Category: games

Driving the Desert Bus for a Good Cause

You may be aware of Penn & Teller’s unreleased Desert Bus game, wherein you have to drive a bus the complete 8-hour realtime trip between Tucson and Las Vegas.

Since the bus veers to the right, and since there is no pause or save function, this may be the most boring game in the world.

And yet … isn’t there something fascinating about it? Some kind of pure gameness?

Desert Bus for Hope is a charity event in which participants play Desert Bus non-stop, while onlookers can give donations to keep the bus going. At the time of writing, the game has been played for 4 days and 15 hours, with $56.000 collected – the money goes to the Child’s Play charity.

Had I been American, I would have described this as “awesome”.

An authentically fake look at computer games in the 1980’s

From the contemporary British spoof 1980’s educational TV program Look Around You, here’s an introduction to computer games:

I find its distortions eerily accurate – the crazy assumptions about what would be the future of games and technology; the “graphics are very realistic”; the seriousness of the interviewer; the synthesizer music; the zany games (UK games were very zany at the time).

(Via Kevin Driscoll.)

Too Nice! PETA takes on Cooking Mama

I didn’t know Cooking Mama was sufficiently popular to merit a critical parody, but PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has made a game that emphasizes the more gory aspects of eating animals.

I do think it would be much more powerful if it started by giving players a more personal relation to the animals that they prepare and then made players kill them. (Meet the sweet little turkey … now kill it.)

I speculate that PETA faced the problem that they wanted to convince players that animals are treated cruelly – but on the other hand they did not want to make a game in which players could do just that. A shame really.

Speaking at MIT Monday the 27th

Monday I am speaking at Nick Montfort’s very nice Purple Blurb lecture series at MIT.

Jesper Juul on developing video games to develop video game theory

October 27, 6pm, 14N-233
Juul is a video game theorist and author of Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT Press, 2006). He is also a video game developer, and will discuss using lessons from developing online and casual games to inform work with video game theory (and vice versa). Juul is currently a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; he works at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Casual Players prefer Obama

My blog seems to be turning into a “games and US politics” affair. Here goes:

According to a study by NeoEdge, 59% of casual players surveyed prefer Obama, 32% McCain.

Now, I want to propose various explanations. Basically, I think there is something in the underlying structure of Hidden Object and Time Management games that are inherently tied to the values of Democrats.

  • Aren’t time management games the ludic expression of the welfare state, the Democrat idea of (the state as) the nurturing mother? An all-seeing eye that helps everybody?

OK, so I don’t quite believe that. It is more likely that casual players are mostly women, and Obama does well with women.

Sen. Barack Obama has widened his lead among casual game[r]s — an overwhelming majority of which are women — over Sen. John McCain following the third presidential debate on Wednesday, October 15. On October 16, the day following the debate, 59% of the respondents said they preferred Obama, while 32% preferred McCain. A week ago, the day after the second presidential debate (October 8), only 54% percent said they preferred Obama, and 36% said they preferred McCain. According to the poll, Obama now leads McCain by 17 points among this key demographic.

So here is a question: Is the reverse is true? Do “hardcore” game players lean towards McCain?

And what do we mean by “hardcore”? Mega Man? Level 60+ in World of Warcraft? Defender? Guitar Hero on Expert?