Author: Jesper

Re:Play 2012: The Theory, Practice, and Business of Video Games

On April 17th, I am co-organizing the one-day Re:Play 2012 video game conference here at New York University.

Re:Play is sponsored by the Media, Culture & Communication Department at New York University’s Steinhardt School for Culture, Education and Human Development in collaboration with the New York University Game Center

The conference is free, but registration is required at the http://replaynyu.org/ site. Hope to see you there!

 

Program

9:00 – 9:45: Arrival and registration, coffee and pastries

9:45 – 10:00: Opening remarks

Panel 1

10:00 – 11:00: Video Games and Religion

Ask your average member of the clergy, and they’re likely to see video games as a waste of time at best or, at worst, as a nefarious destroyer of young souls. But games and religion, closed systems based on stringent rules and dedicated largely to ritual, have more in common than they might imagine. This panel will discuss the relationship between these two popular forms of personal reflection and communal interaction, seeing what, if anything, they might have to teach each other.
            Moderator: Liel Leibovitz (NYU)
            Panelists: Ryan Hennesy (Princeton), others TBA

11:00 – 11:15: Break

11:15 – 12:00: Interlude I: Music for EnvironManta: Painting a Universe with Melody

Katie Jacoby (NYU)

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

Panel 2

1:00 – 2:00: Publisher Revolutions: Free-to-Play Economics

The gaming industry has proven resilient to economic turmoil and declining publisher revenues, growing at an annual rate of ten percent at a time when the U.S. economy grew only two percent per year and adding almost $5 billion to America’s GDP. This growth, however, belies the fundamental shifts currently taking place among the traditional value chain. Developers, publishers, and retailers all find themselves confronted with a changing market forcing each of them to assume a different role. This panel will discuss major trends such as the move toward free-to-play and the emergence of social gaming, and ask whether its emerging publishing models present a blue print for other entertainment industries.
Moderator: Joost van Dreunen (NYU Game Center)
Panelists: Stephen Ju (Credit Suisse), Janelle Benjamin (SuperData Research), Katharine Lewis (Fremantle

Media), Jessica Rosenblatt (Arkadium), Rainer Markussen (Gamigo), Gui Karyo (Atari)

2:00 – 2:15: Break

Panel 2a

2:15 – 3:00: Gamification Mini-Panel

In an attempt to connect theory with practice, this 30-minute panel will discuss the topic of gamification by examining and playing with its machinations.
        Panelists: Paige MacGregor (NYU), Michelle Forelle (NYU), Max Foxman (NYU), Stephanie Llamas (NYU)

3:15 – 4:00: Interlude II: Video game presentation

A representative from one of the industry’s leading studios will showcase a popular, upcoming release.

Panel 3

4:00 – 5:00: Brand new, you’re Retro: Platforms and distribution models from the Atari 2600 to Angry Birds

With interactive entertainment entering into the mainstream, the demands made on designers and publishers have changed as well. No longer exclusively focused on the legendary “hardcore” gamer, we see game designs and business models changing.
But is all of this really new? In this panel, Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul will discuss how casual games fit in the history of video game. Are casual games new, or are they a return to the simplicity of early platforms like the Atari 2600 and once-mighty commercial genres like text adventures?

        Panelists: Nick Montfort (CMS, MIT) and Jesper Juul (NYU Game Center)

5:00 – 5:15: Closing remarks

5:15 – 6:00: Cocktail reception

 

 

 


 

 

I Like Dying a Lot

Over at Kill Screen, a discussion I had with Jamin Brophy-Warren about failure in video games: I Like Dying a lot.

JBW: Do you think the way that game players deal with failure has relevance to the way that people deal with failure in life?

JJ: It’s very obvious that your personality kind of transfers to a certain extent. If you’re having problems dealing with major challenges in games, you probably also have problems in real life and vice versa. The thing with games is they allow for a kind of plausible deniability.

This is something I first read in Steven Pinker, who talks about how this happens with language typically. So if you say something like, “Nice laptop you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it,” that has a plausible deniability. Obviously there is a threat, but there’s a small way out that you could deny it’s the threat that it really was.

We have this freedom in games to take it seriously, even though it may not matter financially or whatever to you. But there’s also a freedom to not take it seriously. There’s a freedom in games to deny that the distress you were showing was all that important. In the 2010 World Cup, when the U.S. lost to Ghana, The New York Posthad a front page saying, ‘This sport is stupid anyway.’

Steve Kordek, Inventor of two-flipper Pinball, Dies at 100

New York Times has an obituary for Steve Kordek, who developed the standard two-flipper configuration of Pinball machines.

In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory in Chicago, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that rudimentary game into one called Humpty Dumpty, adding six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field.

It was an instant hit — until, at a trade show in Chicago 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was a designer for Genco, one of more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at the time.

“It really was revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,” David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. “And it’s stayed the standard for 60 years.”

(Via William Uricchio.)

 

The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

The conference organizers of the Storyworlds Across Media conference in Mainz have put up the videos from the July 2011 conference.

Here is the video of me talking about The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

This a chapter from my upcoming book on Failure, where I revisit a question that I dodged in Half-Real: Can a video game have an unhappy ending? (Answer is yes, in some ways, with modifications, it’s complicated.)

