The videos have been posted from the very exciting Art History of Games Conference in Atlanta earlier this year.

Lots of interesting presentations by Bogost, Bolter, Brathwaite, Kluetsch, Lantz, Lowood, Nitsche, Paul, Pearce, Pozzi & Zimmerman, Rohrer, Romero, Schrank, Sharp, Harvey & Samyn.

A few notes on my talk, “The Pure Game: A Short History of Video Game Aesthetics”, viewable below.

I did the very academic thing of talking about history, about how in art history, the idea of identifying the pure essence of a medium and protecting it from alien influences has been common in the 20th century (painting, cinema), and how in video games we have often made similar claims about identifying a pure game that we wanted to protect from, say, narrative, or from undue emphasis on graphics.

I think some people were hoping for more of a manifesto-style talk, since many other speakers were doing just that. My talk is more of a meta-manifesto, where I say that although we are faced with the weight of history, and although history warns us against making sweeping statements about the properties of an art form, and although there is a current of thought that warns us against definitions and media essentialism, we nevertheless have to continue to make strong claims about our art form of choice, video games. The bold claims, though often proven wrong, drive us forward. We must dare to be wrong. We must continue making bold statements about video games, knowing that they can be wrong, and we must try to make statements that are so strong that they can be wrong.

[Updated September 1st to reflect that I was referring to the criticism that Ian Bogost was initially cited for, rather than his more in-depth post.]

Here is the point: Gamer prejudices against social games are verbatim copies of general prejudices against video games. Within video game culture, we have spent decades trying to make video games respectable, but now we are simply taking the prejudices against us, and regurgitating them at a new form of video game, looking down on social games the way that culture at large has been looking down on video games. We have made social games into the video games of video games.

In July, we had seminar at the NYU Game Center on the issue of social games. Aki Järvinen (a reformed academic who now works at Digital Chocolate) gave a talk on social game design, and on social game definitions. Ian Bogost gave his promised anti-social game talk, and launched his Cow Clicker FarmVille parody.

In some of the media coverage of Ian’s game, I ended up being cited for the following:

According to New York University games researcher and theorist Jesper Juul, social games are “brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money.”

Which wasn’t my point at all. Let me explain. Consider this quote from a blogger that, building on Jesse Schell, presents this criticism of FarmVille:

… the primitive kind of manipulations you see in FaceBook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. … the ways in which these games exploit the psychology of adults and children.

And consider the criticism that Ian Bogost was originally cited for. [Update: Compare to his nuanced comments here.]

[FarmVille gives] experiences more like [Skinner] boxes, like behaviorist experiments with rats.

Now, doesn’t this kind of language sounds oddly familiar? Exploiting psychology, manipulating, and just being in it for the money? Behaviorist experiments? Here is a quote from someone critical of video games in general, exploiting children and so on:

… the video game industry hides behind a First Amendment veil in order to exploit children for the sake of corporate profit.

And in their 1983 book Mind at Play, Loftus & Loftus explicitly compared video games to Skinner boxes.

In other words, the standard criticism against social (and casual) games is identical to traditional criticisms against video games as such. Gamer culture hasn’t exactly invented a new language here, but simply copied the familiar prejudices of parents and of the Jack Thompsons of the world.

I think this is pretty weak. At the very least criticism should be specific. Do social games involve brain hacks any more than WoW does? Any more than BioShock does? Any more than Shakespeare? I am not so sure. How would any art form not involve human psychology?

Of course, this doesn’t mean that FarmVille is a Great Game, it just means that we should try to control our inner Jack Thompson echo machine a little. It also does not mean that we have to love Zynga’s business practices, but it becomes ridiculous when I hear people contrast social games with the traditional game industry by saying that the traditional game industry as such is all about experiences and art, but not about money. It’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s completely legitimate to dislike social games – we don’t have to like everything, but there is a reason why people are playing these games, and it’s not a mystery: It’s nice to grow things. It’s nice to do things with your friends. It’s nice to give and receive gifts. It’s nice to play a game that allows you to schedule your playing time. And so on.

