Introducing the Not Helvetica Collection

We love Helvetica! We really do!

But do you ever feel uneasy over its excessively clean lines?

Suspicious of the self-conscious foot of the upper case R?

Disturbed by the smug purists who think they have found the Eight Wonder of the World?

Then I have something for you.

A wholly frivolous side project, I present to you the NotHelvetica collection: a modest line of apparel and household objects featuring classic good-taste fonts like Helvetica, Bauhaus, and Futura … only in, well, other fonts like Comic Sans, or Old English, or Rosewood.


 Get the T-shirt.


The iPhone 5 case.


The cosmetic bag.

And more! All customizable.

http://www.not-helvetica.com/

Thanks!

-Jesper

PS. For the truly daring contrarian, the Helvetica in Arial T-shirt is now available!

Bennett Foddy Speaks at the Game Center

This Friday, 9/28 at 7PM game designer and Professor of Bioethics, Bennett Foddy, will be speaking at the NYU Game Center.  The topic of discussion will be Bennett’s high-level creative procedures for ideation, his iterative design process, and rules of thumb for solid creative process.  Students and practitioners are encouraged to join us for this unique opportunity for learning and close dialogue with the creator of sucessful games like QWOP, GIRP, and Pole Riders.  A selection of Bennett’s games will be available for play at the event.

Please RSVP here.

This event is the first in a series of informal talks and dialogues on varied topics around games that will be happening on the 9th Floor of 721 Broadway throughout the semester.  As with our Lecture Series, these talks are free and open to the public.  Look for more news on 9th Floor talks on game theory, video game art, LARPs, and much more.  We encourage you to bring friends and colleagues with interest in games and to come with questions for the speakers.

PRACTICE Speakers and Schedule Updated

 You’re invited to the premier game design conference, PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail!

On November 9th-11th join us at the New York University Game Center for a weekend of brilliant talks, intense debates, and playful socializing with some of the world’s top game designers and a group of your game design colleagues and peers.

Since we last updated you on PRACTICE, we have added more world-class speakers, the schedule has been opened up to add time for socializing, and we will host the opening reception and a special event at the Museum of the Moving Image.  View the full list of speakers and more information on the conference here.  On the site you’ll also find videos of select lectures from last year, as well examples of PRACTICE in the news.

Highlights from this year’s schedule include a lecture by the lead designer of the new Sim City, Stone Librande on the development of the game, a longer ‘Open Problems’ session, a popular event from last year where attendees bring in their own design problems for feedback form the entire room, and in keeping with PRACTICE’s penchant for expanding the notion of game design, David Ward, from the War Gaming Department at the United States Naval War College, will open the event on Sunday.  PRACTICE is a gathering of the most diverse and forward thinking game designers in the world and we want you to add your voice!

PRACTICE was created to address the community of working game designers, so this year we’re happy to offer a 10% discount to IGDA members!  Simply use the code ‘IGDA’ at the registration page to access the discount.

The heart of PRACTICE is the exchange of ideas among the attendees, and so we invite you to spread the word to friends and colleagues you think would like to be a part of this exchange!

If you have questions or comments about the conference, we’d be happy to hear from you at: gamecenter@nyu.edu

We hope to see you there!

Closer to total Curation/Censorship every Day

This image shows the dialog box that a user received when trying to install Molleindustria’s already-censored game Phone Story. Turns out this is a lauded “anti-malware” feature called Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion.

Users can change the settings, but many people experience the misleading dialog above, not telling the user the truth – that they cannot install the program because they have to enable non-certified apps/developers in system settings. But rather telling the user that the file is “damaged”.

Paolo has a longer discussion of it here, but it does seem like that Apple has made it possible for the dialog to mislead in order to dissuade users from installing software not sold through the Mac App store and/or made by a licensed developer.

[Note: It is unclear whether this dialog is intentional. Some people claim that it is not the default dialog, but some developers experience it nonetheless.]

I wrote about this scenario some time ago as “Fear of an App Planet“: that our ability to easily and transparently develop and distribute games for PCs and Macs is gradually eroding. Worrying.

Only the Obvious can be Protected – on Games and Copyright

With the Tetris lawsuit of the way, the action has moved to EA’s lawsuit against Zynga for copying the Sims in Zynga’s The Ville.

Like the Tetris case, it comes down partly to the idea-expression dichotomy. (Better explained here.) You cannot protect the core idea of the game (semi-controlling little people), but you can protect the details of how it is expressed:  protection is afforded to the combination of character looks, menus, etc… all the small design decisions that express this idea.

