Category: games

Game Developers Conference 2011, Day 1 on Twitter

First: I am not in San Francisco for this year’s Game Developers Conference. I think this is the first one I am missing since 2002.

I was briefly considering whether one can fake a GDC presence using Twitter, but decided against it. (“Saw you at the Google talk. I was in the back.”)

This does not prevent me from following the conference on Twitter and using Wordle to do a word cloud like in previous years.

Here is Game Developers Conference 2011, day 1 – Monday February 28th. Top themes so far: Angry Birds, Social, Indie, Gamification.

 

Second No Quarter exhibit at the NYU Game Center

In case you are in New York City in May:

The NYU Game Center is proud to announce the second annual No Quarter Exhibition, featuring new games by Terry Cavanagh, Ramiro Corbetta, and Charley Miller, as well as a showing of Clock by Luke O’ Conner.

One of the primary missions of the Game Center at NYU is to foster the development of creative and groundbreaking independent games. To this end we started the No Quarter Exhibition last year by commissioning three games from independent game makers, including the IGF nominated Nidhogg by Mark ‘messhof’ Essen, as well as Recurse by Matt Parker, and Deep Sea by Robin Arnott. You can find pictures from last year’s event on this link.

This year we’re continuing the tradition by commissioning new games from Terry Cavanagh, the creator of VVVVVV and Don’t Look Back, Ramiro Corbetta, a game designer on the IGF Award winning Glow Artisan, and Charley Miller, a New York-based designer of board and big games. We’ll also be showcasing Clock, by Luke O’ Conner, which premiered at the New York indie arcade, BabyCastles.

The new games will developed all semester and then debuted at the No Quarter Exhibition opening party on May 12th, where they will be on display and available to the public for the rest of the month.

Game Studies 11/01: Special Issue on Game Reward Systems

The new special issue of Game Studies on Game Reward Systems is out. This issue was edited by Mikael Jakobsson and Olli Sotamaa.

Editorial

Editorial.

by guest editors Mikael Jakobsson and Olli Sotamaa

The guest editors introduce this special issue on game reward systems by discussing its origin, the focus, the need for further studies, and by presenting the included papers.

Articles

by Christopher Moore
Virtual millinery items were introduced as achievement based rewards for players of Team Fortress 2 in 2009. With attention to these highly sought after items, this article is concerned with promoting attention to the many ‘affects’ involved in the design and play of First Person Shooter (FPS) games.
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by Jason Begy, Mia Consalvo
Multiple frameworks for examining the motivations and achivements of MMO players exist, but many are based on assumptions about what kinds of fictional worlds these games contain. Using examples from the casual MMO Faunasphere, this paper argues that any such examinaton must start with the particular game’s fiction and rule systems.
*
by Mikael Jakobsson
Xbox 360 achievements are explored through casuals, hunters and completists. The dichotomy between MMOs and console games is questioned by framing Xbox Live as a MMO. The ambiguity towards achievements is seen as a result of deeply rooted ideas of what games should be; while at the same time appealing to some of games’ most fundamental pleasures.
*
by Alison Gazzard
By exploring ideas surrounding exploration, obstacles and avatar death, this article seeks to understand the various ways in which both space and time create reward systems in the gameworld. New categories of rewards are defined in relation to how goals may be constructed within different genres of videogames.
*
by Ben Medler
This article presents a framework for understanding player dossiers, data-driven visual reports comprised of a player’s gameplay data. The framework describes how dossier systems validate player motivations and contextualize recorded gameplay allowing players to analyze or share the resulting data.
*
by Paul Williams, Keith V. Nesbitt, Ami Eidels, David Elliott
This paper outlines the development of a top-down shooter designed to investigate the psychological phenomenon known as the ‘hot hand’. Such a game requires a well-balanced risk and reward structure. We chronicle the iterative tuning process, focusing on quantitative analysis of how players adapt their risk taking under varying reward structures.
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by Douglas Wilson
This article presents a case study of designing an intentionally “broken” console party game. Using Henning Eichberg’s concept of the “impossible game” and Bernie DeKoven’s notion of the “Well-Played game,” the article argues that “self-effacing” games of a certain type can help nurture a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play.