I also find StarCraft II more exciting, but I think we can learn something by acknowledging that new games can be interesting by breaking with our expectations of what a game should be. I would like to hear some more advanced discussion of social games.

And we should also avoid assuming that we are clever and able to see through tricks, advertising, and so on, but that they (the people who play these strange games) are unreflected and naïve. I leave you with a picture of the fence hack in FarmVille, where the author’s avatar has been fenced in to fool the FarmVille pathfinding algorithm, speeding up many common tasks. This is a common trick. People will do complicated things in games – all games – if they feel motivated to do so.

The Nielsen company’s latest study show that online games have edged out email as the 2nd-largest time sink online in the U.S.

Progress, I think.

(The result may be partially due to users shifting personal communication from email to social networks.)

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Nordic Digra 2010: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players
August 16-17, 2010
Kista, Stockholm, Sweden

The programme has now been set for the Nordic Digra conference, and we would like to extend our call for participation to this exciting first-time event! The theme for the conference, ‘experiencing games’, places a particular focus on studying design for player experience and research on tools and methods for player-participatory design.

The event will feature
- Keynotes by Prof. Jesper Juul (Half-Real and Casual Revolution) and Christopher Sandberg (CEO and founder of The company P)
- Papers sessions presenting up-to-date Nordic research in the game area
- Two workshops, on Collecting and analyzing video data in game studies and designing and implementing pervasive games
- A social evening located in the new Digital Arts Centre in Kista, featuring music, good food and, of course, gaming

About the keynotes:
Christopher Sandberg is CEO and founder of International Interactive Emmy Award winning television and new media production company The company P. He has one and a half decade of experience in start-ups as CEO and as Executive Producer in television, online and mobile, ranging from drama to social applications and games. Sandberg is Executive Producer and Creative Director for the new project by Tim Kring (creator of Heroes), the Conspiracy For Good.

His keynote draw on experience from working with some of the leading showrunners in drama and having broadcast meet games, social media and live action street play. He will talk about the latest productions from The company P:  It is about letting the audience in to your world, and letting the shared experience out into the world”.

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990′s. He is currently at the NYU Game Center and The Danish Design School, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience.

He will be talking about The Casual Turn: Reinventing Video Games & reinventing Game Research

Registration fee includes coffee and tea breaks, lunches and conference dinner on Monday evening. The workshops have no registration fee but we need to know if you will participate.

Non Digra members need to become members, check http://www.digra.org/join

Early bird fees:
Regular – 130 Euro alt 1250 SEK
Student – 50 Euro alt 475 SEK

Registration after August 1:
Regular – 150 Euro alt 1450 SEK
Student – 70 Euro alt 650 SEK

For registration and further information, go to our website www.nordic-digra.org

A New York University announcement:

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Expand your mind by taking a class in an exciting new field: There are still spaces available in two Game Center classes this fall, Introduction to Game Design and Game Studio! Both classes are free of prerequisites, so they are open to all students. Find them on Albert under Tisch Open Arts Electives.

Students: Please pass this information along to your friends.

Professors: Please pass this information along to your students.

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Introduction to Game Design

(Two Sections Available)

INSTRUCTOR: Eric Zimmerman
Course Number: H95.1605.001/H95.2605.001 (Section 1) &
H95.1605.003/H95.2605.003 (Section 2)
Meeting Tuesday from 9:30 to 12:15AM and 2 to 4:45PM
Lab Time: Thursday 6 – 9PM (Both sections)

This class is an intensive, hands-on workshop addressing the complex challenges of game design. The premise of the class is that all games, digital and non-digital, share common fundamental principles, and that understanding these principles is an essential part of designing successful games. Learning how to create successful non-digital games provides a solid foundation for the development of digital games.

In this workshop, students will; analyze existing digital and non-digital games, taking them apart to understand how they work as interactive systems; create a number of non-digital games in order to master the basic design
principles that apply to all games regardless of format; critique each other’s work, developing communication skills necessary for thriving in a collaborative field; explore the creative possibilities of this emerging field from formal, social, and cultural perspectives; develop techniques for fast prototyping and iterative design that can be successfully applied to all types of interactive projects.

