Games: January 2008 Archive Page

Jeffrey R. Young (Chronicle):

The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise.... "We are a peer-review press--we're always going to want to have an honest peer review," says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. "The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model."

So the experiment will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing--old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the new method "blog-based peer review." Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. "My plan is to respond to everything that seems substantial," says the author.

On Jan 21, 3:47 pm, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm supposed to not know what direction I can walk in?
>
> This is fun?

Play Adventure it to appreciate the big jump from Hunt the Wumpus and mainframe Trek.  

Play it, not merely seeking conformation for your own definition of "fun," but rather to understand why computer users across the early 'net who (according to one humorous estimate) lost about two weeks of work because they were obsessed by the their first encounter with the game.  They must have thought it was fun... why? How did their expectations differ from ours? How was their world differ from ours?

Play it to reach back more than 30 years in time, in order to understand where were are today.

Play it to expand your mind, to refresh your imagination, to challenge your assumptions.  

Play it to appreciate what Crowther and Woods created out of thin air -- all the more wonderful because they built it for love and shared it for free.  

Play it to exercise that part of your mind that will recognize next ground-breaking, genre-defining innovation.

Play Adventure so that, one day when you stumble across something new, you can be the one who says, "Look at this, guys... here's why I think it changes everything!"  

Is *this* fun?

I think so!

[Conrad did end his note by saying "  Well, I'll give it another shot...," and the above is my attempt to give him a bit of historical context for Colossal Cave Adventure.]

Leigh Alexander tries to quit gaming for a week.  How long does she last?

What I did learn - and this was the primary aim - was just a little bit more about why I play, and what gaming means to me, does for me. I thought that without games, the world might open up just a little; that I'd divert that gaming energy into learning new things, visiting new places, developing more relationships. But, even given only a few days to experiment, I realized I felt then, at least for that moment, content with the size of my world and the people in it as they are.

On the other hand, the absence of games left a distinct sense of feeling stranded, as if bridges I had made from my imagination into worlds made by others had been closed for repairs. I didn't have a bad couple of days; more ordinary than I would have expected, and neither more nor less fulfilling.

But it did feel like my world was a bit smaller; there were emotions, impulses and dreams that had nowhere to travel to, that languished amid the everyday. It's true that I learned perhaps gaming has cultivated in me a lack of long-term patience, a need for more regular stimulation, a poorer attention span. It's also very possible that I zone out with games to avoid dealing directly with things that cause me frustration or sadness. But I'm now certain there is a singular fashion in which games engage both mind and emotion - not only for the purpose of play, but for personal reasons both creative and therapeutic - that no other form of media approaches. It's a quality unique to gaming, it speaks to the power and responsibility game developers have assumed, and it makes sense out of the intense, often perplexing personalization we feel toward the games they make.

In the passage I quoted above she said her days without games were no less fulfilling than her days with games, but the crisis in her experiment comes when she is lying in bed, feeling sick, and cannot think of anything to do in order to make her happy again, other than give up her pledge to take a break from gaming. (She also apparently hangs around with gamers, watching them play.)

I'm lying sick on the couch in the basement (which is where my wife banishes me when I'm ill).  Playing a game won't make me happy. Regaining enough mental capacity so I can evaluate the homework students submitted Friday -- THAT will make me happy. Feeling well enough that I'm willing to crawl out of bed to find out which child is dragging something heavy across the kitchen floor (and why) -- THAT wouldn't exactly make me happy, but it would make me less anxious.

Every so often I wish I had access to the unbroken swaths of time -- 12, 16, 20 hours at a time -- when I could do whatever the heck I wanted. But then I read this article and I realize how fortunate I am to have a rich life (with the attendant responsibilities) that mean my life still has meaning even though I have to go through long game-less dry spells (and can only sip at the casual games, rather than delve into RPGs or figure out how the heck to get out of the canal where I've been stuck in Half-Life 2 since June 2005).

New York Times:
Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005 and becoming a citizen. When he emerged now and then, it was sometimes on the radio, ranting in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. His rationality was questioned.

On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld -- a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. 

A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined "winning" outcome.  A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player to shoot waves of attacking enemies, because the game ends when the enemies encroach upon the player's position.  By contrast, an open-ended game such as Sim City permits the player to decide whether the goal of the game is to create a thriving gridlocked metropolis, a road-free utopia. a network of hamlets insulated by forests, or an urban wasteland.

Fatworld presents a series of interconnected systems, such as a socio-economic model, a political model, and (the most complex in the game) a nutrition and health model.  Playing Fatworld is a matter of figuring out how the game depicts connections between these systems.

The release of Fatworld seems perfectly timed, after McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook, ruminating on the causes of childhood obesity, noted last week that "there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."  

Bogost is an accomplished games scholar and proponent of what the field in general calls "serious games."  His studio produced the Howard Dean for Iowa game, and has provided editorial material to the New York Times in the form of "newsgames" (a cross between a game and a political cartoon) such as Food Import Folly.

His book Unit Operations introduces a universal method for analyzing texts from literary works to video games, and this week students in my Video Game Theory and Culture class are reading his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Knowing Ian was behind Fatworld, I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

I wanted to write a review that discusses the game's educational potential, its elegance, and its rhetorical effectiveness at using the game format to communicate a message about health (and politics, economics, and lifestyle). 

I wanted to say I loved the isometric cuteness of the game world, and that the puffy menu bars and the bloated cartoon hand that serves as the mouse pointer fit wonderfully with the theme of the game. I wanted to praise the Govern O Mat, where you can select food-related legislation and click the "Bribe" button to influence a politician. I wanted to try to work restaurant review clichés into my review.

