Author: Jesper

Guitar Hero II: Playing vs. Performing a Tune

I have been playing a Guitar Hero II lately, and I enjoy it immensely.
And yet, there is something disconcerting about the relation between the “frets” (the colored buttons) and the notes that are actually played. On an actual instrument, frets or keys really do correspond to specific notes being played – hitting the A string with your finger on the 3rd fret will consistently play a C. In Guitar Hero the relation is, well, inconsistent.
It looks like we can divide music and rhythm games into those that involve actual playing and those that are about performing.

In Donkey Konga (which I love), Taiko no Tatsujin, or Singstar, the activity of the player is consistently translated into specific sounds that are part of the music. Dance Dance Revolution, on the other hand, is about performing a choreographed sequence along with the music.

And this is where Guitar Hero II fits as well – you don’t play the music, but you perform a choreographed sequence. Performing this sequence just makes the music play correctly.

Guitar Hero‘s emphasis on performing cool/daft rock clichés does go very well with the performance aspect of the gameplay. And the emphasis on style is what Guitar Hero really adds to GuitarFreaks.
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While music and rhythm games are popular, there is also a fear of music[al notation] running through them – all of them eschew common musical notation in favor of something homemade.

In Singstar, why is there no option to make the game display the tune with proper musical notation instead of the colored rectangles?

And worse, in Guitar Hero, why isn’t there an indicator for triplets? (Triplets: Think about the intro in Killing in the Name). As it is, you have to read ahead and divine from sub-pixel positions of the indicators that the note sequence coming up is actually a triplet. A triplet sign would be nice.

Triplet

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I can’t play by ear, but on occasion I have a flash of insight where I realize how to play part of some tune on the piano. That is always very strong – the experience of pressing keys not because they are choreographed, but because I can feel that these keys are the tune. Playing from notes is mostly a combination of those two experiences, following a choreography from the sheet, and pressing keys because those keys are the tune.

Is there something inherent in the music/rhythm genre that makes it hard to make a popular game that really could be played by ear? Singstar can be played by ear, but one with an instrument?

Is Germany the right Country to call for Censorship?

In my experience, Germans usually have a very acute sense of history, but history is being entirely forgotten at the moment: Many German politicians are lobbying for a ban of “killer games”, and trying to lobby the European Union for common regulations.

There have been several school shootings in Germany, and some of the killers have played video games. Isn’t that sufficient proof? Time to ban those games.

Incidentally, the last school shooting in Denmark was by someone who studied Nordic Literature (yes, just like me). Isn’t that sufficient proof? Time to ban those books.

If history teaches us anything, it is that censorship is not a good path to go down. It has been put more succinctly:

Dort, wo man B?cher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Know your history.

Back in Copenhagen

Back in Copenhagen today after spending the last 5.5 months in New York, visiting Parsons School of Design and beginning some research with GameLab.

It is unpleasantly cold and rainy here, but this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it was unpleasantly cold and rainy in Brooklyn when I left.

I have begun quite a few papers that I want to finish this semester. And who knows, perhaps I will be back in NY in the not too distant future.

What do Games Mean? Braid, then flOw pulled from Slamdance

More fallout from Peter Baxter’s decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre from the Slamdance festival:

First Jonathan Blow pulled Braid, and now Jenova Chen has pulled flOw.

Not much to say, the error of Baxter’s decision so obvious, and Blow and Chen deserving credit for sticking out their neck.

The basic problem is this: For unknown reasons, some people assume that games always condone the actions of the player or the events in the game. This is obviously wrong, so let me offer a broader perspective with what I wrote in Half-Real about what games mean:

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Where is the moral?

As a first example, consider Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments (1956). With Charlton Heston playing the part as Moses, we follow the biblical tale about the birth of Moses, his adoption, the exodus from Egypt, Moses parting the waters, and finally receiving the Ten Commandments from God. In this film, it is clear that the protagonist is good, and that his actions are good. This means that we see the protagonist as carrier of the film’s moral, but are protagonists always good? We can compare the Ten Commandments to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni: The personal goal of Don Giovanni is to seduce as many women as possible, something at which he is sublimely skilled. Towards the end of the opera, Don Giovanni is offered the option of repenting his sins, but he refuses and is finally swallowed by the flames of hell. It should be clear that the moral of the opera is that God punishes sinners, and that the protagonist demonstrates what we should not do. We do not automatically assume that the actions of a protagonist are “good” or “right”.

