Category: games

Worth a discussion. From The Onion.

Learned a new word the other day: Brand Slapping is when you take a well-known game genre (say Snakes and Ladders or platform games) and apply a brand on top of it without really changing anything.

Behold one of the top characters on the Check Mii Out Channel (that’s the Mii Contest Channel for some of you).

I haven’t been following the channel that closely, but I think Obama is the first politician to be voted a top Mii.

This post is therefore not your everyday “look how far video games have come”-post, but “look how far politics has come –  it is now so popular that we have politicians made into cute game characters”.

Last post about the Global Game Jam: Participants were treated to a very precise keynote by Kyle Gabler of World of Goo-fame:

After a 100-0 win in a girl’s basketball match, the [Christian] Covenant High School in Dallas issued a statement apologizing:

“It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition.“

The team coach issued his own statement:

“In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Web site, I do not agree with the apology or the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel embarrassed or ashamed. We played the game as it was meant to be played. My values and my beliefs would not allow me to run up the score on any opponent, and it will not allow me to apologize for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity.“

The coach was fired.

This is an interesting philosophical issue: Given that basketball rules state nothing about avoiding large-margin victories (the team played the game as “it was meant to be played”), is the winning team under obligation to avoid a humiliating victory?

My opinion is that this really depends on who is playing and the expectations for the game:

• If I am playing basketball against a 6-year old child, I have a clear obligation not to win by a large margin (and probably not to win at all). This holiday, I let several young family members beat me at musical chairs, for example.
• If teenagers play a game with the expectation that it is a competitive game, I don’t see an obligation to hold back. At least lacking any shared expectation or convention that large victories should be avoided.

Here is a way of illustrating the conundrum:

In my forthcoming book on casual games (“A Casual Revolution”), I propose that playing a multiplayer game is to balance three different ways of framing a game:

1. Seeing a game as goal orientation means that players should try to win (also by as large a margin as possible).
2. Seeing a game as experience means that players should try to keep the game interesting by creating some uncertainty about the outcome.
3. Seeing a game as a way to manage the social situation will mean that you will have to play somewhat badly in order not to win against a fragile child or your boss if you believe this will have negative repercussion.

The discussion around the 100-0 game is pretty straightforward then: The Covenant team and coach focused on frame 1 – trying to win, but critics claim that they should have focused more on frame 3 – managing the social situation by making sure that the other team did not feel humiliated. (The critics overlooking the fact that if the Covenant team had openly played badly, this would have been deeply condescending and humiliating as well.)

The frustration of the coach (and the team presumably) comes from the fact that two mutually contradictory things are asked from them:

1. They are asked to produce convincing victories, thereby making their school and community proud of them.

3. But critics allege that they should also be careful not to produce too convincing victories.

The whole issue stems from the fact that the Covenant school is unresolved about what it is asking from its sports team. Does the school want them to win (frame 1) or to be nice (frame 3)?

With contradictory expectations and in the absence of any guideline for navigating between the two, this is what happens.

Full story at ESPN. Opinion piece. (Via Philosophy of Sport which also has a discussion).