Bernie DeKoven’s FunLog

Turns out that Bernie DeKoven, author of The well-Played Game (mostly about physical group games) has his own blog, “Bernie DeKoven’s FunLog“.

Today’s post is “Why do people want to spend their time “killing” each other as a pastime?”

“Major Fun responds:

– we play war because we need to play with it – there’s no other way to integrate such an awful reality into our understanding of the world. it is too ugly, too irrational, too stupid for us to grasp in any other way.

– we know we’re not really hurting anyone or anything, we know that we can’t really die, and without that knowledge, we couldn’t have fun

– we can trust each other if we all know that we’re trying to kill each other, that the very worst in us is not hidden or subsumed by any other attempts at being human, so when we meet, we can meet above all that

– it is remarkably clear, war imagery. we don’t have to worry about double-meanings, about the “real” agenda. nothing else is as vivid. no interpretation required

– play fighting is fun, as long as it is play. it’s a very basic form of play, in all playing animals. it’s safer and clearer than sex play, but in many ways, even more intimate”

Nice to see one of the classic non-electronic games people blogging.

A parent’s primer to computer slang

Microsoft has published a hilariously serious introduction to “computer slang”.

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher it is important as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically?creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Another page discusses “10 tips for dealing with griefers“:

Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that a kid near you has been bothered by one of these ne’er-do-wells at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find fun in embarrassing and pushing around others.

Not sure what to think about this – it’s all completely earnest and actually useful for the uninitiated, but just with a 1950’s innocence and Microsoft blue colors in the menus. What has the world come to?

Digital Arts & Culture 2005 in Copenhagen

The ITU (and more specifically Lisbeth Klastrup & Susana Tosca) is hosting the Digital Arts & Culture 2005 conference on December 1st-3rd.

www.itu.dk/DAC2005
(Note that for various reasons, the DAC in the URL must be in CAPITALS.)

Jill has already written a nostalgic piece on the history of the conference, so I will just say that DAC 1998 was the first real academic conference for me (speaking and all), and for that I will always have a soft spot for it.

DAC also embodied a shift between DAC 2000 and DAC 2003 where video games began as a sideshow to hypertext, virtual reality, convergence and other things we knew to be the future, and in a few years time became the dominant thing that people discussed. For good reason.

Patent Madness: Yahoo Owns the Patent for Initiating a Game from an Instant Messenger

Behold Yahoo’s US patent 6,699,125:

… The game server includes logic to operate a multiplayer game using inputs from and outputs to an active game set of game clients, wherein game clients other than those in the active game set can join an active game by supplying the game server with a reference to the active game. Additionally, logic is included for coupling a game client to a messenger client to allow the game client to send the messenger client data used to initiate joining a game, whereby a message sent by the messenger client includes the data used to initiate joining a game.

Now, apart from the complete blatant obviousness of this idea – use an instant messenging system to initiate a game – I think the amount of prior art for this one is staggering.
Just in my own small part of the world, people were discussing this idea as early as 1997, and browsing through my own emails, I can see I first implemented a program quite similar to the patent in early 1999. They applied for the patent in 2001. I am sure thousands of other people have done the same, much earlier.

So obviously Yahoo is sueing some former employees for infringing this patent.

The good news recently was that the European Union has postponed a decision to implement software patents here, but we are not immune to the effects of the US Patent office. (And I believe the European Patent Office has already awarded software-like patents.)

I should say that I am not particularly anti-patent, but a patent system is never better than its implementation – obviousness and prior art have to matter.

This madness has to stop.

Gaute Godager of Funcom at the ITU, Friday February 4th

We had a visit from the Eve Online people last week, this week is the Anarchy Online talk by Gaute Godager of Funcom:

Friday February 4th 2005, at 16:15.
IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen s, Auditorium 2.

In this talk, Gaute Goadger will document the basic driving forces of a social game, like a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG), from a modern psychological perspective.

This lecture will not delve heavily into a scientific perspective, but rather have a laid-back and hopefully entertaining discussion of our experiences from making online games, specifically Anarchy-Online the critically acclaimed Funcom MMOG title.

The lecture will focus on the interaction between game design, social engineering (community design), programming and having fun!

Will Wright interview at The Onion AV

Really interesting interview with Will Wright at The Onion’s AV Club (no, it’s not a parody.)

I realized at the end of SimAnt that the simulation we built for the ants was almost more intelligent than for the guy, because the guy was being done using traditional programming, whereas the ants were done using this distributed environmental intelligence of the pheromone trails. I began wondering, could we build a more robust simulation of human behavior if we adopted this ant model, where we distribute the intelligence not through the agents, but through the environment?

(Via Robin.)

Inhumane Punishment: No Video Games in Prison

From CNN.
The US state of Missouri has banned all video games in the state’s prisons. Why? Because inmates had been playing violent video games.

In prison, inmates should “pick up skills and abilities that will allow them to go back out into society and be productive citizens,” Blunt said. “Playing video games doesn’t have anything to do with either of those objectives.”

Hmm. I always thought one of the most terrifying aspects of prison was the sheer boredom at such a place. No video games, this is just too inhumane & heartless.