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Game Studio

INSTRUCTOR: Katherine Isbister

Course Number: H95.1608.001/H95.2608.001
Meeting Thursday from 9:30 – 12:30AM
Lab Time: Wednesday 5:30 – 9PM

In this course, students learn best practices in digital game development, working in small teams to produce complete games. The course introduces students to project management, production roles, playtesting, considerations of audience and platform, and other practical concerns in building games.

The course will combine lecture and occasional guest speakers with practical exercises and milestones in building a completed digital game.

If you, like me, have fond memories of Matthew Smith’s 1983 game Manic Miner (playable here), chances are you are from Europe. It’s a pivotal game in the European history of games, but little known in the U.S.

Someone out there is apparently sufficiently fond of the game to compose an opera about it.

(Philosophical question of the day: does composing an opera about something always imply a fondness of it?)

(Via GameSetWatch.)

If you are using Firefox, you have probably been asked to upgrade to 3.6.6 over the weekend. You may notice that the list of fixed bugs only has one item.

Yes, the primary motivation behind Firefox 3.6.6 is that 3.6.4 introduced problems for FarmVille players. (A new 10-second timeout for Flash sometimes prevented FarmVille from loading.)

From this we can learn that Firefox developers are not (willing to admit that they are) playing FarmVille. Obligatory critical comment in the bug report:

(I have a few comments about the prevalent anti-FarmVille sentiment, but more about that later.)

In my experience, we Europeans tend not to think of soccer (yes, football) as particularly left-wing or democratic, or egalitarian, or non-competitive, but with the World Cup just starting, a few U.S. commentators have been arguing in full force for exactly that.

Here’s Gary Schmitt explaining that Americans (read: U.S. Americans) only enjoy sports in which the best team wins. Latin Americans and Europeans are different of course.

For sure, there may be a number of reasons that is the case but my suspicion is that the so-called “beautiful game” is not so beautiful to American sensibilities. We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail. Of course, the fact that is often not the case when it comes to soccer may be precisely the reason the sport is so popular in the countries of Latin America and Europe.

Oh, Gary’s evidence that soccer is not about the best team winning: The U.S. beating Spain last year in the Confederations Cup.

Here’s Matthew Philbin similarly arguing that soccer doesn’t require skill, agility and so on, unlike American sports.

And to conservatives, the troubling aspects of the game aren’t confined to the pros. Soccer requires comparatively little from children but the ability to run after the ball – the risk of failure for anyone except maybe the goal keeper is zero. Even the strong chance that any given game will end in a tie makes it attractive for parents reluctant to impart life’s difficult lessons to young kids.

It must baffle soccer partisans that Americans haven’t taken to their game. After all, the United States is a sports-obsessed nation.

Americans look to sports to teach work ethic, teamwork and responsibility, in addition to the physical and mental skills necessary for competition. They love underdogs and “Cinderella stories” and “Evil Empires” and “bums,” “Hogs” and “No-Name Defenses.”

And Americans like to think their sports reflect something about them. Michael Shackelford of Bleacher Report praised football because it, “requires a combination of power and agility, brute strength, and grace … In other words, it requires American characteristics in order to succeed.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

(Links via Gawker.)

Joseph Burchett has kindly posted an audio interview with me at Game Developers Radio.

The interview covers a range of issues, from A Casual Revolution to the use of video game studies in general.

The last two weeks have seen heated debate about a mathematical puzzle posed by Gary Foshee and reported by  New Scientist (discussions here and here and here).

Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: “I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?”

“The first thing you think is ‘What has Tuesday got to do with it?’” said Foshee, deadpan. “Well, it has everything to do with it.” And then he stepped down from the stage.

This is the answer: 13/27.

