The Ludologist

It never ceases to surprise me how various mundance practicalities can end up having important implications for game design. Here’s an article on breaking into the Chinese market:

“The game has to be Internet-cafe friendly, and people are smoking all the time in those cafes,” Needham said. “You have to set it up so they can play the game with one hand on the mouse and one holding a cigarette.”

I admit that I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Puzzle Pirates is the well-deserved winner of this year’s Webby Awards.

One of the nice things about the game is that Three Rings have shown 1) that the interesting thing about a multiplayer game is not the amazing 3d or the big swords, but the interaction with other players, and 2) that coherence is overrated. So the swordfights are not button-mashing or rolls of dice – it’s just battling it out in a falling block puzzle. Much better. Harrr!

Clive Thompson interviews Edward Castronova. It’s a story of a dull academic career accidentally turned interesting by a paper on EverQuest. I can relate – if it weren’t for game studies, it’s unlikely that I’d be in academia, and just as unlikely that I would have bothered to finish my MA.

Hey, Hey 16K is curious little British flash piece circulating the net.
It touches precisely on the weird excuses peoples were using for buying home computers in the 80’s – homework, doing the household accounts. Of course none of this came to be, but oh! the games.
(Saw this on the Digiplay mailing list.)

All the screenshots are from the ZX Spectrum (Timex Sinclair to Americans), but how do I know this? -From colour clashes! The Spectrum’s high-res graphics mode worked such that each 8×8 pixel area on the screen could contain a total of two different colors. Thus, it was easy enough to have a red ghost and a blue ghost on their own, but the moment they started to overlap, you’d have weird colour clashes where part of the blue ghost turned red and vice versa. Most of the screenshots in the piece exhibit loads of colour clashes (and I think you can tell the resolution is 256×200 rather than 320×200 of the C64).
Towards the end, Sir Clive Sinclair makes a cameo appearance and the familiy that sings the song is remade in glorious colour clash style.

Which of the games shown have stood the test of time? Gonzalo Frasca votes for Manic Miner. I must admit that I find big games like Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and Elite to be basically unplayable today, but the earlier and much simpler Jet Pac is still worth a quick play.

Two days of a game design research symposium coming up, this time closer to home, at the ITU in Copenhagen.

I won’t exactly be live-blogging (which I still consider quite odd), but there should be some interesting talks to comment on.

The symposium should to some extent answer Chris Crawford’s recent Ivory tower column where he criticizes academic game research for not coming up with anything useful for game designers.
The first answer to his claim is that this symposium should prove him wrong. The second answer is that direct industry applicability just never is going to be the only stick by which academic game research can be measured. Some times we just will be going off on a limb, trying to answer basic philosophical questions that do not matter much in the actual design phase.
And then of course, when the philosophical questions and the game design issues go hand in hand, it’s music.

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Crawford also discusses C.P. Snow’s point about the two cultures, and painting with the big brush he claims that science and humanities get along better in Europe than in the U.S. (which I am not entirely convinced is true) and that European academics are less inclined to work with business (which is true).

Crawford is surely right about the two cultures, and the division just never seems to go away. Even at the IT University which is supposed to be strictly cross-disciplinary, I continue to meet computer science people who wouldn’t dream of learning anything about any kind of humanities field, and humanities people who would rather die laughing than spend a few minutes reading anything about science.
And even after all these years, the voice of my humanities training still tries to tell me that reading Scientific American, Edge or anything about CPU architecture is basically naughty.
The really odd aspect of the two cultures is that there is no particular reason why we would have that split?

I previously mentioned satirical Norwegian online games, but this one is right in the middle of an authentic controversy.

Background story: One of Norway’s famous inhabitants is Mullah Krekar, former leader of the Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam. Since he has been acquitted for the charges brought against him, it’s unclear what the man has actually done, but he really is an out there totalitarian fundamentalist with some dubious friends. (Which is, of course, not a crime.)

Mullah Krekar has recently published an autobiography, and during a debate, the (female) Norwegian-Pakistani stand-up comedian Shabana Rehman performed a stunt of picking up the big man and proclaiming that if she could pick him up like that, he couldn’t be posing a danger to the country.

Krekar did not find this funny. So he has sued Rehman for “bodily violation” (no, I don’t think he will win the case).

Here’s the lift the mullah-game, Jeg bare Tulla, Krekar. [Krekar, I’m only joking.]

The goal of the game is to lift Krekar by clicking the mouse as fast as possible. (“Klikk som en gal Mullah p? musa!” [Click the mouse like a mad mullah.])

Update: Jill points to another lift the mullah game.
And yet another Krekar game.

I don’t think Krekar finds the games funny either. So this touches on some genuine issues of fundamentalism, terrorism, cultural sensitivities, and freedom of speech.

English language article in Aftenposten.

PS. The game is pretty bad of course, but I wonder why all satirical games tend to end up being jokes about the game format as well? Why is it hard to do a satirical game that is also a plainly good game?