Well Played: Volume 1 Number 3

Well Played: volume 1 number 3
Drew Davidson et al. 2012

 

Time Tech and Tales: The fall and rise of the popularity of narration in games seen through Monkey Island 2 and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Emmanuel Eytan

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Queue’d Up: The Functioning of Randomized Groups in World of Warcraft
Charles Ecenbarger II

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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS II: Conquest, trading, diplomacy from the Middle Ages to Napoleon
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen

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Deus Ex Ludos: Representation, Agency, and Ethics in Deus Ex: Invisible War
Joseph Hogle

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Playing as a Woman as a Woman as if a Man
Gabriela T. Richard

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Get it here.

The Impossible Fez Puzzle (and some Notes on Puzzle Aesthetics)

Did you solve the black monolith puzzle in Fez? Ars Technica chronicles the collective quest to solve the most cryptic puzzle of the game. This one involves cryptography and random guesswork.

I must confess that I simply don’t have patience for this kind of thing anymore. Fez is beautiful and charming, but I am bored out of my skull by go-everywhere-click-everything-guess-backtrack-repeat puzzles.

Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.

At the same time, the feeling of impossibility is fundamental to the enjoyment of puzzles: a good puzzle has to appear to be impossible, however briefly. This is why I am conflicted about Portal 2, which I completed without ever feeling stuck for more than a minute or two. Never being stuck makes me feel good about myself, but I can’t help but also feel that Portal 2 just played it a little too safe and was too afraid of veering outside my comfort zone.

I think the problem with puzzles in a game like Fez is that the delay between having a new idea for a solution, and trying it out, is just too big because of the traveling and exploration involved, so you end up repeating the same increasingly uninteresting actions over and over in order to try out new ideas for solving a given puzzle (full disclosure: I am not far into Fez).

(From Ars Technica.)

NYU Game Center Summer Courses

Interested in improving your game development skills over the summer? Then take a look at our exciting summer opportunities for students to get hands on experience creating and thinking about games!

If you have any general questions about summer courses, please check this website or email the Game Center at gamecenter@nyu.edu

OART-UT 1604 Game Development Workshop
Summer Session I: 05/21/2012 – 06/29/2012
When: Mon, Wed 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This course reflects the various skills and disciplines that are brought together in modern game development: game design, programming, visual art, animation, sound design, and writing. The workshop will situate these disciplines within a larger context of game literacy and a historical and critical understanding of games as cultural objects. Classroom lectures and lab time will all be used to bring these different educational vectors together into a coherent whole; the workshop will be organized around a single, long-term, hands-on, game creation project. Working in small groups under the close supervision of instructors, students will collaborate on the creation of a playable game. As a creative constraint to help inspire them and guide their designs, the students will be given a theme to express in their game projects.

OART-UT 1606 Thinking About Games
Summer Session II: 07/02/2012 – 08/10/2012
When: Tue, Thu 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This class is an overview of the field of video games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion.

The course will prepare the student to:
– Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective
– Apply new theories and evaluate them critically.
– Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts.
– Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods

NYU Video Game Seminar XIV on New Interfaces & New Games: This Thursday April 12th at 5-7pm

You are hereby invited to the fourteenth installment of the NYU Game Center’s video game theory seminar series: This coming Thursday April 12th 2012 at 5-7pm.

Location: NYU, 721 Broadway, New York NY 10003, 9th floor conference room.

Are the games we play defined by the interfaces that we already use? If so, can new interfaces shake games up? Provide us with new kinds of games and new types of experiences?

The two speakers of the day are game developer and researcher Doug Wilson of ITU Copenhagen & Die Gute Fabrik, and the NYU Game Center & NYU Poly’s very own game interface researcher Katherine Isbister.

The talks
Katherine Isbister will talk on Shaking up our relations with machines.

Douglas Wilson will present his uncensored talk on Doing Ridiculous Sh*t with Technology.

 

Speaker bios

Katherine Isbister is an Associate Professor jointly appointed between the NYU Game Center and NYU-Poly’s Computer Science Department. She is Research Director of the Game Innovation Lab. Her work focuses on broadening the social and emotional palette of everyday interaction with and through computers.

