The Ludologist

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?

The Philadelphia Inquirer mentions ludology in a news story on video games and learning. People quoted: James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Justin Hall, Greg Lastowka. (I.e. US-centric, but never mind.)

I guess the use of ludology without any references is an indication that the word is now mainstream. Yup.

I will be posting some more detailed few things about Japan, GDC, and games in general in the following days, but as a quick warmup, here’s a picture of a Japanese women’s magazine:

It’s much like the example of the “narrative” clothing section at Nordstrom, and the question is this: What makes it an attractive idea that your life would be like a story? I guess it is a content-oriented view of story – a story consists of meaningful and interesting events. Buying the Nordstrom clothes or the Story magazine means that your life won’t just be “one damn thing after another”, but a series of interesting and important events.

And it’s true that many games (like life sometimes) consist mostly of not-too-meaningful events, too much drudgery and too few things really interesting. Some of the game/story discussion comes from this.