Author: Jesper

Valve has posted their data on how Half-Life 2: Episode Two is played. (Data collection quite reminiscent of Microsoft’s work on Halo 3.)

Excerpt:

• Average session time: 0h 27m
• Average total playtime: 4h 41m
• Average completion time : 6h 11m

This is wonderful because, hey, we actually had no idea what those numbers would be.

The one number they don’t write is what percentage of players completed the game? If we for a moment boldly assume that the majority of players got the game around launch and will not get any further, the bottom graph indicates that the number is <45%. Which means that … the most common experience of playing HL2EP2 is that of not finishing it.

That is a bit of a guess, of course. We would need to see what the data looks like in 6 months to know a more final figure.

Also interesting, data on where people die on specific levels (marked in blue):

The Guardian has an interview with Will Wright in which he says:

The only next gen system I’ve seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that’s happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.

The interesting rhetorical move here is that “next-gen” has been tied to “more polygons” for such a long time, but why not reclaim “next-gen” for better purposes?

Just landed on my desk, a great new video game anthology edited by Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska: Videogame, Player, Text.

My piece is Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games.

Official homepage here.

Videogame, player, text

Edited by Barry Atkins & Tanya Krzywinska

Videogame, player, text examines both the playing and playful subject through a series of analytical essays focused on particular videogames and playing experiences. With essays from a range of internationally renowned game scholars, the major aim of this collection is to show how it is that videogames communicate their meanings and provide their pleasures. Each essay focuses on specific examples of gameplay dynamics to tease out the specificities of videogames as a new form of interaction between text and digital technology for the purposes of entertainment.That modes of engagement with the videogame text are many and varied, and construct the playing subject in different ways, provides the central theme of the collection. Online play, clan membership, competitive or co-operative play, player modification of game texts, and the solo play of a single player are each addressed through individual analyses of the gameplay experiences produced by, for example, The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia, Doom, Quake, World of Warcraft, Street Fighter and Civilisation.

Contents
Introduction: Videogame, player, text – Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska
1. Beyond Ludus: narrative, videogames and the split condition of digital textuality – Marie-Laure Ryan
2. All too urban: to live and die in SimCity – Matteo Bittanti
3. Play, modality and claims of realism in Full Spectrum Warrior – Geoff King
4. Why am I in Vietnam? – The history of a video game – Jon Dovey
5. ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’: real-time game performance in Warcraft – Henry Lowood
6. Being a determined agent in (the) World of Warcraft: text/play/identity – Tanya Krzywinska
7. Female Quake players and the politics of identity – Helen W. Kennedy
8. Of eye candy and id: the terrors and pleasures of Doom 3 – Bob Rehak
9. Second Life: the game of virtual life – Alison McMahan
10. Playing to solve Savoir-Faire – Nick Montfort
11. Without a goal – on open and expressive games – Jesper Juul
12. Pleasure, spectacle and reward in Capcom’s Street Fighter series – David Surman
13. The trouble with Civilization – Diane Carr
14. Killing time: time past, time present and time future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – Barry Atkins

It’s very unfair to Half-Life, but this 60 second sum up is more or less like I remember it.

It’s by Simon Krãtschmer and Jakob Rompkowski.

Why is it unfair? Half-Life is about mood and problem-solving, not so much about a great high-concept story.

[Via Dubious Quality.]

Call for papers for The [Player] Conference at the IT University in Copenhagen next August.

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The Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen is pleased to announce The [Player] Conference, a conference for games researchers taking place August 26^th – 29^th 2008.

There is no escaping the player in games research. Whether the focus is on formal aspects of games or on studies of actual gamers, the player is an intrinsic part of the gaming situation. Despite this, the underlying assumptions that inform the notion of the player are often not made explicit in the work of game scholars, regardless of their academic background. This is problematic in itself, but even more so in the inter-disciplinary field of games research where unclear terminology may cloud communication across the borders of academic traditions.

The central focus for The [Player] Conference is to uncover the assumptions that inform our work as game scholars with regards to the player and to consider how we think about and study the player as embodied, represented, derived, historical, idealised – to mention only a few of the positions the notion of player may be put in.

While all papers should focus on the player in some respect or other, there is a diversity of topics to consider. The topics include but are not limited to:

– Conceptions and definitions of players within different disciplines.

– Ideal and real players.

– Player experience, emotions, affects and cognitions.

– Player agency.

– Player taxonomies.

– Methodological issues of studies that deal with players.

– Ontology of player representations.

– The player’s perception and comprehension of the gaming situation.

– Player motivations.

– The position created by the game for the player.

– Player expectations.

– The player as subject and object.

– The player in history.

– Playing for academic purposes.

– The many different roles of players.

– Videogame’s possible effects on players.

– Assumptions about players within academia and the industry.

– Control of player creativity and communities.

We invite submissions of full papers and panels by the 31^st March 2008. All submissions will undergo a double blind review process. Notification of acceptance will be announced by the 5^th of May 2008. The maximum word limit for full papers is 10000, and 600 pr participant for panels. Note that the panels should focus on debating a chosen topic both among its participants and with the audience.

Inquiries can be sent to player2008@itu.dk. More information will be available on http://game.itu.dk/player/ shortly.

From my recent trip to Japan, this video of a pretty good player of Pop’n music Adventure in an Akihabara arcade.

Pop’n music is an underappreciated music game imo – and with lot more room to grow as a player that you would think! There were quite a few players on this level.

There is some commotion between EA and Rockstar over the new Simpsons game, which was originally slated to include a level called Grand Theft Scratchy.

Apparently, Rockstar pressured EA to remove Grand Theft Scratchy from the game, because, you know, “we need to protect our IP” or some such. Nobody really knows, except that Rockstar apparently feels that parody is not something you should have in games.

Parody was supposed to be protected from this type of legal problems, apparently not.

It would be redundant to describe Rockstar as hypocritical here, but certainly someone took a wrong turn somewhere.

Gamasutra has a link collection on the story here, and Gamepolitics has some developer interviews.

Somebody had to say this at some point. From news.com, breaking news that casual games games are not just for women.

Those were some of the findings in the first yearly market report by the Casual Games Association, an industry group aimed at promoting a fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10 percent of the $30 billion global video game market.

“Everyone always thought that casual games were something that only appeal to women,” Jessica Tams, managing director of the association, said in an interview. “We have always been obsessed about making games for women.”

Surveys of players showed that while nearly three-fourths of people who bought casual games were women, the players of such games were split 50-50 between the sexes.

The article speculates that part of the issue is that many men do not want to admit to playing casual games. Perhaps.

Do you consider yourself a gamer? Is it embarrassing to be playing Mystery Case Files or Cake Mania?