Xio Interactive lost to the Tetris company because a sufficient number of small design decisions such as size of the playfield and color changes were similar to the original Tetris. The judge said:

“I find the following elements are also protected expression and further support a finding of infringement: the dimensions of the playing field, the display of “garbage” lines, the appearance of “ghost” or shadow pieces, the display of the next piece to fall, the change in color of the pieces when they lock with the accumulated pieces, and the appearance of squares automatically filling in the game board when the game is over. None of these elements are part of the idea (or the rules or the functionality) of Tetris, but rather are means of expressing those ideas.”

I am sympathetic to the principle that you cannot copyright a game idea.

On the other hand, this creates a counter-intuitive reversal in which the core innovative idea of a game is unprotectable, and only the trivial design decisions that follow are afforded protection. I think this makes some sense, but isn’t there something strange about it too?

In practice you see something similar in patents, such as in the Apple-Samsung case, where each patent is just a list of obvious or near-obvious concepts combined, with some vague specifics added (a database! a heuristic! a mobile device!), but where it’s the staggeringly banal specifics that actually make it patentable. Patents and copyright are obviously not the same thing, but there are some parallels here. Or this Google patent for face unlocking of devices, which has already been done a million times, except now it’s on a mobile device, with user switching!

Patent law is clearly broken, but I am not sure I would change copyright law.

It’s just that our intuition of what constitutes the “core of a game” puts emphasis on what we could call “the idea”, whereas copyright puts emphasis on what seems to be the shallow surface.

Markus Montola: On the Edge of the Magic Circle

Markus Montola’s Ph.D. On the Edge of the Magic Circle is now available for download at http://acta.uta.fi/english/teos.php?id=1000161

Abstract

On the Edge of the Magic Circle studies two threads of contemporary western gaming culture: Role-playing and pervasive games. Recreational role-playing includes forms such as tabletop role-playing games, larps and online role-playing games, while pervasive games range from treasure hunts to alternate reality games. A discussion on pervasive role-playing connects these strands together.The work has four larger research goals. First, to establish a conceptual framework for understanding role-playing in games. Second, to establish a conceptual framework for understanding pervasive games. Third, to explore the expressive potential of pervasive games through prototypes. And fourth, to establish a theoretical foundation for the study of ephemeral games.

The central outcome of the work is a theory complex that explains and defines role-playing and pervasive gaming, and allows them to be understood in the context of the recent discussion in game studies.

In order to understand these two borderline cases of games, the work establishes a theoretical foundation that highlights gameplay as a social process. This foundation combines the weak social constructionism of John R. Searle with the recent game studies scholarship from authors such as Jesper Juul, Jane McGonigal, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.

Actually, I crashed on Purpose

More sportsmanship discussion from the Olympics, here is gold-winning British cyclist Philip Hindes publicly admitting that he crashed his bike on purpose to get a restart.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IO5QGCzZhb0
Hindes has since retracted the comment, but I have to say that it’s one of the less convincing crashes I’ve seen.

(Via Dylan McKenzie.)

Losing a Match to Win the Tournament

Last week at the Olympics, The Badminton World Federation disqualified eight badminton players for losing matches intentionally in order to get weaker opponents in the coming round.

It is one of those questions: is it OK to lose a match in order to get ahead, or are you always to supposed to put in maximum effort? The Badminton “Code of Conduct” does state that you should always try to win a match:

BWF’s Players’ Code of Conduct – Sections 4.5 and 4.16 respectively – with “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”.

I can understand why it would be frustrating to pay money to watch such a match, but on the other hand the players really were performing to the best of their abilities in order to win the tournament.

I feel that it is the responsibility of the game designers, the Badminton World Federation and the Olympics, to make sure that the optimal way of playing the game involves winning every match. In this case, the players are really being punished for poor game design.

But part of the issue is also about the scope of “one’s best efforts”. The players’ best efforts were not going toward that particular match, but toward the overall tournament. It follows that we could imagine at least four different type of “best effort” arguments, from strict to lenient:

  1. As a player you should put in maximum effort in every single moment in a game.
  2. As a player, you should always put in maximum effort in order to win a match.
  3. As a player, you should always put in maximum effort in order to win a tournament.
  4. As a player, you can do whatever you want as long as it is within the general rules of the game. Win, lose, play well, play badly – it’s up to you.

As we can see, the BWF has chosen type 2: they will probably not punish a player for playing below ability when far behind in a set, or for not diving in order to catch every single shot. Conversely, they don’t acknowledge that a match in a tournament may be played for larger goals (type 3). A more lenient type 4 argument would say that players can do whatever they wanted within the rules (the famous spoilsport behavior).

Summing up, I was about to say that I intuitively support a type 3 argument, but do I really? For some reason I feel that losing on purpose is more acceptable in Badminton than in Soccer. Perhaps because Soccer matches are longer and involve more people, and hence feel more like standalone events? But I am certain that we are having this discussion only because the BWF made a poor game design decision.