Category: games

Two new journals on games out recently:

Games and Culture is the direct competitor to Game Studies and the inaugural issue is freely available (with registration.)

In the opening issue, 22 scholars are asked to answer the question “Why Game Studies Now?” I won’t focus on any particular author, but while I find the manifesto-style responses promising (manifestos are always nice), they do make me look forward to longer and more in-depth articles in future issues.

Issue 4 of The International Review of Information Ethics was edited by Elizabeth A. Buchanan and Charles Ess, and focuses on The Ethics of E-Games. This collection has a more general philosophical slant and covers some familiar (games and violence) as well as some less explored ground (cheating, general ethics of games), so worth a look as well.

BBC has made an “edition two” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. The new version has graphics. Click here to play it.

About the graphics, do they enhance the game? Discuss.

Via Intelligent Artifice, The Guardian Gamesblog features a pretty nice guide on how to defeat end-of-level bosses. Highlights:

1. Keep moving. Whatever you do, don’t stand still. Even for a second. This is the only cue an end-of-level boss needs to swipe at you with a giant fist or blast you with deadly lasers.
2. If the boss stops, panic. Bosses usually move about – when they stop it means they’re about to unleash their signature move, the aforementioned fist or laser blast.
3. Scan for weak spots. Every boss has one, sometimes more. They’re either permanently vulnerable but hard to hit, or they only become vulnerable at certain moments, usually after their signature attack.
4. The quarter rule. Keep checking the boss’s energy gauge – when there’s around a quarter left, more often than not, they’ll introduce a new attack, which throws you off-guard.

It reminds me a bit of the “How to be an evil overlord” list in that it’s an analysis of genre conventions posing as a practical guide.
OK, so it’s a list of genre conventions. But can you spot the pattern in the conventions?

Rules 2-4 all involve reversals:

• Stopping > dangerous assault.
• Seemingly invulnerable boss > weak spot.
• Terrifying attack > weak spot exposed.
• Allmost no energy > new attack introduced.

I think even Kirby’s Canvas Curse followed these conventions.

Here I am supposed to write something about that games designers should start thinking outside the box, and that these are just random conventions that could easily be changed.

But really, I think the current boss conventions work quite well because reversals are basically exciting, dramatic if you will.

Rune Klevjer has written the new DiGRA Hardcore column, about the issue of genre:

There is a curious lack of genre studies in our field, which strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity. It means that variation, tension and significant detail too easily fall below the radar of academic game studies. It also means that we are less able to bridge the gap between the very specific and the very general, and less able to describe the connections between aesthetic convention and social practice.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired office assistant Edward Greenwood IX for playing Solitaire at work:

“The workplace is not an appropriate place for games,” Bloomberg said. “It’s a place where you’ve got to do the job that you’re getting paid for.”

Edward finds it a little harsh:

“It’s not like I’m the only one that ever did this,” said the 39-year-old father of a toddler.

I think it’s time to review the computer use policies where we work. As a game researcher, I guess I can’t be fired for playing games but only for, say, reading a novel…

This may be too obvious to blog about, but the question of games of skill vs. games of chance just comes up often, and discussions invariably involve some confusion. Here is a simple way of explaining it:

Chance means two different things.

It’s the same issue with Roger Caillois’ distinction between Alea (chance) and Agon (competition) – after all, many games of competition also contain chance elements.

Chance can mean either:

1. That a game contains a chance element or mechanic.
2. That the outcome of a game is determined by chance (the game is not a game of skill).

And the two meanings are constantly mixed up. That’s all.

More the kind of thing that Gonzalo blogs about, but News.com has discuss “Games that stick it to the Man”, discussing the genre of anti-advergames.

Advertisers, governments and organizations mount huge campaigns to show us what they want us to see, and we want to expose what they’re hiding,” said Ian Bogost, a partner at Persuasive Games, a pioneer of the new genre. “There’s lots of precedent for this sort of speech in print, in film (and) on the Web, but we think videogames are particularly good at exposing the underlying logics of these organizations–how they work and what’s wrong with it.”

I never blogged about “important events of 2005”, but I think that during 2005 the mainstream media became much better at writing informed articles on video games.

The BBC has just released a really good in-depth report on how people game in the United Kingdom.
Not only does it provide details for six age groups (6-10, 11-15, 16-24, 25-35, 36-50, 51-65) and two genders, they also make distinctions between different platforms down to cell phones, and let us get a peek at personal motivations for playing as well as important players find games compared to other media. It’s a treat.

– How many people are playing games in the UK?
– How, where, when and why they play games?
– When is the family television used as a monitor for a console?
– The context in which gaming plays a role in people?s lives?
– Do people play games in isolation, or in a social situation?
– How does the public?s relationship with radio, television and mobile devices affect the games they play?
– What value do people place on the time spent playing?

Promising well for the future, the 6-10 and the 11-15 rank video games as the most important medium they are using.

(Via Jose P. Zagal.)