Category: general

It’s true: The paper I sent in to the Imagina conference of course brought me a trip to Monaco and a glass teapot.
At at small ceremony last Friday, IBM graciously presented me with an Intellistation M Pro workstation as a main prize for my work.

Danish media about here, IBM press release here.

Far Cry plays really well on it. Looks like it’s time to start playing PC games again.

Greg Costikyan dates the first ever course on game design to 1972.
Given the size of the German board game scene (now), I do wonder if there were any early board game design courses / events in Germany as well.

The nominees for this year’s Webby Awards have been announced:

BrettspielWelt
Samorost
Star Wars Galaxies
There
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates

As you can see, it ended up being a rather motley collection of sites. I am judging this year, and I do think one of the nominees stands out.

Travelling the next month, so my posting frequency is going to drop quite a bit.
Going to Boston tomorrow, then GDC in San José, then two weeks in Japan (Tokyo, Chiba, Kyoto, Kanazawa).

I probably won’t find out this time around, but I continue to wonder how many Japanese academics are working with games and in what ways. If you know any, please drop me a line.

Everybody’s talking about emergent gameplay. This is usually taken to mean something like “creative player actions that weren’t anticipated or explicitly designed by the creators of the game”.

Without getting into a technical discussion, it occurs to me that many non-game situations contain something that could be seen as emergent gameplay.

Biology: For example, (most) spices add to our experience of food without actually adding nutritional value. Though evolution does not have an intention, our sense of taste is evolved due to its capability of distinguishing between poisonous, nutritious and non-nutritious food, but we have figured out how to use spices to “tickle” this sense in order to experience pleasure when eating. This is emergent gameplay in relation to our own biology.

Culture: In culture, laws or technology are usually designed with an intention, but that intention can often be subverted by clever people. Tax loopholes are a prime example of emergent gameplay in culture.

So here are some examples of emergent gameplay in real life:

Biology
Music (arguably)
Writing
Computers
Telephones
Houses
Clothes
Spices
Masturbation
Contraception
Games
Jogging, fitness
Perfume
Robberies at gunpoint

Culture
Tax loopholes
Fake ID cards
Lying
Spam
Video games
Bad video games based on film licenses
Making a living doing video game theory
Frivolous lawsuits
World Wide Web (in relation to the internet)
Churches demanding that you pay them money in order to get into heaven

(Harvey Smith on emergent gameplay here and here. I also wrote something about it here.)

Any other examples?

Last day in Boston before heading home to Copenhagen.

So leaving the cool Comparative Media Studies at MIT in favor of the cool Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen. It’s a hard life I’m living, I know.

Random observations:

-I hadn’t really heard U.S. radio since I was a kid, but it turns out to be EXACTLY like the radio stations in Grand Theft Auto: The commercial stations are terrible, the ads are, well, ads, and the public broadcast radio NPR is pretentious and claims to be non-commercial while sporting tons of ads anyway. The first time I turned on NPR, there was an ad for a renaissance fair – just like in GTA3. In other words, reality was a complete mirror of the game and I’ve felt completely at home here for that reason.

-On 4th of July at the Charles River in Boston, 4 jet fighters flew over the crowd just as we finished singing the Star Spangled Banner. It did add some oomph.

-The only reason I could sing along on Yankee Doodle is that I played lots of North & South on the Amiga. See! Games can really help you in your meeting with other cultures!

-People here are much better at introducing themselves and striking up conversation than people in Denmark.

-Recharged my Gameboy batteries and got Warioware, inc and Namco Museum for the trip home.

-Being in Boston and at MIT has been pretty great. 6 months where I got a lot of work done, met interesting people, and generally experienced life as it always is in its own unpredictable ways. It’s 22 degress (74 f), the sun is shining from a blue sky and it is somewhat sad to be leaving.

There you go … the free trial of Radio Userland was as kind as to silently notify weblogs.com that I was creating a test site. At the time of writing, this test curiously scores as the #1 hit on Google if you search for “ludologist“.

For some reason, I have the largest Googleshare of the word ludology of anyone – 53.37% to be exact. As a random comparison, Gonzalo Frasca only has 10.34%. It doesn’t really make sense, but who am I to complain?
(Via Susana Tosca, Torill Mortensen and Nick Montfort.)