Many people will intuitively say that the answer is 1/2 (=the chance of having a boy or a girl), but probability aficionados will give the answer 1/3, since this is the Boy or Girl Paradox: We are not told that the speaker has a child and is waiting for another, but that he already has two children. Two children can come in four configurations: 1) boy/girl, 2) girl/boy, 3) girl/girl, 4) boy/boy. Since he has one boy, we are looking at the options 1, 2, or 4. Only the boy/boy combination includes two boys, so the probability is 1/3. In other words, order matters and completely changes probability.

So what has being born on a Tuesday got to do with it? Why would the answer not still be 1/3? The New Scientist has a good explanation toward the bottom of the article. Simply count the different combinations of genders and weekdays, which gives the result (number of combinations with two boys, at least one of which was born on a Tuesday) / (number of combinations with at least one boy born on a Tuesday). The result really is 13/27.

This is the best illustration I have found: This shows all the boy/girl pairs as well as the possible weekdays on which they could be born. Green represents situations with two boys, at least one of which was born on a Tuesday. Yellow represents at least one boy born on a Tuesday. Red is neither. Hence the answer is green/(green+yellow)= 13/(13+14)  = 13/27.

But again, what has Tuesday got to do with it?

More below.

Discussion

It is an appealing puzzle because even once you (or at least I) accept the 13/27 calculation and visualize it, it still is wildly counter-intuitive that being born on a Tuesday influences the probability of having a brother. (Actually it doesn’t – see below.) What’s also strange is that with a rarer trait (say, being born on February 29), the probability of having two boys approaches 1/2. (For a trait with probability 1/A, the probability of having two boys is 2A-1/4A-1.)

Other people with more skill in probability theory have explained it well (search for “cocktail party” here), but I thought about it moving backwards from the result: Our intuition (which is correct) is that boys born on Tuesdays do not have a larger chance of having a brother than boys born on other days. Therefore the 13/27 result seems absurd because we could repeat it with all days of the week, add up the results, and reach the conclusion that the answer to the boy or girl paradox was 13/27 and not 1/3. And that is the hint: We are not really calculating what we think we are calculating.

It is really a question of formulation. The puzzle is not “My firstborn is a boy born on Tuesday” or “I have exactly one boy born on a Tuesday”, but “One [or more] is a boy born on a Tuesday [but I am not telling you which one].” Which means that we did not calculate whether being born on a Tuesday influences the probability of having a brother.

As I stated above, the absurdity comes from the fact that we might imagine that we had sliced the possibility space (2 genders, 7 weekdays) into 7 equally big slices, but did we? Try repeating the calculation for “boy born on a Tuesday”, “boy born on a Wednesday” etc…

Now consider the case of the oldest child being a boy born on a Tuesday, and the youngest child being a boy born on a Wednesday. This will count toward both the probability of “two boys when at least one child is a boy born on a Tuesday” and “two boys when at least one child is a boy born on a Wednesday”. Many cases are counted for several weekdays. This is why the probability goes up from the expected 1/3, approaching 1/2.

Why this is such a good puzzle:

• It is a puzzle within a puzzle.
• Like the Boy or Girl Paradox, which encourages us to answer from the knowledge that the boy/girl probability is (roughly) 50%, this puzzle encourages us to answer from the knowledge that being born on a given weekday generally doesn’t influence other probabilities. In both cases, that is not what the puzzle is actually asking us. We are tricked into using a stock answer that is not appropriate for the given puzzle.
• It appeals to puzzle and probability theory fans by building on an existing puzzle.
• It gives a result (approaching 1/2) which is exactly the result that connoisseurs know should not be the answer.
• It uses a counting technique specifically designed to prevent from counting the same case twice, and we may be thinking that “at least I am not counting anything twice”, but that is exactly what we are doing.
• The very terse explanation of the puzzle is deliberately misleading. When Foshee says ‘One is a boy born on a Tuesday. … What has Tuesday got to do with it? Well, it has everything to do with it.“, it makes it sound like we are doing a probability calculation depending on one particular boy, when in fact we are doing a calculation depending on “one or more children being a boy born on a Tuesday” – hence we end up counting some combinations for several weekdays.