(The video contains a Red Read Redemption spoiler. You have been warned.)

New issue of Loading: Spring 2012

The Canadian Game Studies Association has just published the Spring 2012 issue of their Loading … Journal.

 

Vol 6, No 9 (2012)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Editorial-Issue 9, Volume 6 PDF
Jerremie Clyde
Guest editor Jerremie Clyde introduces our Spring 2012 issue…

Dimensions of Design

Beyond the “Historical” Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design. PDF
Jerremie Clyde, Howard Hopkins, Glenn Wilkinson
The authors of this paper present a case for a gamic mode of history that focuses on the construction of the historical narrative via procedural…
Designing Digital Games to Teach Road Safety: A Study of Graduate Students’ Experiences PDF
Qing Li, Richard Tay, Robert Louis
In this paper, we present a framework for designing digital educational games to teach road safety rules specific to Alberta. The framework is…

Probes and Enquiries

Playing Attention: The Hermeneutic Problems of Reading Ico Closely PDF
Peter Douglas McDonald
This article argues that paying attention to the specifics of a videogame involves a difficult problem of interpreting the meaning of repeated…
The practical and theoretical implications of flow theory and intrinsic motivation in designing and implementing exergaming in the school environment PDF
Dwayne P Sheehan, Larry Katz
Helping children develop a positive attitude toward being active for life is a primary objective for physical educators. The cultivation of an…
A Comparison of Exergaming Interfaces for Use in Rehabilitation Programs and Research PDF
Kazumoto Tanaka, J.R. Parker, Graham Baradoy, Dwayne Sheehan, John R. Holash, Larry Katz
Exergames or active video games are video games with interfaces that require active involvement and the exertion of physical force by participants….

Reflection and Review

The Dreamcast, Console of the Avant-Garde PDF
Nick Montfort, Mia Consalvo
We argue that the Dreamcast hosted a remarkable amount of videogame development that went beyond the odd and unusual and is interesting considerd…
To Automaticity and Beyond: Narrative Interpretation in Game and Novel PDF
Margaret Mackey
Common wisdom often posits that game-playing is the enemy of reading, that it offers one of a plethora of “distractions” that seduce people…

Abstracts

Abstracts from the 2011 Exergaming Symposium, University of Calgary. PDF
Larry Katz, Jerremie Clyde
Recent work being conducted on exergaming in the field of Canadian game studies…

Ivory Tower Defense – Games in the Academy

Speaking at our Ivory Tower Defense panel on February 23rd at the New York University Game Center.

Do games belong in the university? Do you need a degree to make games? What can we get out of studying them? What is the connection between research and design? Join us for a spirited conversation with the faculty of the NYU Game Center to discuss the complex relationship between games and higher education. Frank Lantz will moderate Katherine Isbister, Jesper Juul, and Eric Zimmerman as they debate these important issues and discuss the work they are doing to create a shared vision for the study of games at the NYU Game Center.

The talk will begin at 7:00 PM in room 006 in the lower level of 721 Broadway, and is open to students, faculty, and the general public. We welcome everyone, whether your research and teaching is related to games or you are simply curious about this rapidly evolving field. Please come, and feel free to bring any interested NYU colleagues.

Space is limited, please RSVP here.

This is not my Fictional Universe (Mass Effect)

Mass Effect fans are in uproar over errors in the Mass Effect: Deception novel, mostly of the type where the novel contradicts central information from the games.

From the shared Google document chronicling the mistakes. (And the mistakes are pretty bad.)

1. The Citadel is described as being star shaped – Whilst the Citadel does have five arms arranged around a ring, even when it is fully opened, the arms are not in the same plane as the central ring; rather, they are oriented straight forward:

[Error: Lore]

2. There is a batarian embassy in the Citadel – Batarians closed their embassy after the Citadel Council sided with the human System Alliance during a colonization dispute over the Skyllian Verge, and there is no mention of their embassy being re-established in the previous installments. [Error: Lore]

3. Kai Leng visits Chora’s Den – Chora’s Den was closed after Sovereign’s attack on the Citadel. It never re-opened. [Error: Lore]

4. Citadel surrounded by stars – The Citadel is in the middle of a nebula with only one star – Widow – nearby and clearly visible. A few others are only faintly visible through the gas. [Error: Lore]

5. Kai Leng kills a krogan by slicing into the back of its neck and severing the spine – Krogan biology does not work this way. 1) There is a large hump that makes access to the rear of the neck difficult. 2) Most blades (save for a molecular blade) cannot penetrate the thick hide covering the rear of the neck. 3) Even if the spine was severed, the krogan still would not die, as krogan are uniquely equipped with organ redundancy. Instead of an analogue to the human nervous system, they have a second circulatory system with an electrically conductive fluid. [Error: Lore]

 

Via Gamespot.

Well Played Journal volume 1 number 2

Drew Davidson has just posted volume 1, number 2 of the Well Played Journal.

BioShock and Portal: A Discussion of Poetics
Yotam Haimberg

We should be heroes… A case study of community building as a dominant strategy
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen

Cracking the Code: Untangling Game Structure, Properties and Player Experience
Elizabeth Goins

A Life in Baseball, Digital and Otherwise
Abraham Stein

Get the PDF here.