Category: games

You are one of two people in an experiment. The other person is handed $100 and has the choice of either splitting the money 50-50 with you, or taking $90 and giving you $10. You can accept or refuse the offer.
The other person takes $90 and offers you $10. Do you accept?

Chances are that you will reject the offer and thus end up with no money even when you could have had $10. This is completely irrational behavior, but you were disgusted by the behavior of the other person and wanted no part in it.

Businessweek writes about neuroeconomics:

According to the new science of neuroeconomics, the explanation might lie inside the brains of the negotiators. Not in the prefrontal cortex, where people rationally weigh pros and cons, but deep inside, where powerful emotions arise. Brain scans show that when people feel they’re being treated unfairly, a small area called the anterior insula lights up, engendering the same disgust that people get from, say, smelling a skunk. That overwhelms the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. With primitive brain functions so powerful, it’s no wonder that economic transactions often go awry.

We can extend this to games. Players do not always play rationally, but sometimes they do.

Here’s a prediction that I have not tested:

In a multi player game, disgust is a factor. Players will irrationally refuse offers that they find unfair or humiliating.

When interacting with a character that the player is consciously aware is an NPC, disgust will not be a factor.

The role of disgust in decision-making when interacting with NPCs depends on how much the player thinks of the game as a fictional world. If the player believes in the fiction of the game, disgust will be a factor, if the player thinks of the game as a set of rules for which to optimize his/her personal performance, disgust will not be a factor.

Hence in dealing with NPCs disgust is more likely to be a factor for beginner players, and early on in the playing of a specific game.

It would be nice to empirically test this.

• Update October 10 2006: OK, images of Spore are all over. I have put the images back online.
• Update March 3rd 2006: You can see the video of Will Wright’s presentation here.
• Update March 23rd 2005: I have inquired with Maxis/EA and found that the screenshots should not be distributed. They have been permanently removed, sorry.

By popular demand, more pictures from Will Wright’s Spore video game demo at Game Developer’s Conference:

The amoeba stage:

On land:

(At this point, we all thought “wow, they really put in a lot of stuff in this game!”)

The Sim City-style mode:

Planet mode:

Solar system mode:

Galaxy:

Should provide entertainment for a few afternoons.

Will Wright’s presentation included a sneak peek of Spore.
The sheer ambition of Spore is unbelievable.
You start of as a mutating amoeba, then you become a higher-level creature in the sea, then an action game on land, then a social simulation with a tribe of your own creatures, then a SimCity style city simulation, then an RTS-type game between different cities, then you zoom out yet again and see the entire planet, then the solar system, then the galaxy. All of these levels are unique games.

The only thing really missing is the Sims – the game certainly appeals to the geek in me (from gene to galaxy, hey!), but I feel that the market is slightly smaller than the Sims.

I think we were told not to take pictures, so since I don’t have my camera cables with me, here is a cell phone camera picture of my real camera showing a picture of Spore. This is in planet-mode, a planet in the middle, your flying saucer at the bottom. The game looks great, though you can’t tell:
[Image removed, sorry.]

Just an hour or two left of the Indie Game Jam.

Here’s the title screen of my game, Emotional:

As you may notice, the 3d models are from The Sims – Maxis generously donated the complete library to the game jam.

The games will eventually be available on Sourceforge.

The indie game jam has so far been incredibly interesting and eminently bloggable. But it’s also an event where every minute of programming time counts, hence no updates.

Chris Hecker et.al. have set up a very nice 3d engine suited for the theme of this year’s jam, “people interaction”.
Here’s Chris in the middle of it all, during a briefing:

People interaction is cool because it’s incredibly hard, and the obvious “big step” that everybody?s thinking about. I guess we are around 30 people, and the games include a dance party game, a film noir adventure, a simulation of the Fairmount lobby in San José (the end point of previous Game Developer Conferences).
Everything will be showed at the game design workshop at this years Game Developer Conference – Thursday, I think.

My own game has the working title of “Emotional Chuchu”. That is, it’s a puzzle game, but based around people being happy or sad, and trying to convince the others to come to “their side”. Here’s a screenshot from Saturday morning:

Tasks for today: Make title screen. Tweak gameplay. Implement all sounds. Make sure the player gets what is going on.

Irregular postings for the next 3 weeks – off to the Indie Game Jam (from which I may or may not blog), then GDC (same).

The [Wall Street] Opinion Journal interviews Susan Polgar – one of the two famous chess-playing Polgar sisters.

She airs the idea that Chess is a tool for personal improvement:

Chess is a wonderful tool to increase concentration, self-control, patience, imagination, creativity, logical thinking and many more important and useful life skills

It’s an idea that pops up now and then, that a game can improve you as a person. I would love to see somebody write a history of this, I would guess it can be traced, at the very least, to ancient Greece.

At the same time, whenever you spend years focusing on something specific, I think you always end up feeling that what you learned could be used in other contexts. Video game theory for me, certainly, but it’s just like literary theorists or film scholars for whom their medium of choice is a privileged space for all kinds of existential and philosophical thinking.

Interesting and silly, from a Times article on cows.

Turns out that cows enjoy problem solving:

Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, who is presenting other research at the conference, will describe how cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges.

In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.

?Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,? said Broom.

Just like the rest of us it seems. Other interesting bits about cow psychology in the article, some of which are beyond the scope of this blog.