The Ludologist

Plug:
A lifetime ago, I briefly worked at Deadline games programming the Mac version of a very ambitious, artsy, alternative “storytelling” game called Blackout.

Now the same Deadline Games is about to launch Total Overdose, a completely over-the-top I-don’t-give-a-damn action game where you play the role Ramiro Cruz, trying to deal with a Mexican drug cartel, blowing up lots of things and earning Tony Hawk-style combo bonuses in the process.

Not quite on the same page as their earlier games, but then you don’t need to be.

http://www.totaloverdose.com

The Spore website has been launched.

I still don’t see Spore becoming as big as the Sims, but I really, really want to play it.

Read the Will Wright interview at Wired news.

Workshop at IT-University of Copenhagen
Friday 20th and Saturday 21st of May 2005

?THE THIRD PLACE? – COMPUTER GAMES AND OUR CONCEPTION OF THE REAL

Computer games have become a dominant influence in modern culture, and are set to gain an ever increasing importance in the years to come. This development gives rise to a number of questions. Among these is the question how computer games challenge and affect traditional conceptions of what it is for something to be real.

The aim of the workshop is to initiate a discussion between computer games researchers and philosophers on this question: What is the ontological status of the objects and events in a computer game, and how do they relate to objects and events outside of the game? On the one hand, an answer to this question must recognize that objects and events in computer games are real in some sense. On the other hand, it must also recognize that they are not real in quite the same sense as objects and events outside of the game are. To accommodate the reality of these objects and events, we need to consider our conception of the real as such.

The workshop is open to everyone, and interested parties that are unable to attend are encouraged to notify the organizers if they are interested in possible collaboration or information about future initiatives.

Program:

Friday

09.30 Games in Virtual Environments: Towards a Virtual Ontology of Games
Prof. Espen Aarseth

10.30 What is Real?
Prof. Olav Asheim

11.30 Framing the Ludic Commons – Cooperation and Conflict in Multiplayer
Games
Ph.d. Candidate Jonas Heide Smith

12.00 Lunch

13.00 Reality and Mimesis: Aristotle on Computer Games
Ass. Prof. Hallvard Fossheim

14.00 Discipline Reloaded: Players, Game Design, and Technologies of Power
Ph.D. Candidate Miguel Sicart

15.00 The Half-Reality of Games
Ass. Prof Jesper Juul

16.00 Possible Worlds and Real Worlds in Interaction? Semiotic ?Transworld? Perspectives
Prof. Patrick J. Coppock

Saturday

10.00 The Myth of the Real in Gran Turismo
Ph.d. Candidate Charlie Breindahl

11.00 Real or Virtual? Does it Matter for My Spatial Orientation?
Ph.D. Candidate Anita Leirfall

12.00 Lunch

13.00 Challenge-perspectives on Games
Ph.d. candidate Sara Mosberg Iversen

14.00 Interpretation, Interaction and the Anchoring of the Real
Ph.D. Candidate John Richard Sageng

15.00 Notes for a Phenomenological Ontology of Virtual Worlds
Ph.D. Candidate Tarjei Mandt Larsen

16.00 Plenary discussion

The workshop will be held at seminar room 3A14 on the IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 K?benhavn. It is a collaboration between Filosofisk Prosjektsenter in Oslo, Center for Computer Games Research, ITU and Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo.

I have very conflicting feelings about the Xbox 360.
At a deep emotional level, I don’t want Microsoft to succeed as they are a big annoying faceless company – I instinctively much prefer that things work out for Sony, the other big annoying faceless company or Nintendo. Also, Sony and Nintendo are Japanese – what other reasons do you need?

Design
This time around, Microsoft hired actual designers to create the console.
But the screenshots from new Xbox live are quite ugly. Microsoft has all the resources in the world, yet they always make odd-looking UI designs. Did anybody ever say, “I really like the default theme in Windows XP”?

Online
Judging from what was published and the “leaked” developer video, the online and IM component is going to be big, and rightly so. Nothing can ever beat playing with your friends or chatting with your friends. But are we all going to have USB keyboards plugged in?

Backwards compatibility
And backwards compatibility is still unclear. As has been suggested, this is probably because MS has a somewhat working emulator, but is unsure how good they can make it, how perfect it has to be, or what effect it will have on sales. Even with 99% or so compatibility, weird bugs may still pop up on emulated games due to timing differences. I think they need it, because it is still quite early in the life cycle of the Xbox.
Update May 17th: The 360 will be “backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games“. It doesn’t work all too well apparently, but it is being tweaked to work with selected titles.