Douglas Wilson is a Lead Game Designer and Partner at Die Gute Fabrik, a small indie games studio based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently working on a number of game projects including Johann Sebastian Joust, which received the Innovation Award at the 2012 Game Developers Choice Awards. Doug recently finished a PhD dissertation at IT University of Copenhagen, where he wrote about designing games that embrace an aesthetic of confrontation, silliness, and brokenness. His work has been shown around the world, in venues such as the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, Babycastles, and the Museum of Modern Art.

 

The theory seminars are aimed at researchers, industry professionals and graduate students. We are ordering coffee and grapes, so RSVP by emailing jesper.juul at nyu.edu.

Three-sided Football

[Updated with photo from match and Wikipedia entry. Thanks to Janus Lodahl and Bernie DeKoven].

Somehow I missed this, but Danish situationist Asger Jorn designed a three-sided football (that is, soccer) game back in 1961.

And the Asger Jorn museum in Silkeborg inaugurated their Triolectic football court last weekend. This is from the opening match. (Image courtesy of Midtjyllands Avis.)

It’s a returning question: what does it mean to declare that a game is an artwork of sorts?

And even more media: A somewhat unedited 2012 document of Triolectic Soccer:

 

Re:Play 2012: The Theory, Practice, and Business of Video Games

On April 17th, I am co-organizing the one-day Re:Play 2012 video game conference here at New York University.

Re:Play is sponsored by the Media, Culture & Communication Department at New York University’s Steinhardt School for Culture, Education and Human Development in collaboration with the New York University Game Center

The conference is free, but registration is required at the http://replaynyu.org/ site. Hope to see you there!

 

Program

9:00 – 9:45: Arrival and registration, coffee and pastries

9:45 – 10:00: Opening remarks

Panel 1

10:00 – 11:00: Video Games and Religion

Ask your average member of the clergy, and they’re likely to see video games as a waste of time at best or, at worst, as a nefarious destroyer of young souls. But games and religion, closed systems based on stringent rules and dedicated largely to ritual, have more in common than they might imagine. This panel will discuss the relationship between these two popular forms of personal reflection and communal interaction, seeing what, if anything, they might have to teach each other.
            Moderator: Liel Leibovitz (NYU)
            Panelists: Ryan Hennesy (Princeton), others TBA

11:00 – 11:15: Break

11:15 – 12:00: Interlude I: Music for EnvironManta: Painting a Universe with Melody

Katie Jacoby (NYU)

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

Panel 2

1:00 – 2:00: Publisher Revolutions: Free-to-Play Economics

The gaming industry has proven resilient to economic turmoil and declining publisher revenues, growing at an annual rate of ten percent at a time when the U.S. economy grew only two percent per year and adding almost $5 billion to America’s GDP. This growth, however, belies the fundamental shifts currently taking place among the traditional value chain. Developers, publishers, and retailers all find themselves confronted with a changing market forcing each of them to assume a different role. This panel will discuss major trends such as the move toward free-to-play and the emergence of social gaming, and ask whether its emerging publishing models present a blue print for other entertainment industries.
Moderator: Joost van Dreunen (NYU Game Center)
Panelists: Stephen Ju (Credit Suisse), Janelle Benjamin (SuperData Research), Katharine Lewis (Fremantle

Media), Jessica Rosenblatt (Arkadium), Rainer Markussen (Gamigo), Gui Karyo (Atari)

2:00 – 2:15: Break

Panel 2a

2:15 – 3:00: Gamification Mini-Panel

In an attempt to connect theory with practice, this 30-minute panel will discuss the topic of gamification by examining and playing with its machinations.
        Panelists: Paige MacGregor (NYU), Michelle Forelle (NYU), Max Foxman (NYU), Stephanie Llamas (NYU)

3:15 – 4:00: Interlude II: Video game presentation

A representative from one of the industry’s leading studios will showcase a popular, upcoming release.

Panel 3

4:00 – 5:00: Brand new, you’re Retro: Platforms and distribution models from the Atari 2600 to Angry Birds

With interactive entertainment entering into the mainstream, the demands made on designers and publishers have changed as well. No longer exclusively focused on the legendary “hardcore” gamer, we see game designs and business models changing.
But is all of this really new? In this panel, Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul will discuss how casual games fit in the history of video game. Are casual games new, or are they a return to the simplicity of early platforms like the Atari 2600 and once-mighty commercial genres like text adventures?

        Panelists: Nick Montfort (CMS, MIT) and Jesper Juul (NYU Game Center)

5:00 – 5:15: Closing remarks

5:15 – 6:00: Cocktail reception