Category: games

Join us on Wednesday, November 1st for a chat with on the subject of games and art with Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Marc LeBlanc, and Eric Zimmerman.

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Hideo Kojima says “If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it’s art. But videogames aren’t trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It’s something of a service. It’s not art.”

And Roger Ebert says “To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers… for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

Contrariwise, Henry Jenkins says “Computer games are art?a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless… The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century.”

Are games art? If not, why not? And if so, why? Is thinking of games as art useful or actually a hindrance for game developers? If games are art, what should our aspirations for the form be?

Participants:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including the recently published Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and an Assistant Professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Computer Game Research Copenhagen. He is author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and numerous articles about games, and his prestigious and influential blog is The Ludologist.

Marc LeBlanc is a twelve-year veteran of the game industry. At Looking Glass Studios, he was a core contributor to several award-winning games, including the Thief and System Shock series. In collaboration with Andrew Leker, he developed Oasis, the 2004 Independent Games Festival Game of the Year in the web/downloadable category.

Santiago Siri is an Argentinean game designer whose work includes Football Deluxe and Utopia (forthcoming). He works for Three Melons, an advergaming firm that offers innovative branding through games. He is also a writer and theoretician, and his blog, Games as Art, is a resource for all members of the game community.

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic exploring the theory and practice of game design. He is the is the co-founder and CEO of gameLab, a game development company based in New York City. He is the co-editor of several works in the field, including Rules of Play, a seminal study of game design technique.

Last week, Troels Folmann received the BAFTA award for best original video game score on Tomb Raider: Legend.

Troels used to be a promising PhD student at our center for computer games research in Copenhagen, but was lured away by the industry.

And here, I should be writing a warning: “And look where it got him.”, but it’s turning out rather well, so congratulations!

I am giving a talk at Georgia Tech this Thursday at 4:30Pm, in the Skiles building, room 010.

Talk title: “A Game in the Hands of a Player. Or: This Game is just like that Other Game.”

In this talk, I will look at the space between the game and the player. What happens when a player picks up a game, and how can game design influence the player’s actions and experiences?

I see this as an open field between basic two observations: 1) Different players may play the same game differently, and experience the same game differently. 2) Different games yield give different kinds of pleasures.

Wired has the spectacular story of the thoroughly failed Gizmondo game system and the very shady Bo Stefan Eriksson: How a former Swedish debt collector and criminal managed to lure amazing amounts of money from investors in order to launch a doomed portable game device.

This is the story: Dubious character realizes that there are lots of money to me made in video games, invites equally dubious and video game ignorant friends along to make it big, launches terrible games.

I can’t be the only one to think that this is also the story of WarioWare, with Eriksson playing the role of Wario (or vice versa). Life imitates art. (Or vice versa.)

The difference being, of course, that the WarioWare games are sufficiently bad to be really, really good.

Seems we have an “unbelievable implementations of Pac-Man” week, so here is … Pac-Man in an Excel spreadsheet.

Research answering a seldomly posed question: What happens if you let real insects control the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man?

This: Animal Controlled Computer Games: Playing Pac-Man against Real Crickets.

My feeling is that game balancing could be improved by selective breeding of the crickets, which I hope Wim van Eck will have time for in a future project.