The Ludologist

On Tuesday March 21st, I will be keynoting at the Serious Games Summit at GDC.

The title is “Broadening Our Idea of What Games Can Be“:

It may seem that all games have goals, but a number of recent hit games have demonstrated that a game can be interesting because it has weak or non-existing goals. Hits such as the GRAND THEFT AUTO series, WORLD OF WARCRAFT, and THE SIMS may be very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform actions that do not simply work towards a single game goal. If serious games are to reach a broader audience, they must learn from recent developments in game design.

In his presentation, Juul demonstrates how weakening or removing the game goal works can make a serious game cater to a wider audience. He discusses how to open-up a game to different styles of playing, how to make it more expressive, and how to increase playing time and the variation that a game can provide. Juul also outlines several tips for when to remove or weaken the goal of a game and how to create serious games systems that can sustain the interest of a variety of different player types.

This is what I like to do these days: Work on theory that is practically useful. And having worked on the question of what a game is, I have become interested in what happens when games change and become something new, catering to new players and playing styles.

Two new journals on games out recently:

Games and Culture is the direct competitor to Game Studies and the inaugural issue is freely available (with registration.)

In the opening issue, 22 scholars are asked to answer the question “Why Game Studies Now?” I won’t focus on any particular author, but while I find the manifesto-style responses promising (manifestos are always nice), they do make me look forward to longer and more in-depth articles in future issues.

Issue 4 of The International Review of Information Ethics was edited by Elizabeth A. Buchanan and Charles Ess, and focuses on The Ethics of E-Games. This collection has a more general philosophical slant and covers some familiar (games and violence) as well as some less explored ground (cheating, general ethics of games), so worth a look as well.

BBC has made an “edition two” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. The new version has graphics. Click here to play it.

About the graphics, do they enhance the game? Discuss.

Via Intelligent Artifice, The Guardian Gamesblog features a pretty nice guide on how to defeat end-of-level bosses. Highlights:

1. Keep moving. Whatever you do, don’t stand still. Even for a second. This is the only cue an end-of-level boss needs to swipe at you with a giant fist or blast you with deadly lasers.
2. If the boss stops, panic. Bosses usually move about – when they stop it means they’re about to unleash their signature move, the aforementioned fist or laser blast.
3. Scan for weak spots. Every boss has one, sometimes more. They’re either permanently vulnerable but hard to hit, or they only become vulnerable at certain moments, usually after their signature attack.
4. The quarter rule. Keep checking the boss’s energy gauge – when there’s around a quarter left, more often than not, they’ll introduce a new attack, which throws you off-guard.

It reminds me a bit of the “How to be an evil overlord” list in that it’s an analysis of genre conventions posing as a practical guide.
OK, so it’s a list of genre conventions. But can you spot the pattern in the conventions?

Rules 2-4 all involve reversals:

• Stopping > dangerous assault.
• Seemingly invulnerable boss > weak spot.
• Terrifying attack > weak spot exposed.
• Allmost no energy > new attack introduced.

I think even Kirby’s Canvas Curse followed these conventions.

Here I am supposed to write something about that games designers should start thinking outside the box, and that these are just random conventions that could easily be changed.

But really, I think the current boss conventions work quite well because reversals are basically exciting, dramatic if you will.

Rune Klevjer has written the new DiGRA Hardcore column, about the issue of genre:

There is a curious lack of genre studies in our field, which strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity. It means that variation, tension and significant detail too easily fall below the radar of academic game studies. It also means that we are less able to bridge the gap between the very specific and the very general, and less able to describe the connections between aesthetic convention and social practice.