The Ludologist

Here’s a funny one: The new Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life movie is doing not too well at the box office. Paramount pictures have the perfect explanation for this:

“The only thing we can attribute that to is that the gamers were not happy with the latest version of the ‘Tomb Raider’ video game, which is our core audience,” Paramount distribution president Wayne Lewellen said.

Thinking about the previous post:
When I initially began working with computer game theory, it was always easier for me when somebody violently criticized me than when they actually agreed. It seemed kind of awkward when somebody had actually been influenced by something I’d written or said. I am not as manically focused on antagonism these days, but there still are some fuzzy boundaries between 1) what should be a clear reference, 2) what is something that has become a common meme, and 3) what is an idea that is so obvious that everybody has come up with it on their own.
I recently reviewed a paper whose main point was essentially identical to a posting I had made on a mailing list – the author was also on the mailing list. I still don’t know whether it was 1) plagiarism, 2) an idea I had launched into the world that sailed of on its own, or 3) me overestimating my own ingenuity. And I still don’t know how to decide.

Who says theory is boring? In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous & funny short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the writer Pierre Menard sets out to write a novel identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; not another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote. He succeeds admirably, actually producing an all-new word-for-word copy of Don Quixote:

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for examples, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.

Now, game studies is finally catching up, compare a quote from this 2002 article:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… with a quote from this new, 2003 article by a different author:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… and draw your own conclusions.

The program for the DiGRA games conference in Utrecht November 4-6th is now available.
In something as new as game studies, there is always an open question on whether it will suddenly dry up or whether we will continue to see more in-depth and more interesting research. Fortunately things are looking good, and everybody does seem to get more savvy and clever all the time. Makes me happy.

Yours truly will be speaking on The game, the player, the world: looking for a heart of gameness.

Edward Castronova has a new paper online about the real-world (EBay) pricing of avatars in EverQuest based on various factors such as sex.

This paper explores a unique new source of social valuation: a market for bodies. The internet hosts a number of large synthetic worlds which users can visit by piloting a computergenerated body, known as an avatar. Avatars can have an asset value, in that users can spend time to increase their skills; these asset values can be directly observed in online markets. Auction data for avatars from the synthetic fantasy world of EverQuest are used here to explore a number of questions, especially those involving the relative value of male and female avatars. In EverQuest, about 20 percent of the avatar population is female, and there are no sex-based differences in avatar capabilities. Many avatars (about one-fourth to onefifth of the population) are cross-gendered, being piloted by a person of the opposite sex. Nonetheless, relations between avatars are gender-based, and include chivalry, dating, and sex. Female avatars tend to be concentrated in highly sexualized Human and Elven races, with very few being present among such aesthetically-challenged races as Ogres and Trolls. Hedonic analysis of the auction price data suggests that gender labels are a less important determinant of avatar values than the “level,” a game-design metric that indicates the overall capabilities of the avatar. Thus, ability seems more important than sex in determining the value of a body. Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount. The average avatar price is 333 dollar; the price discount for females is 40 to 55 dollar, depending on methods. The discount may stem from a number of causes, including discrimination in Earth society, the maleness of the EverQuest player base, or differences in well-being related to male and female courtship roles. We do know, however, that these differences cannot be caused by sex-based differences in the abilities of the body, since in the fantasy world of Norrath, there are none.

Slate has an enlightening piece on using games to rebuild Iraq.
Lord British suggests applying the lessons from Ultima Online where the original anarchy turned into a social structure (tip: communicate clearly to the users that you’ve heard their complaints).
Edward Castronova suggest remaking an old board game called KingMaker to reflect the muddled political conflicts in present-day Iraq.

While the word “game” can make everybody uncomfortable, it does make sense: Iraq (and the real world in general) is the kind of place where clear-cut ideologies fail because they think that reality can be reduced to a simple root cause (economics, power structures, language, the joy of being liberated, national pride, god) whereas it in actuality is complex and packed with emergent and unpredictable events. Games, however simplistic their models, can be a soothing reminder that the world is full of emergent “gameplay” and events that we can’t master or fix with a simple sleight of hand.

My long-time cool colleague, Lisbeth Klastrup has succesfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on virtual worlds today in Copenhagen!
Congratulations, Doctor Klastrup!!!

(My own dissertation is due October 1st, btw.)

The L.A. Times has an interesting article on the standards of game censorship in different countries: How sex in video games is off-limits in the US but violence is OK, whereas sex is OK in Germany but violence is not. (Famously, the human soldiers in StarCraft became androids in the German version and their red blood became some kind of green guck.) Germany of course has a special history, but there is a general tendency (exception below) where sex in Northern [Protestant] Europe is seen as less awful than violence, whereas in the US it’s the other way around. Which is one of those situations where Northern Europe is clearly right. (Thanks to Zhan Li for the link.)

In related news, the Norwegian department of culture wants NRK, the Norwegian state television network, to remove two, well, sexually oriented & wildly ironic games from their web site. (Norwegian language article,
short English article.) Feel free to see for yourself, the language barrier shouldn’t pose a problem: 1 and 2.
Here in Boston, everything bad (bars closing early and such) gets blamed on the Puritans, and people tend to assume that Scandinavia is this wildly free and progressive place, but Norway clearly has its own kind of puritanism.