The Ludologist

It is that time of the year, so I will probably be quite quiet the next two weeks.

It’s been a good year for gaming. Some things that stood out for me:

• More student projects becoming commercial titles and gaining recognition (such as GAMBIT’s own CarneyVale). We are becoming better at setting up a concrete link from theory to practice.
• Indie games becoming mainstream. Meaning: There is a wider recognition that a low-budget game can have something special to offer, something that is not offered by big-budget games. World of Goo is a great example.
• The Wii, Rock Band and other “casual” titles continue to reach a broader audience.
• And I finished a book about that, should come out in the summer.
• But the downloadable casual games channel is becoming less and less profitable for developers.
• More than half of the US adult population is playing video games. Media panics over video games should become more obviously ridiculous for everyone involved.

Happy Holidays to everyone! Happy Gaming!

The Video Game Theory Reader 2 is here, edited by Bernard Perron and Mark Wolf.

My own piece is Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games. You can read my piece here, but get the book (Amazon US, Amazon UK), of course – lots of interesting articles.

• Foreword – Tim Skelly
• Introduction – Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf
• Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the 21st Century – Eric Zimmerman
• Philosophical Game Design – Lars Konzack
• The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form – David Myers
• Embodiment and Interface – Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal
• Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences – Aki Jarvinen
• In the Frame of the Magic Cycle: The Circle(s) of Gameplay – Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron
• Understanding Digital Playability – Sebastien Genvo
• Z-axis Development in the Video Game – Mark J. P. Wolf
• Retro Reflexivity: La-Mulana, an 8-Bit Period Piece – Brett Camper
• “This is Intelligent Television”: Early Video Games & Television in the Emergence of the Personal Computer – Sheila C. Murphy
• Too Many Cooks: Media Convergence and Self-Defeating Adaptations – Trevor Elkington
• Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games – Jesper Juul
• Between Theory and Practice: The GAMBIT Experience – Clara Fernandez-Vara, Neal Grigsby, Eitan Glinert, Philip Tan, and Henry Jenkins
• Synthetic Worlds as Experimental Instruments – Edward Castronova, Mark W. Bell, Robert Cornell, James J. Cummings, Matthew Falk, Travis Ross, Sarah B. Robbins and Alida Field
• Lag, Language, & Lingo: Theorizing Noise in Online Game Spaces – Mia Consalvo
• Getting into the Game: Doing Multi-Disciplinary Game Studies – Frans Mayra

You may be aware of Penn & Teller’s unreleased Desert Bus game, wherein you have to drive a bus the complete 8-hour realtime trip between Tucson and Las Vegas.

Since the bus veers to the right, and since there is no pause or save function, this may be the most boring game in the world.

And yet … isn’t there something fascinating about it? Some kind of pure gameness?

Desert Bus for Hope is a charity event in which participants play Desert Bus non-stop, while onlookers can give donations to keep the bus going. At the time of writing, the game has been played for 4 days and 15 hours, with $56.000 collected – the money goes to the Child’s Play charity.

Had I been American, I would have described this as “awesome”.

From the contemporary British spoof 1980’s educational TV program Look Around You, here’s an introduction to computer games:

I find its distortions eerily accurate – the crazy assumptions about what would be the future of games and technology; the “graphics are very realistic”; the seriousness of the interviewer; the synthesizer music; the zany games (UK games were very zany at the time).

(Via Kevin Driscoll.)

I am speaking at University at Buffalo on Monday the 10th at 6:30.

Location: 112 Center for the Arts, North Campus

More details here.