research) is suddenly getting, now that it's part of the prehistory of today's video games.

Somewhere, beneath the cover of an innocuous-looking retail operation, those with true Power have built a facility to imprison forces man was not meant to know . . . things we were never meant to comprehend. The Ark of the Covenant. The Crystal Skull. Alien spacecraft . . . and aliens. Documentation of conspiracies and cover-ups. And more. Are you ready for Warehouse 23?

• A plain box of unsharpened No. 2 pencils, without any visible brand name. Any electronic scoring machine for standardized tests will score any answer marked with one of these pencils as being correct.
• Seven identical (and apparently original) paintings of the Mona Lisa. In all of the pictures she is smiling happily, as if the artist has just made a really funny comment.
• An ordinary, audio compact disk, labeled "I cannot be played." If the disk is played in any CD player, it will produce audio vibrations, optical reflections, feedback noise, and so forth, that will destroy the equipment it was played on within a minute or so.

--Warehouse 23

Organic soup awaiting the lightning bolt? I'd classify it as a playful literary exercise, rather than either a game or a short story, but whatever you call it, it's a collection of decontextualized inventory items as flash fiction. Open another box. Mike Arnzen may wish to proceed directly to the dumpster.

So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which it handles language. And yet it continues to draw devoted practitioners and interactors. It is, in Montfort'sview, a still vibrant tradition.

Why does IF work despite these design difficulties? Perhaps the answer lies in its structure as a riddle. Riddles, unlike puzzles, are always verbal and are based on a conversational exchange. They are intrinsically interactive, and have a formal syntax, a variant of call-and-response structure. A riddle is a word-puzzle, framed as a conversation. --Janet Murray --Janet Murray responds to Nick Montfort (Electronic Book Review)

Murray notes that the interface innovations that made IF a breakaway success in the 70s (specifically, the fact that the user communicated with the program by typing words that followed a syntax that was at least recognizably a subset of English) is the source of its awkwardness today.

When I first started teaching IF, I noticed newbies tried to use MUD syntax to get around in the world. More recently, students who are used to text messaging each other have to unlearn their IM syntax (which is itself a simplified form of English, with creative spelling "rulz"). Thus, they are so used to communicating with each other via short textual bursts, and they are so used to assuming that the recipient of these messages will be able to deal with typos and irregularities of every sort, that the command-line interface appears much more stringent. Thus, it's an increased familiarity with the command line (as employed in purely social contexts) that distances them from the command line as used in IF.

The discussion also includes Brenda Laurel and a response by Nick Montfort. Part of Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Great reading! But I've got to get back to grading now...

While there might be a future for narrative and new forms of storytelling in this cornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, the largest potential seems to be in new types of games, forms that blend the social and the aesthetic in creative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a new generation of gamers grows up, the word ?game? will no longer be as tainted as it is today. Then euphemisms such as ?story-puzzles? and ?interactors? will no longer be necessary. Games will be games and gamers will be gamers. Storytelling, on the other hand, still seems eminently suited to sequential formats such as books, films and e-mails, and might not be in need of structural rejuvenation after all. If it ain't broke, why fix it? --Espen Aarseth --Espen Aarseth Responds [to Murray's First Person essay] (Electronic Book Review)

Aarseth responds to an essay by Janet Murray in the Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Murray responds to Aarseth).

I wish this online collection hadn't appeared in the very week when I so desperately seek distractions to help me put off marking huge stacks of papers.

Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game StudiesJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In a comment attached to my blog entry on The Muse of the Videogame, Eyejinx makes an excellent point, an excerpt from which is below:

Unless and until those involved in game studies seriously work with the development process (and perhaps the developers themselves), any proposals for how to go about making games remain in the realm of theory.

In the meantime, as a nascent field of study, those involved in game studies should, perhaps, strive to identify where their work falls in the criticism/craft divide.