Media Center
Game Girl Advance is raving about using the 360 as a media center. Here, I am not so sure. It’s part of the convergence story that we have been force-fed for the last decade, and both the PS2 and the Xbox 1 had DVD-playing capabilities, but it ended up being not such big a deal.
The 360 could be a great media center if MS really went as far the modding community, but I suspect that several things will hold them back: Will MS sell you a console with network playing of all the 15 variations of the Divx codec, QuickTime, mp3, ogg? Or will they only accept Windows Media files and only with DRM? Will you be able to upload your own python scripts? Probably not.
Sony has been trying this already with the PSX (PS2 with more multimedia capabilities).

The HD Era
The way Allard was selling the console at GDC, with us now entering “The High Definition TV Era” is horrible. I can only assume they had lots of scriptwriters working on the best catchline, and that this was the worst they could come up with. “The Xbox 360. It has more pixels”.

We are all semi-doomed
The HD Era adds to the feeling of impending doom: Game budgets will skyrocket once again, and judging from the complete lack of imagination in the announced 360 titles, nothing will ever happen again, it’s all master chief and exploding cars the rest of our days.

And yet – MS hints at downloadable “pilots” and episodic content. This really could be a break that allowed for smaller budget projects to get to the end consumer. Depending on how controlled the channel is going to be.
Is this the alternative distribution system that we are crying for?
Perhaps the more general problem is that the developers of the “medium” (hardware) lose money on the machines and make it on the software, and for that reason prevent non-licensed developers from making content for it. Like if the makers of your DVD machine controlled what DVDs could be made. Not good.

I also really wish that the console makers would realize that the gaming community is absolutely international and that region coding is absolutely evil. Katamari Damacy is not out in Europe, and I am shuffling boot discs and inserting weird plastic things into my PS2 in order to play my US and Japanese imports.

My big dream scenario is that someone makes an Xbox 360 / PS3 / Nintendo Revolution game called “The Indie Game Channel”. This is a physical DVD product that comes with a few games, but also lets you to download and play quirky, independent games at 15$ a piece. Now, that would make me happy.

[Update May 20th: Anandtech has acquired many more details about the Xbox 360 as a media center, downloadable games and so on.]

If you are in the neighborhood:

We are having an informal research seminar this Friday in Auditorium 2, the IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen S.

10:15-10:30: Welcome
10:30-11:00: Sara Mosberg Iversen (ITU): “Challenges, motivation, fun & games”
11:00-11:30: Espen Aarseth (ITU): “Quest theory: an introduction”

11:30-11:45: Break

11:45-12:15: Andreas Gregersen (Film and Media Science, University of Copenhagen): ?Cutscenes, Camera and Action: Halo, Half Life 2, Ninja Gaiden and Jade Empire?

12:15-13:15: Lunch

13:15-13:45: Jesper Juul (ITU): “Without a goal”
13:45-14:15: S?ren Svendsen (Film and Media Science, University of Copenhagen): “Japanese and Western Games”

14:15-14:30: Break

14:30-15:00: Jonas Heide Smith (ITU): “Homo Ludens Vs. Homo Economicus – may the best approximation win”

From BBC News:

Apparently an art collector in Tokyo couldn’t decide between selling a collection via Christie’s or Sotheby’s, so he asked them to play Scissors, Paper, Stone [rock, paper, scissors] for the right to sell the collection.

Sotheby’s reluctantly accepted this as a 50/50 game of chance, but Christie’s asked the experts, Flora and Alice, 11-year-old daughters of the company’s director of Impressionist and modern art, and aficionados of the game.

They explained their strategy:

1. Stone is the one that “feels” the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors first

Sure enough, the novices at Sotheby’s went for paper, and Christie’s scissors got them an enormously lucrative cut.

Without any data to back it up, I also think that stone is played more often because it feels “strong”, but apart from that I think the only consistent thing about rps/sps is that we all believe for a second that we can peer into the mind of our opponent. Don’t we?

Going to Bristol tomorrow to speak at University of West England.

I can’t make it to the bigger event in Bristol, Playful Subjects on May 13th/14th.

Also not going to the Board Game Studies colloquium in Oxford April 27th-30th. The latter is one of those things – we video game people do like to pretend that we made up everything about studying games, but there is another older and parallel field of game studies that we should get more in touch with.
David Parlett will be talking about What are the rules of a game and who authorises them? What sorts of rules are there, how can they best be expressed, and how do they get to be changed? A core question, indeed.
How do we enable more cooperation and communication with the non-digital games people?