Games: July 2007 Archive Page

Gamers are unequivocal: "Dying gives a game meaning", say posters on the PC Advisor forums. Markus Montola, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, takes this further: "You have a motivation - to avoid being annoyed by dying. Motivation is what makes the game meaningful."

Pete Hines - vice-president at Bethesda, the developer behind the role-playing game Oblivion and its expansion pack, Shivering Isles - agrees. "Having your character die or fail is important because your actions have to have some meaning in the game, and to you."

But is the death of your character the right way to give a game meaning? Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, the developer of Fable, Black & White and The Movies, says: "A fight has to cost the player something, or it loses its meaning. Previously, that cost was time and tedium [in replaying a level]. But is that the right cost?" --Kate Bevan --Why do we have to die in games? (Guardian)

--Statetris (mapmsg.com)

Like Tetris, but with American states.

"I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father's father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time," said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa on the back porch as his uninterested son ran back inside to his Sony PlayStation. "It was a moment I'd always looked forward to sharing with my own son."

"Well, so much for that dream," added Meier, heading to the kitchen to pour the boy's untouched mug of cocoa into the sink. --Child Unimpressed With Aurora Borealis After Whole Day Of Tekken 3 (The Onion (Satire))

An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better. --Gang Kidnaps Gamer to Get Password Using Fake Orkut Date (Gizmodo)

The story points to a website that appears to be in Portugese, so I can't investigate this story any further. It fulfills so many stereotypes it just doesn't sound credible... the kidnap victim isn't named, for instance. I don't see any coverage of this outside the gamer weblogs and fansites, so I'm leaning towards "PR hoax" on this one. Perhaps time will tell.

Barker: "I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"? --Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (Roger Ebert | Sun Times)

Film reviewer Roger Ebert fisks novelist and gamer Clive Barker. Filing this for a rainy day.

--Echochrome - the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance)

What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I'm not a platform gamer, I'll have to admire this one from afar.

Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. --Clive Thompson --These Games Are So Bad, It's Not Funny (Wired)

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text. --Sidewalk stencil choose-your-own-adventure (Flickr)

Very cool concept.

Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

* User-Created Content. It's all about the audience, and the "audience" is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.

* Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.

* Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.

* Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world--or diverge wildly from it--present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.

* The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like--and how new scholars might work.

* Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones. --The Horizon Report 2007 Edition (PDF) (New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative)

I'm glad to have found this document, as I start to pull together materials for my tenure bid.

If I'm working on a project, it's my dream. I'm not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else's pyramid. If you're going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession - and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism - I say to you this: make it mean something. Spend your life making meaning. Create things that excite you, which get you out of bed early in the morning and keep you up late at night. Create experiences that will set minds on fire and inspire, in turn, to create experiences for others. We all have a reason for wanting to create games and, at some level, it boils down to an experience we had playing someone else's creation, their dream. What was that game for you? --Swink --The Teaching Game: Part One - Transitioning (Game Career Guide)

An interesting feature from a games industry professional who got tired of the grind and gave it up. I'm a little worried that Swink is romanticizing the teaching profession as much as he had previously romanticized the games industry, but this is still a good read.