I did not want to do what I'm about to do instead -- bellyache about a confusing interface that violates basic UI principles; puzzle over displays with unexplained readouts that never change and clocks that count up by increments of four and down by increments of two (why?); grumble about design flaws that make mini-games unnecessarily confusing; and grouse about bugs that make minigames cut off abruptly for no reason.

New York Times: (the NYT Peramalink generator seems to be down.)

"If I can walk into the office of a member of Congress and tell them we have 20,000 voters in their state who are already signed up to write letters and act based on game-related issues that concern them, that's powerful," he said.

The industry's new round of muscle-flexing comes as the political and cultural environment for video games has improved significantly.

FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game's goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It's one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You'll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community. FATWORLD comes with numerous foods, recipes, and meal plans, or players can create their own from the foods in their pantry or their imaginations.

I'm assigning this as tomorrow's discussion question for my Video Game Culture and Theory course. The in-game tutorial is long, and it's not immediately clear how to exit out of some windows (the circle with the X in it is not close enough to where the information is listed), and when the message "enter" appears on the screen, I keep wanting to push the "enter" button (rather than space, which is what the game expects). So I'm still exploring at this stage.

From the Chronicle:

On an afternoon this fall, nearly all of the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in concentration -- some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others strumming along with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork. But the goal of the lab is very much college-related. It is to entice students to take game-design and other IT courses, says John Min, dean of business technologies on the college's campus here. Mr. Min decided to create the Game Pit, as the lab is called, because he noticed that IT enrollment had been falling since 1999. "We need to find ways to get more students," he says. Posters and fliers in the gaming lab list the many computer courses offered, and professors sometimes stop in to tout their courses.

Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article.

Common threshold structures of the world - closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals - often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the rendering engine must be given time to catch up, a new portion of code must be loaded into memory) or limits of the game's database (transporting her avatar to a new "level," an elevator also redirects the player's attention away from the fact that there is no inter-level space beyond the elevator's compartment, as nothing there is computationally-defined). Crucially, the threshold matches the program trait to the gameworld trait concurrently, or with such close approximation that their difference is not noticed much. In this and similar moments of play, the user's attention is primarily on the gameworld rather than its software and hardware correlates; there is entanglement, but its expression tends toward a reification of one plane of gameplay. We may say that by some mechanism, which may vary from game to game and in the degree of its openness, the gameworld recaptures traits of hardware or software, repurposing them to its own ends and masking their potential disruption of the world with information that is notionally distinct from it. The back-directed orientation implicit in the term "recapture" is appropriate to the concept because, as I understand it, recapture takes place on the cusp of a sort of crisis in representation: exactly at the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game's determinism by its definite technical situation, that determinism is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules.

A student in my Video Game Culture and Theory course, when writing a reaction to playing Andrew Plotkin's Shade, referred to a casual gaming genre that was new to me, the point-and-click "escape the room" game.  The Wikipeidia entry for Escape the Room mentioned a key-retrieval puzzle from Zork, but I thought that passage had a weak sense of history.  The first paragraph below is left over from what the article initially said, but I added the second paragraph in order to give credit where credit is due.

The game which popularized the term "escape the room" is said to be MOTAS (2001), though there are many older examples of the point-and-click variation. The genre was further popularized by the Japanese "Crimson Room" game (2004) by Toshimitsu Takagi, which has spread throughout the internet and can be seen on many gaming websites. Strictly speaking, MOTAS is not strictly an "escape-the-room" game, as it includes many levels, some of which include more than one location.

The basic idea of collecting and manipulating objects is a core element of text adventure games (interactive fiction). Colossal Cave Adventure (1976-77) featured a grate that requires a key to unlock and a rusty door that must be oiled, and Zork (1977-79) featured a trap door under a rug and a puzzle involving slipping paper under a door to retrieve a key (a puzzle which reappears in MOTAS). While these classic text games were not limited to one location, John Wilson's Behind Closed Doors is an early example of a commercial game in the genre, and Laura Knauth's Trapped in a One Room Dilly shows the genre was well-established in the text-adventure hobbyist community in 1998. While a single-location game may not be set inside a room, and while the player's goal may not necessarily be escape, in 2002 the interactive fiction community first hosted a One Room Game Competition (attracting six entries, all in Italian), and in 2006 Riff Conner wrote Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game, indicating that the genre is well known in the contemporary interactive fiction hobbyist community. Often, a game that features many different locations will begin with a prologue of sorts, in which the player must escape a cell or simply leave the player's apartment in order to get the main plot started.

A few months ago, Jeremy Douglass posted a thread on rec.arts.int-fiction that asked for early examples of the "My Apartment" genre, which is a common programming exercise (along with "My Dorm Room" or "My Office") created by people who are teaching themselves how to write a text game, generally with the intention of sharing it with their friends (so there are typically lots of in-jokes and not much else). 

I don't remember where I was when I saw a link to Cursor*10.I thought "Cooperate by oneself" was a good example of "All your base are belong to us" English, but it actually makes sense.

It's like time travel. Very cool.

Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain's training grounds for real-world emergencies.

The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost any domain, from sports to piano playing.

The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior.

Saber-toothed tigers no longer stalk our villages, but Stone Age themes still rule our dreams. "Nowadays, the evolutionary footprint is clearest in the dreams of children, who often dream about being chased by monsters, much the same way we were once chased by predators," says Revonsuo. As life has evolved, so have the threats we rehearse. "You insert a modern danger into that ancestral key and get a bizarre combination," says Revonsuo. "We dream of being chased, shot, or robbed, getting into traffic accidents, a burglar in our house, or perhaps smaller mishaps such as losing our wallets--and that prepares us for our waking life."