Games: May 2008 Archive Page

Thanks for the suggestion, Matt.

Prospect Magazine:

When Mogwai isn't online, he's called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line "The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview." How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. "In Warcraft I've developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I've enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people's intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task."

It's an eloquent self-justification--even if some, including Adam's partner of the last ten years, might say he protests too much. You find this kind of frank introspection again and again on the thousands of independent websites maintained by World of Warcraft's more than 10m players. Yet this way of thinking about video games can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the alien: more like exotic organisms dredged from the deep sea than complex human creations.

Mike Musgrove, Post I.T. (Washington Post)

One computer historian joked that the game's release "set the entire computer industry back two weeks" when it appeared on Arpanet, the U.S. government-designed Internet precursor, about 30 years ago.

That link, by the way, connects to the page of associate English professor Dennis G. Jerz, of Seton Hill University, who published an article last year about Adventure that made a splash on techy sites such as Slashdot. Jerz, who attended the MITH event, wrote about how the classic game's virtual world is actually based on a real cave in Kentucky.

Fraistat said he thinks that virtual worlds will come to be seen as a type of literature. "Definitely," he said. "These games are literary in their founding. The more evocative the text, the more it seems like a novel you can travel through."

#6 is devoted to Infocom text adventures:

And the fact is, the classic Infocom games (I have left it to the reader to pick his or her favorite, as there were so many of such a high quality that it is folly to pick one for this list) were just tremendous entertainment, mainly for two reasons:

Reason 1 is their goofy advertising slogan, which said in one way or another with great irony that their games "had the best graphics". Ha ha ha, yeah, had the best graphics, even though they had no graphics. So clever! But goddammit, tell me you have any visual memory of any video game ever as crisp, vivid, and lifelike as standing in that field west of that white house. Because I sure as hell don't. I can recall every inch of the first level of Doom, better than I can my own house, but I still only see it in 320×200 resolution. That white house exists, thoroughly and completely. And that just makes every moment of one of these games so much more real, more compelling than any graphics could muster.

Reason 2 is that finally unlocking that door and entering the hidden room is as satisfying as any experience to be found in any video game ever. It's almost sexual. It was even better back when you knew you'd done it because the floppy disk drive would have to spool up. Just the thought of it is enough to bring on goosebumps.

The site is heavy on the nostalgia, but does a great job describing why the text games worked their way into our memories.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities:
The timing is right... I think I'm going to be able to attend this. Woo hoo!

Jason Lutes:

With every step "forward" in any area of human endeavor, something is gained, and with rare exception there is a concomitant loss. I feel this keenly in video game design, as the cutting edge of graphics slices into the future, opening up new and ever hotter arteries of experience for the player, but leaving imagination dead in its wake. Consider an informal visual chronology of computer game graphics:

Left to right, top to bottom: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Rogue (1980), Lords of Midnight (1984), Master of Magic (1993), Age of Wonders 2 (2002), Battle for Middle-Earth (2004).

The earliest text adventures used words alone to suggest the game world, allowing the player's imagination to fill in all of the details. Later, the ideogrammatic use of ASCII characters made possible things like the dungeon floorplans of Rogue to be clearly delineated, but that "*" that represented a pile of gold was still something to conjure with. With each step in the progression from limited-palette, low-resolution graphics to high-res 3D models and particle effects -- with each step toward a more photorealistic rendering of the game environment -- the player has to do that much less creative work, that much less imaginative interaction.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad progression. The trade-off is that we get games that are more immediately, actively immersive, as opposed to ones in which we have to work to immerse ourselves. Something is lost, but something else is certainly gained. Even as better and better graphics technology is erasing the need for an active imagination in playing video games, increasingly sophisticated game design has made possible a range of consequential (as opposed to imaginative) interactivity that is unparalleled in any other medium. Plus, I'd hazard that most people who play video games don't want to use their imaginations -- they just want a fun ride¹. The more bells and whistles the better.

Each of us probably have our own sweet spot between abstraction and representation, a point where our imagination is fired up by the power of suggestion, but would be extinguished by too much more information.

The idea isn't new, but the phrasing is clear and effective.  Todd Alcott:

Just as movies began as novelties shown before "real" entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve years and from the 15-minute Great Train Robbery to the maximum-opus Birth of a Nation in seven. Gaming started with Pong and Pac-Man in the 70s and got to Doom in the 90s, then Half-Life a mere four years later. If Half-Life is the Birth of a Nation, that means that the Gone With the Wind of gaming is still in our future, and the Godfather of gaming as well.

Reuters:

To launch next year as a massively multiplayer online game, or MMOG to those in the gaming community, Lego Universe will let players create online versions of themselves and interact with each other.

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Not the best spoof I've ever seen, but if you really want to see a spoof of a trailer of a documentary about text adventure games, you might be somewhat amused. (Here's the original.)

I'm mocked in this, if that's any incentive to anyone...