I'd agree that theorists often make impractical suggestions, but choosing a starting point that privileges production and development over theory is naturally going to find a theoretical piece lacking. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- academics do write mostly for each other, and specialists in any field tend to develop an elite language, partly out of necessity, but partly as a social signal. (And if you think I'm only talking about the ivory towers, don't forget the 1337 h4xx0r culture.)

Most people who aren't professional athletes have a favorite team; most people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag have some idea of who their favorite actors are, and can recognize and be moved by a good performance. On the other end of the scale, theorists may call for the production of certain texts that don't exist, but that would need to exist in order for them to fully explicate their theories... thus, in literature, we have a tradition of visionary authors writing traditional books about imaginary books (Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths," Stephenson and "The Diamond Age," even Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

People who study the history of the American Revolution aren't necessarily trying to write a how to manual for future revolutionaries... Likewise, if I were to write a paper examining the development of the cave setting in computer games, or the development of inventory-based puzzles, or the rise and fall of text adventures, I wouldn't feel any obligation whatsoever to tell my readers what to do in order to produce these games.

On another note, the best practitioners aren't automatically the best teachers, so I wouldn't be so hasty to elide the difference between teachers of the craft and practitioners of the craft. Obviously theorists need stuff about which to theorize, but their discourse does not necessarily need to be focused towards teaching other people how to create more of the kind of thing that they study... a theorist might instead focus entirely on the effect a particular work had on its surroundings, and if the article or book in question did a good job with that, I certainly wouldn't fault it for not overtly addressing ways to help game development companies make more money.

Plato wrestled with similar issues -- his "Ion" is a dialogue between Socrates and a "rhapsode," a sort of actor/orator/composer who insists that, because he tells good stories about generals, he'd make a better general than the professional soldiers. (We are meant to laugh at this overextension -- after all, since Plato isn't a professional rhapsode, so what does he know about what a rhapsode would say? At the same time I think it's meant to be satire at the expense of the contemporary military leadership.)

It's a simple truth nowadays that among the people whose lives are being affected by computer games include many who aren't computer programmers, who have never taken a course in computer programming, and who aren't very good at the kind of logical, iterative, procedural creativity that programming requires. Having said all that, I do introduce my students to Inform (the most popular language for creating text adventures), in order to get them to appreciate the effort that goes into creating, beta-testing, and perfecting a computer game.

While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted. These non-programmers and non-designers are the ones who hired me, the ones who sign up to take my classes, and the ones who decide whether to publish the articles I write or the books I propose, and they're an important part of the audience for all the game study scholarship that's coming out.

I was recently told by a theatre history specialist that, although my background is English lit, my book on American Drama from 1920-1950 was worth recommending as a theatre history text. Art history and art practitioners, mathematicians and math teachers, politicians and speech writers, creative writers and copy editors... The intellectual life is full of uneasy pairings.

It’s because of the existence of literary criticism as a profession that people can major in English literature (which amounts to reading novels, poems, and plays, and talking about and writing about them). It’s because of the existence of film criticism as a profession that people can major in film studies (which amounts to watching movies, and talking and writing about them). And because the students are lining up to take these courses, schools can fund “artist in residence” programs, where established authors or filmmakers can do their thing, free (for a while, at least) from the pressures of producing something that will make money. If literature and film programs limited their focus to doing nothing but producing the next generation of creative writers or filmmakers, these programs wouldn’t have nearly the cultural capital that they do; in the market economy, producers need consumers, and educated, critical consumers are probably better for the long-term health of a genre. (I’ll save the elitism/populism debate for another day!)

The game press does a piss-poor job of covering the culture of games -- from Games That Teach to local LAN parties. Instead, the delve into the intricate details of each game -- which is clearly important from a game play standpoint. However, the culture at large is at least as important as the game play. If you read the newspaper, you'll find stories that cover a wide variety of subjects. Business stories aren't only about stocks. Sports stories aren't only about the games. Yet, the game press really focuses on game play. --wiredbeat2000 --The State of [Computer Game] Criticism (Buzzcut Forum)

From a forum comment posted on Buzzcut.