When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning he found that he had been transformed in his bed into a little red robot

This product is one of the most uncanny things I have seen. The ConnectR is for visiting people while you are somewhere else, by way of a small red circular robot that you can remote control, and which transmits sound and video.

The parallels to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are unbearable. You have been transformed into a small robot, and people will view you as such.

ConnectR

What would you use it for? According to the materials:

  • Participate in family moments even though you’re working late
  • On a business trip? Read your kids a story and see their faces light up

Fun and awkwardness ensues when everybody is seated at the table, but dad is stuck on the floor.
“Dad is busy, but he is visiting us as a vacuum-like red robot. Don’t step on him.”

It is such a downer to be the only avatar in the room.

Setting up rules so that all parties have the incentives to act in the way the designer prefers

Another year, another Nobel Prize in economics that sounds immediately relevant to multiplayer game design.

Quoting Steven Levitt’s description of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson’s work awarded:

The prize was “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, or parent can set up rules so that all parties involved have the incentives to act in the way that the planner/manager/parent prefers. This Nobel is not for the idea that you can design incentives this way, but rather for coming up with ingenious proofs that simplify the task of proving that, indeed, all parties have the right incentives — a task that can turn out to be awfully difficult.

That is, I am sure it is relevant, but my personal experience with game theory is that anything more complicated than the prisoner’s dilemma tends to become so fantastically complicated that designers just design from their own intuitions anyway.

Is anybody actually using game theory for designing video games?

New Paper Posted: A Certain Level of Abstraction

I have posted my conference paper from September’s DiGRA 2007 conference in Tokyo:

The paper A Certain Level of Abstraction discusses abstraction in games. This is the paper’s abstract:

ABSTRACT

This paper explores levels of abstraction: Representational games present a fictional world, but within that world, players are only allowed to perform certain actions; the fictional world of the game is only implemented to a certain detail.

The paper distinguishes between abstraction as a core element of video game design, abstraction as something that the player decodes while playing a game, and abstraction as a type of optimization that the player builds over time.

Finally, the paper argues that abstraction is a related to the magic circle of games and to rules as such.

Games referenced include Cooking Mama, Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, Karate Champ and The Marriage.

The paper is a bit of a follow-up to some of the rules & fiction discussions in Half-Real – you think you are finished, but you are not.

http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/acertainlevel/

List of IGF 2008 Entrants

The Independent Games Festival has published their list of entrants for the 2008 competition. This is the 10th IGF.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that indie and experimental games have gained a lot of popular attention during the last 2-3 years.

Just 2 years ago I felt that indie games were perceived as “games with low production values”, but now it seems to be more accepted that they can provide something unique, a special sensibility.

Perhaps it relates to new distribution methods. Student project gets massive publicity, becomes PS3 downloadable (flow). Quirky indie game is sold on XBLA (Eets, Space Giraffe).

With casual games and downloadable console games, we have a distribution method and economical model for smaller games.

Service Restored

After my server had a complete hard drive failure Saturday, it looks like I now have all sites and blogs up and running again.

This marks the point in time after which I no longer find it interesting to administer my own Linux server.

The time I save will be spent playing games, I promise.

Echochrome

Echochrome was probably the game of Tokyo Game Show that I found the most compelling. If you haven’t read about it, it’s all about rotating the world in order to create Escher-like optical illusions which then actually work.

Echochrome

Hard to say why, but the 2d games of the show looked great on high-definition screens. Seriously. Echochrome and LocoRoco – not sure if they justify a PS3 and a 40 inch TV, but we are getting there.