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A Casual Revolution and the Future of Video Games
If you are in New York City, please join me for the book launch and panel debate for A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
6:00pm – 8:30pm
Tisch school of the Arts, room 006
721 Broadway
New York, NY
In this evening of debate, Jesper Juul (New York University Game Center) will introduce the new book, followed by a panel discussion on the rise of casual games and the future of video games. The panel consisting of Mia Consalvo (MIT, author of Cheating), Nick Fortugno (Playmatics, formerly Gamelab) and Wade Tinney (Large Animal) will discuss topics such as:
- What are casual games, and where did they come from?
- Are casual games saving video games from cultural ghettoization, or are they preventing video games from dealing with serious themes?
- Are traditional gamers right to feel threatened by casual games?
- Do game developers have an obligation to make games for everybody?
- How should video game studies deal with new game forms and different types of players?
Refreshments will be served. Hope you can make it!
[Update: The event podcast can be downloaded here.]
Three Ways of Playing
Jamin Brophy-Warren writes about New Super Mario Bros for the Wii.
And refers to some of my thoughts from A Casual Revolution, on playing to win vs. playing to keep the game interesting vs. playing to manage the social consequences:
“Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU’s newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game – that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you’ll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor – what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates.”
Social Network Game Genres
Farmville reached 65 million users in November, so something major is happening. Video games continue to reach a broader audience and be available in more places.
… but social games do seem to have gelled into some distinct genres. From Virtual Shackles:
Podcast Interview in the Another Castle Series
Game Design Advance has posted a podcast interview with me as part of the Another Castle series.
The interview, here, is about the state and history of video game studies as well as a dive into some of the concepts from Half-Real.
Other interviewees in the Another Castle series include Frank Lantz, Anna Anthropy, Greg Trefry and Richard Rouse III.
The Art History of Games Conference
The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form. Speakers include Ian Bogost, Brenda Brathwaite, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Henry Lowood, Christiane Paul, John Romero, and more.
Also featured in the conference is the premiere of three commissioned art games, from Jason Rohrer, Tale of Tales, and Eric Zimmerman. The designers will exhibit their work and participate in the symposium.
Organized by Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta, the symposium will be held Feb. 4-6 in the High Museum of Art’s Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., in midtown Atlanta.
Register by January 5 for reduced rates.
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The flyer:
The High Def Illusion
I continue to feel that the focus on High-Definition graphics in some newer consoles (PS3/360) is a little misguided for a simple reason: Many people cannot tell the difference between standard and high definition. Anecdotally, I have seen video game designers with 360 consoles running in standard definition, and I find that few viewers can accurately tell whether a given console or television channel is in high-def or not.
In the paper The emperor’s clothes in high resolution: An experimental study of the framing effect and the diffusion of HDTV, a group of Dutch researchers demonstrate that users will experience a standard definition signal as being of higher quality if they are told that it is high definition. Hence the idea of high definition will apparently override the quality of the television signal itself.
I also discuss the role of graphics and high definition in A Casual Revolution, noting that while graphical quality matters, and while all consoles will eventually be high-def, technical graphical quality just doesn’t translate directly into improved user experience…
Game Studies, issue 09/02
The new issue 09/02 of Game Studies is out.
Contents
The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games
by Gerald Voorhees
Abstract
This essay examines the cultural politics of the Final Fantasy series of computer roleplaying games. It advances an approach to games criticism that supplements Bogost’s procedural method with a thoroughly contextual approach to rhetorical criticism. By accounting for the narrative, visual and procedural representations in various iterations of the series, this essay argues that Final Fantasy games can also be understood as toys that allow players to experiment with different responses to cultural difference.
http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/voorhees
———
Moral Decision Making in Fallout
by Marcus Schulzke
Abstract
Many open world games give players the chance to make moral choices, but usually the differences between good and evil paths through a game are slight. In order for moral choices in games to be meaningful they must be fairly calculated and have significant consequences. The Fallout series is one of the best examples of how to give players thoughtful moral problems and multiple paths to resolving them. This essay looks at the series, and Fallout 3 in particular, as examples of how moral choice can be incorporated into video games. One of the oldest fears about art is that it may corrupt observers and lead them to immorality – a criticism that has resurfaced with attacks on video games. Fallout 3 does the opposite. It encourages players to think about the morality of their actions in the virtual world, thereby teaching them the practical wisdom that Aristotle considered essential to being a moral actor.
http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/schulzke
———
Cheesers, Pullers, and Glitchers: The Rhetoric of Sportsmanship and the Discourse of Online Sports Gamers
by Ryan M. Moeller, Bruce Esplin, Steven Conway
Abstract
In this article, we examine online sports gamers’ appeals to fair play and sportsmanship in online forums maintained by game developers. These online discussions serve to document and police acceptable behavior and gameplay for the larger community of game players and to stimulate innovation in game development, especially in online ranking systems.
http://gamestudies.org/0902/articles/moeller_esplin_conway
———–
World of Warcraft: Service or Space?
by Adam Ruch
Abstract
This article seeks to explore the relationship between the concept of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft in legal terms, in Blizzard’s End-User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use (TOU), and the concept of the game as conceived by the players of the game. Blizzard present their product as a service, and themselves as a service provider, in the EULA/TOU. Meanwhile, the product itself seems to be more akin to a space or place, which subjective players move about in. This conflict is essentially a difference between a passive viewer accessing certain content within a range available to him, and an individual who inhabits a space and acts within that space as an agent. The meaning of this subjectivity-in-space (or denial of the same) problematizes the relationship Blizzard has with its customers, and the relationships between those customers and Blizzard’s product.
An evolution of the governance of these spaces is inevitable. Where Castronova and Lessig’s answers differ, their basic assertion that the virtual political landscape can and will change seems clear. These changes will be influenced by the values placed on the social capital generated within the spaces themselves. The identities as per Turkle, Koster, and Dibble are human identities. Arguments as to why we should pay attention to synthetic worlds have been made by these authors already, so this article seeks to actually pay that attention. This is one practical example of the work that must be done around synthetic/virtual worlds, which directly affects tens of millions of people.