[…]

A meaningful car crash

We can see why it would be a misunderstanding to see a game as an expression of the players wanting to perform the in-game actions in reality. Games are rather – like stories – things that we use to relate to death and disaster. Not because we want them to happen, but because we know they exist. Consider the game Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002). Burnout 2 can be played in a special crash mode, where the object is to drive into a busy intersection at full speed in order to create as large pile-ups as possible (fig. 5.18). It should be obvious that we do not play this game because we want traffic accidents, but because we know they exist and because we want to consider the possibility of death and destruction.

Burnout intersection Burnout buses

Figure ‎5.18. Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002), crash mode: Create the largest traffic accident possible.

The audience of a movie does not automatically assume that the protagonist does good, and neither does the player of a video game believe that the protagonist of the game does good. A game is rather play with identities, where the player at one moment performs an action considered morally defensible, and the next moment tries something that the player considers indefensible. The player chooses one mission or another, tries to complete the mission in one way or another, tries to do “good” or “evil”. Games are playgrounds where players can experiment with doing things they would or would not normally do.

[…]

I think that having the tools for discussing games, and remembering how we interpret other cultural forms can prevent us from making na?ve, literal interpretations of games.

(Half-Real, p. 191-194).

Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games

I have posted a new article for your perusal: Without a Goal: On Open and Expressive Games.

The article discusses the recent popularity of games without goals or with optional goals, such as Sims, the Grand Theft Auto series, and World of Warcraft.
It is slated to appear in the forthcoming Videogame/Player/Text anthology edited by Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins.

Without a Goal can be considered the academic version of my Game Developer’s Conference 2006 talk on A New Kind of Game. I.e. more references, fewer practical suggestions, and broader theoretical strokes.

Game Studies Volume 6, Issue 1 is Here

In time for the holidays, the new Game Studies issue has just been published.

The biggest issue yet. For the future, we are considering switching to a fixed release schedule of twice a year. (We do these things so you don’t have to.)

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Nick Montfort: Combat in Context

Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games

Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth

Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn – A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay

Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

Thaddeus Griebel: Self-Portrayal in a Simulated Life: Projecting Personality and Values in The Sims 2

Charles Paulk: Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design

Benjamin Wai-ming Ng: Street Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong: A Study of Cultural Consumption and Localization of Japanese Games in an Asian Context

Jonas Heide Smith: The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games

Hector Rodriguez: The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens

Jussi Parikka, Jaakko Suominen: Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement

Half-Real nominated for Game Developer Front Line Awards

OK, for that I am honored. Game Developer Magazine has nominated Half-Real for best book in the Game Developer Front Line Awards. Half-Real is obviously not a book about game development, but it was certainly intended to be useful in many of the discussions that pop up around games and development.

The book nominees are quite different, so let’s see what happens.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ — The editors of CMP Technology’s Game Developer have named the finalists for the 2006 Front Line Awards, the magazine’s ninth annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, hardware, game engine, middleware, and books.

The final award winners, plus one inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame chosen for its outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more, will be announced in the January 2007 issue of Game Developer, available on newsstands beginning January 17, 2007.

The finalists for the 2006 Game Developer Front Line Awards are:

ENGINES
Torque Game Builder 1.1.1, Garage Games
Valve Source Engine, Valve
Unreal Engine 3, Epic
HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation
Gamebryo 2.2, Emergent

BOOKS
"Better Game Characters By Design,"
Katherine Isbister, Morgan Kaufmann
"3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop,"
Luke Ahearn, Focal Press
"ShaderX4,"
Wolfgang Engel (ed.), Charles River Media
"Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames,"
Chris Bateman, Charles River Media
"Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds,"
by Jesper Juul, The MIT Press
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