The Home-Field Advantage

The question of why sports teams are more likely to win on their home turf … yes, it has been studied. The Boston Globe writes about it.

Prime suspects:

  • Visiting team has to travel
  • Familiarity with the field
  • Support from fans making referees partial
  • Support from fans making teams play better (this is the most commonly invoked explanation I believe – “thanks to our fans for their great support”)

Though I do recall reading about another theory that home teams tend to have higher testosterone levels implying that they somehow see themselves as “defending” their home.

All interesting because the home-field advantage is such a basic fact of sports.

The Game Apartment

Next time I buy a Manhattan apartment near Central Park, this is the architect I want to hire for the renovovation.

The apartment is quite attractive and perfectly functional in all the typical ways, and its added features remained largely unnoticed by its inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan’s bedroom, staring at dozens of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random — FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek, Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan’s name was the first word.

Co potrafią,a czego nie potrafią gry komputerowe (What computer games can and can’t do)

Peter Wojcieszuk has graciously translated my paper What computer games can and can’t do into Polish: Co potrafią,a czego nie potrafią gry komputerowe.

This paper (from 2000) was the first time I made a position statement about the need for video game theory, for a ludology.

Many of the things the paper asks for seem to have come true, but we are not exactly done (and it probably not technically possible to be done, we can just get further).

Fuel Efficiency as a Game (AKA: Games are the Poetry of Action)

The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do?

Make it a game, of course.

Wired writes on hypermilers, people who compete in getting the most mileage:

Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He’s getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He’s a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. “It’s like a videogame,” he says. “Can I beat my new high score?”

As I read it, “game” here implies all the features in my game definition, but it can also be described as an attitude, a way of seeing the activity of driving the car as an opportunity for optimizing a strategy, with the optimization in itself being pleasurable.

I have been thinking about describing it in this possibly pretentious way:

Games are the poetry of action.

Meaning: In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson), games have a focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve. Or put more simply: games are autotelic (performed for their own sake), like poetry is autotelic.

XBox Live Arcade: Digital Distribution, but without the Benefits

That was quick: Microsoft has announced that they will start removing underperforming games from XBox Live Arcade.

You would think that infinite shelf space or the long tail meant something, but apparently not. I do not understand why the game industry has to be so different from, say, Amazon? Amazon does not believe that you have to push the same 20 products to all customers, but Microsoft believes so, and casual portals also seem to believe it.

It raises some questions about the status of XBox Live Community games: Couldn’t the developer just resubmit their game as a community game (if it was written in XNA)? There seems to contradictory forces at play – opening the 360 to developers, and closing the 360 to developers.

I also wonder why there aren’t any more titles beginning with A on XBLA? It is clearly an advantage to come high in the alphabet as that brings you to the top of the browsing list. I would make a game about an aardvark.

Five years of The Ludologist

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Who would have thought?

Some little known information:

  • Blogging continues to be fun. I never had the kind of blog crisis that I hear about. The frequency varies, but there are always more things to blog.
  • The blog title is somewhat tongue in cheek, and perhaps always a little too close to Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology.org blog.
  • The title should suggest a magazine for “ludologists” the same way there is a magazine called The Economist. It was not to suggest that I am the ludologist.
  • The most popular post ever was the one with Spore screenshots.
  • The description “My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a ludologist” is supposed to sound like Alcoholics Anonymous. I liked the idea that it would be something you would be somewhat embarrassed to admit to being, but also something you could never quite escape from.
  • Until October 2007 I was running the blog on a Linux server of which I was the administrator. Now I can’t be bothered with that sort of thing.
  • I am blogging this in Singapore.
  • Video game studies are progressing nicely in my opinion, but the long tradition of play research seems to be constantly ignored.
  • It’s official: The new conflict in video game studies is between those who study players and those who study games.
  • The magic circle is for real.

Thanks for listening!

Here is the first post.

Ball Games are Dangerous

Especially in the US there is a trend towards banning school recess or at least strongly controlling what games children are allowed to play (NY Times article.) Perhaps because I am Scandinavian I find it horrifying that somebody would prevent children from playing. At the same time, the argument is complicated to make: Children are sometimes physically and emotionally hurt during play, try arguing against this with the big-picture viewpoint that it is good for their development and happiness in the long term (though I am pretty sure this is the case).

MONTVILLE, Conn. — Children at the Oakdale School here in southeastern Connecticut returned this fall to learn that their traditional recess had gone the way of the peanut butter sandwich and the Gumby lunchbox.

No longer could they let off their youthful energy — pent up from hours of long division — by cavorting outside for 22 minutes of unstructured play, or perhaps with a vigorous game of tag or dodgeball. Such games had been virtually banned by the principal, Mark S. Johnson, along with kickball, soccer and other “body-banging” activities, as he put it, where knees — and feelings — might get bruised.

Instead, children are encouraged to jump rope, play with Hula Hoops or gently fling a Frisbee. Balls are practically controlled substances, parceled out under close supervision by playground monitors.

The article does not mention the obvious gender perspective – it is usually the play activities of boys that are controlled.

For further reading – Helen B. Schwartzman’s article “Child-structured play” in The World of Play (1983) is an overview of studies of children’s unsupervised play.