games – Page 5 – The Ludologist

Interviewed for the Professor Game Podcast

Rob Alvarez Bucholska was kind enough to interview me for his Professor Game podcast.

The conversation touches on a lot of things I don’t usually talk about, like writing method, game design methods, and the relation between game-making and theory. I hope you enjoy it.

Direct link here.

Bernie De Koven’s The Infinite Playground is out

I am happy to announce that Bernie De Koven’s final book is now out, courtesy of Holly Gramazio, Celia Pearce, and Eric Zimmerman. I contributed a small essay about what it was like to play with Bernie.

The Infinite Playground is available from MIT Press and elsewhere.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infinite-playground

Using trademarked objects in a video game

Depicting a Humvee like this in <em>Call of Duty</em> is allowed by the First Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.

There’s no shortage of legal issues in video games, but the recent court case AM General LLC v. Activision Blizzard, Inc. et al, No. 1:2017cv08644 – Document 218 (S.D.N.Y. 2020) was decided in a way that surprised me:

The judge ruled that Activision Blizzard can use Humvees in Call of Duty without any kind of license from the manufacturer, given that it ties in with an artistic goal and does not mislead about the source of the work: “if realism is an artistic goal, then the presence in Modern Warfare games of vehicles employed by actual militaries undoubtedly furthers that goal.”

Military vehicles would not be my choice of example, but it’s an interesting twist.

However, and as always, even with this ruling, this remains the kind of freedom of speech best exercised with a large legal team on your side.

Petscii Jetski – a C64 game in BASIC

Introducing Petscii Jetski!

Instigated by Nick Montfort, we returned to the Commodore 64 to write a 10-line game & visual poem.

A very long time ago I used to be into C64 programming, at first BASIC and later assembly. I have severe existential reservations about going back to “things that I gave up years ago”, but it really was like coming home in a holy & broken sort of way.

In a world full of ever-shifting Javascript preprocessors and package managers, a simple predictable machine is a comfort, and yet the BASIC implementation is excruciatingly slow and full of strange decisions. For example, on this 1 Mhz machine, the BASIC implementation only runs floating point, which is really slow. This meant that the C64 was special in that assembly was perhaps a 1000 times faster than BASIC, a much bigger difference than in modern languages.

Play Petscii Jetski online at https://nickm.com/montfort_juul/petscii_jetski/ and read a detailed discussion of BASIC optimization at https://nickm.com/trope_tank/TROPE-20-01.pdf

Game Studies vol 20, issue 1

For your theoretical inspection: Game Studies 20/01.

“I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters
by Jacqueline Burgess, Christian Jones

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.

Sick, Slow, Cyborg: Crip Futurity in Mass Effect
by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.

Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III – Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture
by Emil Lundedal Hammar

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.

I’d Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines
by Jess Morrissette

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1
by Debra Ramsay

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.