Category: games

Off to (and Speaking at) the Game Developers Conference

I am heading off to the Game Developers Conference once again.

I am giving a talk on the meaning of failure in games: Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences.

If you have been following this blog, you may have noticed that I have been interested in the role of failure lately. This being GDC, the talk is pretty practically oriented, presenting data and concepts, then demonstrating their applicability:


Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences
Speaker: Jesper Juul (Lecturer / Researcher, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
Date/Time: Friday (March 27, 2009)   10:30am — 10:50am
Location (room): Room 2022, West Hall
Track: Game Design
Secondary Track: Production
Format: 20-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
This lecture presents a toolbox for improving failure design in single player games. Player research shows that the primary issue is not the frequency of failures, but how failure is communicated, what happens as a result of failing, and whether a given failure design allows the game to be enjoyed within a player’s time constraints. Using concrete examples, this lecture will show how failure can play a positive role in games, how players of casual games are actually not averse to failure, and how developers can get beyond balancing to improve the failure design in their games.

Takeaway
Attendees will be introduced to new research on how players perceive failure in games. A framework of Five Elements of Failure design will be presented. Attendees will be able to use the framework for improving the design, testing, and balancing of video games for different audiences.

Intended Audience and Prerequisites
Designers, producers, testers, and marketers interested in both rethinking the role of difficulty and failure in their games and in tailoring game design to the preferences and time constraints of their audience. Knowledge of game balancing issues is helpful but not required.

The IGDA Casual Games White Paper 2008 is here!

For those interested in casual games and everything about them, the IGDA Casual Games SIG has published the 2008 Casual Games White Paper. (Yes, it is 2009 now, but it has just launched.)

A lot has happened since the 2006 white paper was published, so I am glad that we have an updated resource again.

Dave Rohrl writes:

The white paper is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of casual games.  It weighs in at over 200 pages and is the fruit of hundreds of hours of work from several dozen volunteer writers, editors, and project managers.

It gives in-depth coverage on the basics of casual gaming from both business and creative perspectives.  It has detailed insights not only on downloadable games, but also on ad-supported web games, advergames, console downloads, and microtransaction-supported web games.  It even has a couple of articles on exotic and interesting topics like the state of the casual games market in India and the confluence of casual games and serious games.

Conference Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008

For your theory pleasure, the Conference Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008 have now been published, edited by Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch, with the editorial cooperation of Sebastian Möring. Download it here.

I discussed my own contribution in the previous post, here is the table of contents.

Table of contents

Petra Müller: Preface

Patrick Coppock: Introduction

Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe and Dieter Mersch: Editor’s Note

Keynotes
Ian Bogost: The Phenomenology of Videogames

Richard Bartle: When Openness Closes. The Line between Play and Design

Jesper Juul: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece

Ethics and Politics
Anders Sundnes Løvlie: The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games. Freedom and Discipline in America’s Army

Kirsten Pohl: Ethical Reflection and Emotional Involvement in Computer Games

Niklas Schrape: Playing with Information. How Political Games Encourage the Player to Cross the Magic Circle

Christian Hoffstadt/Michael Nagenborg: The Concept of War in the World of Warcraft

Action | Space
Bjarke Liboriussen: The Landscape Aesthetics of Computer Games

Betty Li Meldgaard: Perception, Action, and Game Space

Stephan Günzel: The Space-Image. Interactivity and Spatiality of Computer Games

Mattias Ljungström: Remarks on Digital Play Spaces

Charlene Jennett/Anna L. Cox/Paul Cairns: Being ‘In The Game’

Souvik Mukherjee: Gameplay in the ‘Zone of Becoming’. Locating Action in the Computer Game

Dan Pinchbeck: Trigens Can’t Swim. Intelligence and Intentionality in First Person Game Worlds

Robert Glashüttner: The Perception of Video Games. From Visual Power to Immersive Interaction

The Magic Circle
Britta Neitzel: Metacommunicative Circles

Yara Mitsuishi: Différance at Play. Unfolding Identities Through Difference in Videogame Play

Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez and Paul Cairns: Pulling the Strings.
A Theory of Puppetry for the Gaming Experience

Michael Liebe: There is no Magic Circle. On the Difference
between Computer Games and Traditional Games

New paper: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece

My keynote presentation from the 2008 Philosophy of Computer Games conference can now be downloaded here: The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece.

This is my attempt at giving some nuance to recent discussions about the magic circle of games. Abstract:

In a common description, to play a game is to step inside a concrete or metaphorical magic circle where special rules apply. In video game studies, this description has received an inordinate amount of criticism which the paper argues has two primary sources: 1. a misreading of the basic concept of the magic circle and 2. a somewhat rushed application of traditional theoretical concerns onto games. The paper argues that games studies must move beyond conventional criticisms of binary distinctions and rather look at the details of how games are played. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative metaphor for game-playing, the puzzle piece.

***************************

Postscript

With The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece I had been hoping to create a paper as balanced as my old Games Telling Stories? paper, wherein I would elaborate the merits of pro and con arguments concerning the magic circle.

What I found was that in hindsight, the games vs. stories discussion was the easy one: The participants agree that there exists something called games, and that we can discuss whether or not these can be considered stories.

The discussion of the magic circle is much harder because the participants fundamentally disagree about the terms of the discussion: Proponents of the magic circle metaphor consider it interesting to examine to what extent a game session is or isn’t separate from something outside that game session. Critics of the magic circle, on the other hand, have objections to the question itself because they assume that the metaphor is fundamentally problematic for various historical and theoretical reasons that I mention in the paper.

In other words, the magic circle discussion has not happened so far. In the paper, I hope to have opened a tiny hole in the wall through which future conversations can take place.

The PS3: Difficult on Purpose?

A few people are up in arms over a comment made by Sony’s Kaz Hirai to the effect that Sony deliberately made the PlayStation 3 a difficult console to develop for:

We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?

I think it does make sense from a certain angle: If game quality improves throughout the lifetime of a console, owners are more likely to keep buying more games rather than getting the latest new console from competitor X.

The counter-argument would be that developers are usually able to improve quality over time even with easy-to-use development tools.

Certainly, it is a strategy that works best if you start from a position of absolute strength – which Sony to their own surprise didn’t this time around.

Fashion in World of Warcraft

My old colleagues Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca have published a study on the role of fashion in World of Warcraft, “‘Because it just looks cool!’ Fashion as character performance: The Case of WoW“.

Findings: WoW players care about the way they look, even when the look has no effect on stats – and that goes for men as well as women.

Abstract:

“This paper explores the neglected area of clothing and fashion in computer games, particularly MMORPGs, which we claim is an important aspect of game aesthetics and player performance. Combining knowledge from the cultural studies of fashion with a study of the function and importance of clothing in the gameworld World of Warcraft (WoW), and drawing on qualitative methods, we argue that fashion in an online gameworld like WoW is a vehicle for personal storytelling and individualization.”

This also gives me the opportunity to mention the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, another interesting academic journal on games.