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.

Keynoting at the Game Philosophy Conference in Potsdam

This week I am keynoting at the Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Potsdam, May 8-10.

My talk is Who Made the Magic Circle? Seeking the Solvable Part of the Game-Player Problem.

If the early days of game studies concerned the issue of games and stories, recent discussions appear to be focused on the issue of games and players. This is a discussion of methods and of the object of study: Should we discuss players or should we discuss games? There are two possible perspectives on this: The common “segregationist” perspective implies that games are structures separate from players, structures that players can subsequently subvert. In this talk, I will make the case for an alternative “integrationist” perspective wherein games are chosen and upheld by players, and where players will happily create formal rule systems and boundaries around the playing activity.
I will argue that the question of games and players must therefore be decomposed into a set of smaller problems, each of which must be answered with different methods.

It’s a meta-talk! Looking forwards to the conference.

The use of video game metaphors in contemporary fiction

Not a survey of the question, but I have been reading Junot Díaz‘ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose title character is, of course, a geek in every way. What is special is how this matter-of-factly spills into the narrator’s use of video game (and role-playing game)  references for illustration:

When the young Beli meets the man later known as The Gangster, she:

Shrieked: No. Me. Toques. … Then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive rapiers, and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed on of the great Street Fighter chain attacks of all time.

Later, when Trujillo is assasinated we hear:

Shot at twenty-seven times – what a Dominican Number – and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps towards his birthplace, San Cristóbal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time.