Author: Jesper

Ideological Games: September 12th

Gonzalo Frasca?s Newsgaming outfit has posted the September 12th game.

It is quite interesting but I think it has the problem that I wrote about earlier, that its ideology has a cartoonish clearness (the war on terror is evil, end of story). I like to see doubt in things like this. As has been discussed on Game Girl Advance, the “terrorists” in the game are really, really nice.

Couldn’t one make a game that mirrors the weird ambiguities of the real world: being critical of the war on terror while recognizing that fundamentalist political Islam is fascism by another name?

[Note added later: I begin to wonder whether some people would consider the last statement to be controversial? Is it?]

The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression

Uploaded my paper from the Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference in Finland, June 2002: The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression.

It describes a pretty basic distinction between “progression” games where the player faces a series of challenges with predefined solutions (adventure games, mostly) and “emergence” games where the rules of the game interact to create variation. The description of emergence is much more elaborate in the dissertation, by the way.

What does it take to know a Game?

We discuss it all the time at the ITU: How much time do you have to spend on a game before you can claim to be knowledgeable about it?

Gamespot have pulled their review of Savage: The Battle for Newerth in response to allegations that, according to the server stats, the reviewer had only played it for a few hours.

Here’s the original review.

It ain’t easy: Scott Osborne is generally a very good reviewer IMO and I’ve quoted him several times in papers. Perhaps he just immediately hated the game and felt that nothing more would come from playing it further. And then he may have been wrong.

Narrative is overrated. I have proof.

The story so far: It should be no surprise that a new field of academic research will reflect the theoretical sensibilities and preoccupations of the time. The emergence of video game research was just like that.
In the late 1990’s, the concept of narrative was being used by everybody, all the time, to describe everything, and so early video game researches happily employed the term on video games as well. OK, so we discussed that already. But even so:

The US department store Nordstrom has for a while had a narrative department in women’s clothing.
Here’s a picture I took at the Chicago branch:
Nordstrom Chicago women's clothing: narrative section
Which, I think, proves the point.

Blame it on Camus

Wondering about media effects:

According to the Swedish tabloid Expressen, the presumed killer of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh has as a favorite book: Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

The journalist half-heartedly tries to make a case for a connection between Camus and the murder (my translation):

The explanation [for the murder] can possibly be found on the book shelf of the 35-year old.
-His favorite book is “The Stranger”, a friend tells us.
The book is about an ice-cold killer who attacks a person on a beach. After the murder, the man is put to trial. When the verdict is announced, it is declared that he is punished harder since he has not shown any emotions. In the book, the main character also has a very complicated relationship to his mother.

I am not sure the description of The Stranger would receive a passing grade as a book essay in high school, but it is certainly unusual to blame high-brow literature for the evils of the world.

I suppose the general assumption has been that low-brow culture (like Grand Theft Auto) is bad for you, whereas high-brow culture (Camus, Rilke, Bartok) generally purifies your spirit and makes your personality all nice and angelic.
I doubt I ever believed the first part, that rock music, jazz, techno, cartoons, video games, or anything else demonized lately could cause you to commit a violent act, but up to a point I really did romantically believe that art was good for you.
I ceased to entertain that notion in 1994 when a fellow student at Nordic Literature at the University of Aarhus shot two people in the cafeteria. Here was a guy whom I assume must have read all the canonical novels and poems of Danish literature, and yet it had not inoculated him against committing a violent, stupid, and despicable act against other human beings. Art can’t save your soul.

By strange coincidence, this happened on the first day I had taken leave from my studies to work with computers instead – it was beginning to look like a very good idea.

Terra Nova: New blog on Virtual Worlds

Dan Hunter, Greg Lastowka, Julian Dibbell and Edward Castronova anounce their new shared blog on virtual worlds, Terra Nova.

The purpose of the blog is to report and comment on critical developments in the area of emergent collective reality spaces, aka virtual worlds. Our focus is not on the worlds themselves but on the economic and legal implications of the behavior they generate.

The blog already has some interesting posts, but “emergent collective reality spaces”? What does emergent mean in this context?