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.
We can discuss why, but Sarah Palin is a popular choice for games this election season.
The Palin as President game (or game-like-thing) takes a grim view of things.
More lighthearted, here is the Palin Bingo game that I played with the locals at the vice presidential debate.
We shall know them by their games.
Apparently the Obama campaign is placing ads in Burnout Paradise.
(From GigaOM.)
Fascinating, but I also find the whole idea of in-game ads a little disturbing. Imagine playing Lumines with commercials – I could be made to buy anything.
I have been posting a bit slowly lately because I am finalizing my book on “casual games”, meaning downloadable casual games / Wii / Guitar Hero / Rock Band.
And I am looking for good photos of people playing these games!
If you have some that you would be happy to see in my book, please send me a line at:
j at jesperjuul dot net
Thanks!
At least if you play Brain Age, according to a Scottish study.
The report describes how children who were instructed to play Brain Age for 30 minutes every day improved their math skills faster than children having normal class during that time.
Here’s the graph:
It’s the kind of result we want to hear, isn’t it?
For a while I have been saying that “The Sun Always Shines in Casual Games”: Casual games, especially the downloadable ones, have tended to be colorful and bright, with a weather that was always good, with themes that were always cheerful.
Righteous Kill breaks with that: It is a hidden object game, but this time your job is to find a serial killer.
About time – after all, we can find lots of dark themes, tragedy, and murders in mainstream entertainment as well as in the entertainment for the presumed female audience of casual games.
The game seems to be doing reasonably well, so perhaps we will be seeing more thematic variation in the future.
(There have been detective and mystery casual games before, but Righteous Kill is a lot darker than other games I have seen.)
The previous post discussed indie games as being the punk rock of video games. I chained this to the “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt that Jonny Rotten apparently wore once. And I said that we should wear “I Hate World of Warcraft” t-shirts.
But really, what is the Pink Floyd of video games? What should the t-shirt say; what games should we hate?
I take it the late 1970’s objection to Pink Floyd was that they were rather pretentious, stodgy, had too big and expensive sets. I am a big fan but I see the point. So what is the Pink Floyd of video games?
The obvious line of attack is to go for the good big-budget titles on grounds of their big budgets and hardcore sensibilities:
On the other hand, Pink Floyd was always in somewhat “good taste”, which would lead us to an attack on exactly the games considered to be good taste:
What is the Pink Floyd of video games? (You don’t have to really hate it, just bring out your inner punk!) What should the t-shirt say?
According to rock lore, John Lydon aka Jonny Rotten of the Sex Pistols once wore an I Hate Pink Floyd t-shirt.
The standard interpretation is that the world at the time was full of symphonic (aka progressive) rock bands, Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, doing massive concerts and overly pretentious, long and elaborate songs …
… and so the stage was set for Punk music, the songs of which were short, had low production cost, and which wrestled music from the claws of big corporations.
And this is my small comment on Braid in the Wall Street Journal: Indie video games are like punk rock, short, low production costs, wrestling our art from the claws of big corporations.
And we really should be wearing “I hate World of Warcraft” t-shirts.
Who would have guessed that the subject line and the following quote was from an 1895 review of Stewart Culin’s book Korean Games?
The subject of games, especially the games of children, has been generally regarded as beneath the dignity of real scientific treatment. They have been indulgently regarded as trivial pastimes, or, at best, as amusements only.
A quite different presentment of their significance is advanced in the work before us. The author, drawing most of his information from fresh and unpublished sources, describes ninety-seven games played by the youth of Korea, or by those of older years who retain the love of festal occupations.
(Science, N. 8 Vol. II. No 49. 1895)
It just struck me because 1) it is the kind of thing that we keep on saying – games have not been taken seriously and now we should, but 2) I rarely feel I have to defend the study of games anymore. (But perhaps I travel in the wrong circles?)