Category: games

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.)

I haven’t been following the Rubik’s cube scene too closely the past few decades, but it’s doing well according to news.com:

On Saturday, at the International Rubik’s Cube competition held at the Exploratorium here, Lo took just 11.13 seconds to set the world record for solving of one of the iconic red, white, blue, green, yellow and red cubes.

For updates, check speedcubing.com.

Not that “world records” for the Rubik’s Cube are that important – a lot of luck involved in the way a cube is scrambled. I admire the focus that people bring to the thing, I never thought about being so systematic about it. Old puzzles never die.

A favorite obsession is to ponder the differences between Western and Japanese game tastes. Hardcore gaming 101 has published shots of how the boxes of various Western games look in Japan.

I’ll just link straight to Deus Ex: Invisible War, American and Japanese covers:

So this would support the idea that the Japanese are more spiritual & sophisticated. But if you check out the Backyard Wrestling cover, it looks a bit different. Not that Backyard Wrestling is the epitome of taste and sophistication, but still.

(Via Ars Technica.)

News.com on board games becoming faster:

“What we call ‘time compression’ is becoming an overbearing trend in our industry,” said Richard Tait, co-founder of board game company Cranium.

With kids’ schedules packed with afterschool activities and homework, and the rise in both dual-income and single-parent families, Tait said it is hard for families to find time to play board games–especially new ones they haven’t played before.

“In today’s world, if there’s a new entertainment experience, it’s got to be quick to learn and quick to play,” he said.

Sounds a bit like conventional wisdom for video game design. Though I think changes in video game design (from difficult and long to easy and short) is also a reflection of the industry trying to talk to non-hardcore players.

NEW YORK? Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people’s behavior in any way.

“With Stacker, the player interacts with an environment full of boxes?lightweight, uniformly brown boxes with rounded corners?and uses diligence and repetitive hard work to complete his mission,” said Doug Benzies, Stacker’s chief developer. “We’re confident that the new ‘reluctantly interactive’ content engine we designed will prevent any excitement or emotional involvement, inappropriate or otherwise, on the part of the player.”

From The Onion, brilliant as ever.

With the launch of the Xbox 360, the idea of the Uncanny Valley is becoming a popular meme.

Clive Thompson writes in Wired:

My hat is off to whoever designed the new King Kong game for the Xbox 360, because they’ve crafted a genuinely horrific monster. When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity.

I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts.

Not the actual Naomi Watts. She’s heart-stoppingly lovely. No, I’m talking about the version of Naomi Watts that you encounter inside the game.

In some ways, her avatar is an admirably good replica, with the requisite long blond hair and juicy voice-acting from Watts herself. But the problem begins when you look at her face — and the Corpse Bride stares back. The skin on virtual Naomi is oddly slack, as if it weren’t quite connected to the musculature beneath; when she speaks, her lips move with a Frankensteinian stiffness. And those eyes! My god, they’re like two portholes into a soulless howling electric universe. “Great,” I complained to my wife. “I finally get to hang out with a gorgeous starlet — and she’s dead.”

James Surowiecki discusses the 360 in Slate:

The closer a game gets to resembling the real world, the ways in which it’s different become more obvious, and the more psychologically jarring those differences become. Flaws that in earlier-generation games could be written off as the inevitable product of technological limitations now seem glaring and inordinately frustrating. Sometimes these are small things. Why, in Call of Duty 2, do your fellow soldiers keep running in front of you as you’re drawing a bead on an enemy? Why can’t two people walk through a door without getting stuck in an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine? Why can I jump over that wall but not this fence? And sometimes the flaws are bigger: Why doesn’t this story make more sense? Would a person actually do this?

I think that developers have to take a step back. The blind aim for “photo realism” simply doesn’t work. Think animation, think cartoons instead. Players don’t care about polygons.