Category: games

Call for papers for The [Player] Conference at the IT University in Copenhagen next August.

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The Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen is pleased to announce The [Player] Conference, a conference for games researchers taking place August 26^th – 29^th 2008.

There is no escaping the player in games research. Whether the focus is on formal aspects of games or on studies of actual gamers, the player is an intrinsic part of the gaming situation. Despite this, the underlying assumptions that inform the notion of the player are often not made explicit in the work of game scholars, regardless of their academic background. This is problematic in itself, but even more so in the inter-disciplinary field of games research where unclear terminology may cloud communication across the borders of academic traditions.

The central focus for The [Player] Conference is to uncover the assumptions that inform our work as game scholars with regards to the player and to consider how we think about and study the player as embodied, represented, derived, historical, idealised – to mention only a few of the positions the notion of player may be put in.

While all papers should focus on the player in some respect or other, there is a diversity of topics to consider. The topics include but are not limited to:

– Conceptions and definitions of players within different disciplines.

– Ideal and real players.

– Player experience, emotions, affects and cognitions.

– Player agency.

– Player taxonomies.

– Methodological issues of studies that deal with players.

– Ontology of player representations.

– The player’s perception and comprehension of the gaming situation.

– Player motivations.

– The position created by the game for the player.

– Player expectations.

– The player as subject and object.

– The player in history.

– Playing for academic purposes.

– The many different roles of players.

– Videogame’s possible effects on players.

– Assumptions about players within academia and the industry.

– Control of player creativity and communities.

We invite submissions of full papers and panels by the 31^st March 2008. All submissions will undergo a double blind review process. Notification of acceptance will be announced by the 5^th of May 2008. The maximum word limit for full papers is 10000, and 600 pr participant for panels. Note that the panels should focus on debating a chosen topic both among its participants and with the audience.

Inquiries can be sent to player2008@itu.dk. More information will be available on http://game.itu.dk/player/ shortly.

From my recent trip to Japan, this video of a pretty good player of Pop’n music Adventure in an Akihabara arcade.

Pop’n music is an underappreciated music game imo – and with lot more room to grow as a player that you would think! There were quite a few players on this level.

There is some commotion between EA and Rockstar over the new Simpsons game, which was originally slated to include a level called Grand Theft Scratchy.

Apparently, Rockstar pressured EA to remove Grand Theft Scratchy from the game, because, you know, “we need to protect our IP” or some such. Nobody really knows, except that Rockstar apparently feels that parody is not something you should have in games.

Parody was supposed to be protected from this type of legal problems, apparently not.

It would be redundant to describe Rockstar as hypocritical here, but certainly someone took a wrong turn somewhere.

Gamasutra has a link collection on the story here, and Gamepolitics has some developer interviews.

Somebody had to say this at some point. From news.com, breaking news that casual games games are not just for women.

Those were some of the findings in the first yearly market report by the Casual Games Association, an industry group aimed at promoting a fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10 percent of the $30 billion global video game market.

“Everyone always thought that casual games were something that only appeal to women,” Jessica Tams, managing director of the association, said in an interview. “We have always been obsessed about making games for women.”

Surveys of players showed that while nearly three-fourths of people who bought casual games were women, the players of such games were split 50-50 between the sexes.

The article speculates that part of the issue is that many men do not want to admit to playing casual games. Perhaps.

Do you consider yourself a gamer? Is it embarrassing to be playing Mystery Case Files or Cake Mania?

Another year, another Nobel Prize in economics that sounds immediately relevant to multiplayer game design.

Quoting Steven Levitt’s description of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson’s work awarded:

The prize was “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, or parent can set up rules so that all parties involved have the incentives to act in the way that the planner/manager/parent prefers. This Nobel is not for the idea that you can design incentives this way, but rather for coming up with ingenious proofs that simplify the task of proving that, indeed, all parties have the right incentives — a task that can turn out to be awfully difficult.

That is, I am sure it is relevant, but my personal experience with game theory is that anything more complicated than the prisoner’s dilemma tends to become so fantastically complicated that designers just design from their own intuitions anyway.

Is anybody actually using game theory for designing video games?

The Independent Games Festival has published their list of entrants for the 2008 competition. This is the 10th IGF.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that indie and experimental games have gained a lot of popular attention during the last 2-3 years.

Just 2 years ago I felt that indie games were perceived as “games with low production values”, but now it seems to be more accepted that they can provide something unique, a special sensibility.

Perhaps it relates to new distribution methods. Student project gets massive publicity, becomes PS3 downloadable (flow). Quirky indie game is sold on XBLA (Eets, Space Giraffe).

With casual games and downloadable console games, we have a distribution method and economical model for smaller games.