Category: games

Grand Theft Auto IV: ‘Grand,’ but No ‘Godfather

Junot Díaz (whom I did suspect was a bit of a gamer) has an essay on Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wall Street Journal today: ‘Grand,’ but No ‘Godfather.

Sharply:

Rockstar Games could have had a field day with Niko as immigrant, Niko as veteran from a war that was screwed up from the start, with Niko as aspirer to an American Dream that might never have existed in the first place. It wouldn’t have taken much to have made some plot alterations, to have had Niko ducking ICE special agents, to have had him actually struggling to get the girlfriend of his dreams, robbing, stealing, killing in order to dress up to local standards, or to end the game with Niko being deported back to Europe. Any one of these narrative additions would have made Niko’s journey and his successes all the more poignant, all the more surprising — would have put a face, a very real, hard face on the American Dream, which for many aspiring Americans, throughout our country’s long checkered history, is a nightmare.

I briefly appear in the sidebar on video game studies to mention that I am working on a book about casual games:

Conventional wisdom has it that gamers are predominately young men and boys. “That is a huge misunderstanding,” says MIT researcher Jesper Juul. For example, the category of “casual games,” including digital puzzles and word games, is largely fueled by female players. For an upcoming book, Mr. Juul is digging into history for more evidence. He traces videogame stereotypes back to views about card games like solitaire, which in the late 19th century was widely perceived as a pursuit for “idle ladies.”

Game Consoles: The Lost Generation

Wagner James Au has one of the more interesting speculations right now:  The disappointing sales of GTA IV in combination with the fact that it surprisingly didn’t help sell more PS3 and 360s … means that “next gen” games as in “great graphics” have stopped driving console sales and are ceasing to be economically viable. Au further predicts that it will be a long time before the PS3 and 360 will be followed up.

I like historical moments. This also comes on the heels of the Wii outselling the 360 quite quickly after launch. Perhaps things are changing permanently, “better” graphics give diminishing returns, video games will never be the same again?

The Home-Field Advantage

The question of why sports teams are more likely to win on their home turf … yes, it has been studied. The Boston Globe writes about it.

Prime suspects:

  • Visiting team has to travel
  • Familiarity with the field
  • Support from fans making referees partial
  • Support from fans making teams play better (this is the most commonly invoked explanation I believe – “thanks to our fans for their great support”)

Though I do recall reading about another theory that home teams tend to have higher testosterone levels implying that they somehow see themselves as “defending” their home.

All interesting because the home-field advantage is such a basic fact of sports.

The Game Apartment

Next time I buy a Manhattan apartment near Central Park, this is the architect I want to hire for the renovovation.

The apartment is quite attractive and perfectly functional in all the typical ways, and its added features remained largely unnoticed by its inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan’s bedroom, staring at dozens of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random — FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek, Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan’s name was the first word.

Co potrafią,a czego nie potrafią gry komputerowe (What computer games can and can’t do)

Peter Wojcieszuk has graciously translated my paper What computer games can and can’t do into Polish: Co potrafią,a czego nie potrafią gry komputerowe.

This paper (from 2000) was the first time I made a position statement about the need for video game theory, for a ludology.

Many of the things the paper asks for seem to have come true, but we are not exactly done (and it probably not technically possible to be done, we can just get further).

Fuel Efficiency as a Game (AKA: Games are the Poetry of Action)

The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do?

Make it a game, of course.

Wired writes on hypermilers, people who compete in getting the most mileage:

Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He’s getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He’s a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. “It’s like a videogame,” he says. “Can I beat my new high score?”

As I read it, “game” here implies all the features in my game definition, but it can also be described as an attitude, a way of seeing the activity of driving the car as an opportunity for optimizing a strategy, with the optimization in itself being pleasurable.

I have been thinking about describing it in this possibly pretentious way:

Games are the poetry of action.

Meaning: In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson), games have a focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve. Or put more simply: games are autotelic (performed for their own sake), like poetry is autotelic.

XBox Live Arcade: Digital Distribution, but without the Benefits

That was quick: Microsoft has announced that they will start removing underperforming games from XBox Live Arcade.

You would think that infinite shelf space or the long tail meant something, but apparently not. I do not understand why the game industry has to be so different from, say, Amazon? Amazon does not believe that you have to push the same 20 products to all customers, but Microsoft believes so, and casual portals also seem to believe it.

It raises some questions about the status of XBox Live Community games: Couldn’t the developer just resubmit their game as a community game (if it was written in XNA)? There seems to contradictory forces at play – opening the 360 to developers, and closing the 360 to developers.

I also wonder why there aren’t any more titles beginning with A on XBLA? It is clearly an advantage to come high in the alphabet as that brings you to the top of the browsing list. I would make a game about an aardvark.