My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
Passage in 10 seconds, a remake of Jason Rohrer’s Passage.
My favorite part is the audience member at the end, declaring the game to be art. It’s a relevant commentary – what causes something to be “art”? There certainly needs to be an audience willing to understand it as such. And here it is.
(Via Nick Montfort.)
Jesse Schell’s “Future of Games” talk at DICE is getting a good deal of buzz and discussion.
So here are a few thoughts: The second half of Schell’s talk centers on external reward systems such as the Xbox Live achievement system, and he describes a possible future (that he appears somewhat ambivalent about) in which everything – TVs, toothbrushes, pianos, cars, schools are designed as game-like systems that constantly reward you with points for various actions. Such as, well, brushing your teeth.
Schell’s basic argument is that external rewards are an incredibly strong psychologically motivator.
Yes and no. If you think about the car that gives you points for a mundane activity such as driving fuel-efficiently, then certainly external rewards can work as a motivator.
But I think that Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.
Here’s the graph from a write-up of the results that also mentions similar studies of adults. (Expected reward = consistently receiving a reward for drawing.)
But how can that be? Aren’t rewards motivating? Not necessarily, because rewards may trick you into forgetting your original motivation. You think you like drawing, but when you are consistently showered with rewards for doing it, you start thinking that you are really in it for the rewards …
Marc LeBlanc once pointed me to the business book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. From the book description:
Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
As you can see, this is completely at odds with the argument that Schell is making. I can’t claim to be an expert on the psychology here, but it does seem that external rewards may have a kind of reversal effect: If you dislike the activity, external rewards make it more attractive, but if you like the activity, external rewards make it less attractive.
So one theory to use could be Michael Apter’s Reversal Theory, according to which we switch between telic (focused on external goals) and paratelic (focused on immediate enjoyment) states. Hence the introduction of an external reward will switch us from the paratelic state where we are enjoying a task, to the telic state where we are performing a task for external rewards.
On a more personal note: I sometimes hear of universities that want to reward researchers for publishing papers or talking to the media. This always strikes me as unpleasant because it discounts the pride that we (hopefully) have in our research. If we started to do research only for the external rewards, our productivity would surely drop.
And that, my friends, is why external rewards can be demotivating.
My former workplace, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT lab at MIT is running a Video Game Completion Marathon this weekend.
Please donate or sponsor this event for Haiti to keep the games going!
Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games was published in the Space Time Play anthology in 2007.
At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of specific video game designs. (Also evident in my Swap Adjacent paper.) I think it is important to paint the big picture, but I find it interesting to supplement this with more specific examinations of very focused topics. The big and the small pictures are then meant to supplement each other.
Variation over Time concerns the kind of early video game design where variation was provided by opening the playing field during the course of a level. Examples include Space Invaders, (Ms.) Pac-Man, Pengo, and Super Bomberman. From the paper:
My interest here is in a specific way of providing variation, the qualitative change of difficulty that is created by opening the playing field during a game level. This is a type of design where obstacles are gradually removed and the playing field becomes more open as a result. We can see this design in a number of board games (e.g. backgammon, chess, checkers), and it was a popular design in the non-scrolling action video game, most prominently in the 1980s. But for reasons I will discuss later, this design has become unusual in contemporary video games. Consider the early video game Space Invaders (Taito 1977) as a first example. (Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Space Invaders (Taito 1977)
More.
My conceptual game 4:32 from the 2010 Global Game Jam has taken on a pretty fascinating life of its own. (Blog announcement here.)
Here is Alec Meer’s post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the game was presented under the heading of “PC Gaming In 2010”. A long flame war ensued on the site, showing that some people clearly felt cheated by the game. Which they were, of course, but that sort of is the game. One commenter compares 4:32 to rickrolling and is taking the whole thing personally:
… I bet there will be many other people disappointed or outright enraged by this. This has got nothing to do with “playground attitude” as it deserves to be called out for what it is. There are good and there a bad jokes, but this one is completely off the mark.
Part of the strong reactions at Rock, Paper, Shotgun seemed to come from people who felt that the game had crossed some line by forcing them to install and uninstall plugins.
Over at Play This Thing, Greg Costikyan’s post about the game immediately led to a flame war about PC vs. console gaming.
Petri Purho also blogged about it here.
I am pretty happy with the response, but it’s also interesting to see how players interpret the game in their own way. I didn’t think it was about PC vs. console gaming, and I didn’t think that a conceptual piece like this could get people that agitated. But then again, it’s a long-standing observation that some audiences will get angry if they feel a specific “work of art” breaks the conventions they expect – and the audience may even take it as a personal insult. That wasn’t intended, but it seems I did succeed in making something that played with player expectations!
Statistics: 13.000 games played. 513 games completed. (Cheating may have been involved, but I think that’s part of the game.)
Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s 100 Thousands Billion Poems, Andrew McKenzie’s site Ten Million Sports randomly combines elements from football, polo, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, table tennis, basketball, rugby, the Kirkwall ba’ and beach volleyball … to generate new sports.
Here is one randomly generated sport (ice skates + ping-pong in Kirkwall).
Duration: 60 minutes, 3 periods of twenty minutes each.
Playing area: The town of Kirkwall in Orkney, Scotland.
Objective: To score more goals than the other side. The goals, located at both ends, are 3m wide x 0.9m high.
Players per side: 5
Attire: A helmet combo, shoulder pads, trousers, shirts, elbow pads, gloves, shin guards and ice-skates.
Ball: A polo ball: spherical, high compact plastic. Circumference: 23-27cm. Weight: 120-135g.
Method of play: The ball may only be hit with a ping-pong paddle.
This is a pretty great idea – could be interesting to try out in actuality if you managed to have all the equipment available. (We may have to renege on Kirkwall, Scotland.)
(Via Nick Montfort.)
On February 18th the NYU Game Center will be hosting a lecture by writer, programmer, and media theorist Alex Galloway on the long connection between philosophy and games.
For centuries philosophers have explored the concepts of “game” and “play,” from poet Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the “play-drive” to cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s image of “the human as player.” In this presentation we will explore the interplay between philosophy and games in these and other writers, ending with a quick introduction to the contemporary trend known as “object-oriented philosophy.”
Dr. Galloway will give a short lecture followed by an interview by Game Center Director Frank Lantz, and will then take questions from the audience.
Feb. 18, 6pm – 8pm
721 Broadway, Room 006, lower level
RSVP: gamecenter@nyu.edu
Refreshments will be served.
The 2010 Global Game Jam took place this weekend at over 100 locations around the world.
I made a small conceptual game called 4:32.
The theme of the Global Game Jam 2010 was deception, and the constraint for the time zone of the NYU Game Jam was “Rain, Spain or Plain”. This game furthermore fulfills the achievement “instant gratification” by being playable in the browser.
Without giving too much away, 4:32 is a response to Petri Purho’s game 4:33, which in itself is a response to John Cage’s silent composition 4:33.
4:32 won the vote for “most innovative game” at the NYU game jam.
Update February 21, 2010: I have changed the game a little to prevent some of the more obvious ways of cheating. (Linking to the final page, for example.)