Category: games

Gonzalo Frasca’s PhD Posted

Gonzalo Frasca has just posted his excellent 2007 PhD dissertation, “Play The Message”. To quote Gonzalo:

I haven’t posted anything in years –I’ve been too busy working on my game studio, Powerful Robot Games. And I’m enjoying it a lot.

So, I’ve been pretty much outside from the ludology/game studies field since I completed my PhD dissertation in 2007. I didn’t share the file online since I wanted to publish it in book form. I still want to but, let’s face it, it’s been almost 4 years… So I decided to share the pdf with you guys out there. It’s about games but mainly about Play. And communication. Play Rhetoric. And toys, too. Hope you enjoy it!

Here it is:

http://www.powerfulrobot.com/Frasca_Play_the_Message_PhD.pdf

Feel free to share it, read it, quote it, translate it, compose music for it :)

From ludology.org.

Are Social Games the Work of the Devil?

On March 23rd, I am giving a short talk in Copenhagen – in Danish. Title: “Are Social Games the Work of the Devil”?

 

Hvor: Filmhuset, Gothersgade – Bio Asta (i kælderen)
Hvornår: Onsdag d. 23. marts kl. 16:30-18:30
Hvorfor: Fordi Facebook-spil alligevel vil erobre verden, så kend din næste gud.

16.30-16.50: Jesper Juul: Er sociale spil djævelens Værk?
16.50-17.10: Brian Meidell: Hvad jeg lærte af at spille FarmVille (så du slipper)
17.10-17.40: Mingling
17.40-18.30: Debat
18.30- : Mere mingling – og Tactile Entertainment giver øl!

More about the event here.

The Death of Consoles, again

It’s something of a regular occurrence, the proclamation that consoles are going away.

Here’s Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of Angry Birds:

… as mobile gaming (including games on tablet devices like the iPad) continues to grow, console games are “dying”. Vesterbacka scoffed at the traditional model where companies charge $40 to $50 for a game that’s difficult to upgrade.
(From Venturebeat.)

Certainly, we are at an uncertain time – the current console generation has a longer lifetime than previous consoles, and Sony and Microsoft are releasing incremental upgrades with the Move and Kinect. All of the buzz concentrates on mobile and social games, yet a handful of big-budget titles in the Red Dead Redemption and Modern Warfare 2-class continue to generate huge sales. But the old threat to consoles (PCs and Macs) hasn’t disappeared either.

Will consoles go away? Only when some other device that people already have (computers, cell phones, tablets, built-in TV functionality, set top boxes) easily provides a living room experience on the big TV with good controllers. Nothing is quite there yet, but could it happen?

GDC 2011 final Twitter overview

Continued from last week, here is the complete Twitter cloud for Game Developers Conference 2011:

I have removed the words GDC, “game” and “games” here to give a better overview of themes.

  • Platform winner: Nintendo with the 3DS.
  • Genre winners: Social games, indie games.
  • Game character winner: Mario.
  • Topic winners: Art, gamification, postmortems.
  • Non-game winner: Netflix.
  • Most notable absences: Sony, Microsoft, consoles.

I think Apple had hoped the iPad 2 would be on this list, and Google had hoped that Android was here too. The iPhone and Android did make appearances on single days though.

For an actual writeup on the conference vibe, I can recommend Nick Fortugno’s blog post.

 

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 5 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday. The final day of Game Developers Conference 2011  (March 4th) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: Ron Gilbert’s talk on Maniac Mansion, Will Wright’s talk, Brian Moriarty’s talk, which helped art (as in “are video games art”) trend. Only game company today is Nintendo.

I will do an overview of the entire week in a few days.

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 4 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday: Game Developers Conference 2011, day #4 (March 3rd) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: From the Twitter helicopter view, this day looks almost content-free. Main words are “party”, “awesome”, “great”, “talk”. Actual themes show up as Chris Crawford, Eric Chahi (developer of Another World). Below that, Bejeweled and Populous (Molyneux’s postmortem). Only platforms today are the iPhone and the 3DS. The experimental gameplay sessions and the rants also make it, as does Doom.

Again, notice the conspicuous absence of buzz for big-budget console games.

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 3 on Twitter

Continued from yesterday: Game Developers Conference 2011, day #3 (March 2nd) as seen on Twitter:

Top themes: The Nintendo keynote gets the top tweets (Iwata, 3ds, Netflix, Mario, Zelda). Then awards, Minecraft. Battlefield 3 barely makes it to the list.

It’s interesting how the consoles have so far been nearly absent in tweets. Wii and Playstation are tiny specks in the cloud. The buzz so far is clearly around social games and cell phones – the 3DS is the first dedicated game hardware to trend so far.