Category: games

Should you be in Copenhagen next Friday, Gitte Stald has arranged a seminar on death & violence in video games. Flyer.

Friday November 12, 2004
Conference Room 5.2.29a, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80

PROGRAMME:
09.15-09.25: Welcome
09.25-10.05: Gitte Stald – Perspectives on Fascination of Death and Violence in Games
10.05-10.45: Kjetil Sandvik – Game Characters with Scruples?
11.00-11.40: Susana Tosca – To Kill or not to Kill: the Butterfly Effect in Blade Runner
11.40-12.20: Troels Degn-Johansson – On Death and Destruction in Strategy Games

13.15-13.55: Jesper Juul – What the Game Means: About Grand Theft Auto 3
14.10-14.50: Charlie Breindahl – Racing Games
14.50-15.30: Jonas Heide Smith – Games, Peacocks, and the Theory of Conflict

So it happened, Red Sox won the world series.
Again, the idea of winning and losing streaks, curses just always seem to find its way into games.

On my desk is a paper, Heuristics as beliefs and behaviors: The adaptiveness of the ‘hot hand’ (Bruce D. Burns) which discusses the belief in a player having a “hot hand” (likely to score) in a game of basketball.

Update: And at MIT they did their part.

Nintendo has launched two “misleading” sites leading up to the relase of Metroid Prime 2.
channel51.org and orbislabs.com.
Orbis Labs make lots of cool technology, including a mechanical ball which is suspiciously similar to Samus’ mechanical ball…

Baseball: The Boston Red Sox finally beat the New York Yankees to make it to the World Series.
It’s one of the interesting things around sports, the myth-making, the belief in winning streaks, losing streaks, and curses.
In this case, the Red Sox may have broken “The curse of the Bambino“, which is the idea that the Red Sox were cursed because they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918 – and true enough, Red Sox haven’t won the world series since.

Perhaps all this because it’s hard to understand & predict why one team wins the match, but we humans cannot prevent ourselves from seeing patterns everywhere, curses, magic.

Update: There’s a New York Times piece where the writer explains that the Red Sox always lose if he watches them play. This time they won because he didn’t watch.

You grew tired of the old discussion, so a new one came along: Arrative and videogames.
Your name was starting to feel so normal, so you acquired a new one: Jasper.

Article on our Game Centre at The World. As I recall, I had a “bad soundbite day” when the journalist was visiting, but, well.

Off to Steirischer Herbst in Graz .

It was a major revelation when we stumbled upon Richard Bartle’s player type paper a few years ago – imagine being able to discuss such things!

Straightforward copy from Greg Costikyan’s excellent post on the subject. He lists 5 different categorizations of player types:

Ron Edwards: Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist.

Richard Bartle: Categories of achievers, explorers, socialisers, and killers.
Nick Yee: players who desire relationships, immersion, grief play, achievement, and leadership.

Nicole Lazzaro (at GDC 2004): desire for “internal experience,” for “challenge and strategy,” for “immersion,” and for social experiences.

Richard Rouse: Players want either a challenge, to socialize, a dynamic solitaire experience, bragging rights, an emotional experience, or to fantasize.

Game Design Workshop: At least ten player types: competitors, explorers, collectors, achievers, jokers, artists, directors, storytellers, performers, and craftsmen.

As I recall, Nokia also has a categorization somewhere, but I can’t find it right now.

And I think Greg is right in saying that it’s hard to justify any particular categorization. On the other hand, it’s usually pretty productive to do the attempt – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Mirjam Eliadhari presents her Sims 2 story about the Katt family here.

And yes, it really does work. In Mirjam’s recounting (making-it-into-a-story), it very much becomes some kind of daytime soap – people snapping in and out of love, high drama, and so on. And I guess that soaps just were one of the not-so-talked-about inspirations behind Sims.

The other big inspiration – at GDC Europe 2002, someone proposed that reality TV was one of the things that had paved way for the Sims. And if you think about it, it does look a lot like Big Brother.

Steven Johnson writes about how he recreated his family in Sims 2 only to have “himself” burn to death in an instant.

It wasn’t supposed to be my thing, but I find Sims 2 quite appealing (I would really like to play it instead of having to work now – and much more so than the previous incarnations.

It’s official: Will Wright is the new Emile Zola and the new Aaron Spelling.