Half-Real published as Paperback
MIT Press has now published Half-Real in a paperback edition.
It’s just like the hardback, except lighter and cheaper!
Get it from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or your local independent bookseller.
Archived entries for half-real
Podcast Interview in the Another Castle Series
Game Design Advance has posted a podcast interview with me as part of the Another Castle series.
The interview, here, is about the state and history of video game studies as well as a dive into some of the concepts from Half-Real.
Other interviewees in the Another Castle series include Frank Lantz, Anna Anthropy, Greg Trefry and Richard Rouse III.
New Paper Posted: A Certain Level of Abstraction
I have posted my conference paper from September’s DiGRA 2007 conference in Tokyo:
The paper A Certain Level of Abstraction discusses abstraction in games. This is the paper’s abstract:
ABSTRACT
This paper explores levels of abstraction: Representational games present a fictional world, but within that world, players are only allowed to perform certain actions; the fictional world of the game is only implemented to a certain detail.
The paper distinguishes between abstraction as a core element of video game design, abstraction as something that the player decodes while playing a game, and abstraction as a type of optimization that the player builds over time.
Finally, the paper argues that abstraction is a related to the magic circle of games and to rules as such.
Games referenced include Cooking Mama, Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, Karate Champ and The Marriage.
The paper is a bit of a follow-up to some of the rules & fiction discussions in Half-Real – you think you are finished, but you are not.
What do Games Mean? Braid, then flOw pulled from Slamdance
More fallout from Peter Baxter’s decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre from the Slamdance festival:
First Jonathan Blow pulled Braid, and now Jenova Chen has pulled flOw.
Not much to say, the error of Baxter’s decision so obvious, and Blow and Chen deserving credit for sticking out their neck.
The basic problem is this: For unknown reasons, some people assume that games always condone the actions of the player or the events in the game. This is obviously wrong, so let me offer a broader perspective with what I wrote in Half-Real about what games mean:
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Where is the moral?
As a first example, consider Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments (1956). With Charlton Heston playing the part as Moses, we follow the biblical tale about the birth of Moses, his adoption, the exodus from Egypt, Moses parting the waters, and finally receiving the Ten Commandments from God. In this film, it is clear that the protagonist is good, and that his actions are good. This means that we see the protagonist as carrier of the film’s moral, but are protagonists always good? We can compare the Ten Commandments to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni: The personal goal of Don Giovanni is to seduce as many women as possible, something at which he is sublimely skilled. Towards the end of the opera, Don Giovanni is offered the option of repenting his sins, but he refuses and is finally swallowed by the flames of hell. It should be clear that the moral of the opera is that God punishes sinners, and that the protagonist demonstrates what we should not do. We do not automatically assume that the actions of a protagonist are “good” or “right”.
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A meaningful car crash
We can see why it would be a misunderstanding to see a game as an expression of the players wanting to perform the in-game actions in reality. Games are rather – like stories – things that we use to relate to death and disaster. Not because we want them to happen, but because we know they exist. Consider the game Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002). Burnout 2 can be played in a special crash mode, where the object is to drive into a busy intersection at full speed in order to create as large pile-ups as possible (fig. 5.18). It should be obvious that we do not play this game because we want traffic accidents, but because we know they exist and because we want to consider the possibility of death and destruction.
Figure 5.18. Burnout 2 (Criterion Studios 2002), crash mode: Create the largest traffic accident possible.
The audience of a movie does not automatically assume that the protagonist does good, and neither does the player of a video game believe that the protagonist of the game does good. A game is rather play with identities, where the player at one moment performs an action considered morally defensible, and the next moment tries something that the player considers indefensible. The player chooses one mission or another, tries to complete the mission in one way or another, tries to do “good” or “evil”. Games are playgrounds where players can experiment with doing things they would or would not normally do.
[...]
I think that having the tools for discussing games, and remembering how we interpret other cultural forms can prevent us from making na?ve, literal interpretations of games.
Half-Real nominated for Game Developer Front Line Awards
OK, for that I am honored. Game Developer Magazine has nominated Half-Real for best book in the Game Developer Front Line Awards. Half-Real is obviously not a book about game development, but it was certainly intended to be useful in many of the discussions that pop up around games and development.
The book nominees are quite different, so let’s see what happens.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ — The editors of CMP Technology’s Game Developer have named the finalists for the 2006 Front Line Awards, the magazine’s ninth annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, hardware, game engine, middleware, and books.
The final award winners, plus one inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame chosen for its outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more, will be announced in the January 2007 issue of Game Developer, available on newsstands beginning January 17, 2007.
The finalists for the 2006 Game Developer Front Line Awards are: ENGINES Torque Game Builder 1.1.1, Garage Games Valve Source Engine, Valve Unreal Engine 3, Epic HeroEngine, Simutronics Corporation Gamebryo 2.2, Emergent BOOKS "Better Game Characters By Design," Katherine Isbister, Morgan Kaufmann "3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop," Luke Ahearn, Focal Press "ShaderX4," Wolfgang Engel (ed.), Charles River Media "Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames," Chris Bateman, Charles River Media "Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds," by Jesper Juul, The MIT Press Continue reading...
Half-Real Reviews and Commentary at RCCS
The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies has posted two new reviews of Half-Real: One by Curt Carbonell, one by Randy Nichols. And I have written a short response.
Complete announcement follows:
Books You Should Read
If you’re in the game industry, Ernest Adams has made a list of 50 books you should read. It’s at Next-Gen.
It’s an excellent list – OK, so Half-Real is on it – lots of breadth, so many things to go into.
For design, I really would put Tracy Fullerton’s (et.al.) Game Design Workshop on the list though.
Half-Real: Sample Chapters Available
For your perusal, I have made a few sample chapters of my book Half-Real available on the website:
- The Preface (in which I talk about my first video game)
- The Introduction (the overview of the field)
- The References (the texts and the games)
- The Index (the people, the subjects, and the games)
I am also working on an update to the dictionary, which should be ready soon.