A History of Choose Your Own Adventure

Slate has a nice write-up on the history of choose your own adventure books.

As usual, the article has a reference to Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, but there is more detail to the history than I have seen before. I did not know (or had forgotten) that B.F. Skinner was part of the story.

A more prosaic early attempt at interactive texts were psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “programmed learning” books that culminated with Doubleday’s interactive TutorText series, which debuted in 1958 with the thrilling The Arithmetic of Computers. Basically an extended multiple-choice quiz, a correct answer sent you forward in the text while an incorrect answer sent you to a page explaining just how wrong you were. But all of these efforts were eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in 1969.

Julio Cortázar’s 1963 Hopscotch novel goes unmentioned though. And you could have discussed OuLiPo. I can’t help but wonder if there are more non-English branching narratives that we have neglected.

(Via Nick Montfort.)

Casual Games as Treatment for Depression (?)

A Popcap-sponsored study of using casual games as treatment for depression has been making the rounds the last few days. (Here, here, here.)

The table shows changes over time (pre study – post study): test subjects who were told to play a casual video game at regular intervals (bottom data) showed much greater improvement than a control group who were not asked to make any changes (top data).

As usual, I should say that I am not trained in psychology, but the study would be a lot stronger if there was a second control group who was subject to another type of intervention – therapy, drugs, any kind of behavioral change. As far as I know, certain psychological states are not only likely to change over time (as happens with the control group who does get better), but are also influenced by any type of intervention or change in behavior. The two underlying questions that I would like to see answered:

  1. Does Bejeweled work better than cooking classes or reading?
  2. Do different games work differently? My feeling is that asking novice users to play StarCraft II would increase depression.

(The study isn’t published yet, but the slides can be found here.)

What I have been doing lately

An update on what I have been doing the last 6 months:

I am spending the period from summer 2010 – summer 2011 in Copenhagen, where I am working on a research project at the Danish Design School. The project is to write a small book on the subject of Failure in video games (the failures of the player, that is). The project is sponsored by the Danish Centre for Design Research.

I continue to be affiliated with the New York University Game Center, to which I am returning physically in the summer.

The Dangers of Games in the Workplace

In the wake of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, I participated this week in a round table at Zócalo Public Square on the subject of “How Will Video Games Change the Way We Work?” The other participants were Mark Deuze, Paul Dourish, Nick Yee, and David Rejeski.

Here is my contribution.

Games can be a huge help—but have huge limitations

Reality is Broken makes a strong case for applying the lessons of video games to work, and to the rest of the world. While I am very sympathetic to this idea, I would like to add a caveat: Games work well in part because they provide clear goals and feedback, but the application of clear goals and feedback to work environments has in many cases proved disastrous. The employees of (for example) Washington Mutual have explained how they were being measured exclusively on the number of loans they were approving (clear goals), and how they were threatened with sanctions if they asked too many questions about a customer’s ability to pay (feedback). In fact, much of the financial crisis was due to the application of game-like design principles to work, where employees were forced to work toward short-term goals that were detrimental to the health of their company and the economy at large. In the Eastern Bloc, Polish furniture factories used to be rewarded on the basis of the weight of their total output, and consequently made the heaviest furniture in the world.

The key is to recognize that it is fine to set up goals and feedback in work environments only as long as everybody – from CEO to temp employee – understands that performance measures only give a partial image of reality. Clear goals and feedback are only inspiring in work situations when we have the discretion to decide how seriously we want to take them, and as long as there is no higher-level manager that takes the performance measure literally anyway. Games are also enjoyable because they give us wiggle room. If we are to use game design principles outside games, we need to make sure that the wiggle room is still there; we need to make sure that we are still allowed to use our sound judgment when faced with a performance goal.

I am probably coming out as a skeptic of gamification here, but the point really is that game conventions should not be blindly applied everywhere.

My argument is more fully developed in the book on Failure that I am currently working on.