The conference organizers of the Storyworlds Across Media conference in Mainz have put up the videos from the July 2011 conference.

Here is the video of me talking about The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?

This a chapter from my upcoming book on Failure, where I revisit a question that I dodged in Half-Real: Can a video game have an unhappy ending? (Answer is yes, in some ways, with modifications, it’s complicated.)

(The video contains a Red Read Redemption spoiler. You have been warned.)

The Canadian Game Studies Association has just published the Spring 2012 issue of their Loading … Journal.

Vol 6, No 9 (2012)

Speaking at our Ivory Tower Defense panel on February 23rd at the New York University Game Center.

Do games belong in the university? Do you need a degree to make games? What can we get out of studying them? What is the connection between research and design? Join us for a spirited conversation with the faculty of the NYU Game Center to discuss the complex relationship between games and higher education. Frank Lantz will moderate Katherine Isbister, Jesper Juul, and Eric Zimmerman as they debate these important issues and discuss the work they are doing to create a shared vision for the study of games at the NYU Game Center.

The talk will begin at 7:00 PM in room 006 in the lower level of 721 Broadway, and is open to students, faculty, and the general public. We welcome everyone, whether your research and teaching is related to games or you are simply curious about this rapidly evolving field. Please come, and feel free to bring any interested NYU colleagues.

Space is limited, please RSVP here.

Mass Effect fans are in uproar over errors in the Mass Effect: Deception novel, mostly of the type where the novel contradicts central information from the games.

From the shared Google document chronicling the mistakes. (And the mistakes are pretty bad.)

1. The Citadel is described as being star shaped – Whilst the Citadel does have five arms arranged around a ring, even when it is fully opened, the arms are not in the same plane as the central ring; rather, they are oriented straight forward:

[Error: Lore]

2. There is a batarian embassy in the Citadel – Batarians closed their embassy after the Citadel Council sided with the human System Alliance during a colonization dispute over the Skyllian Verge, and there is no mention of their embassy being re-established in the previous installments. [Error: Lore]

3. Kai Leng visits Chora’s Den – Chora’s Den was closed after Sovereign’s attack on the Citadel. It never re-opened. [Error: Lore]

4. Citadel surrounded by stars – The Citadel is in the middle of a nebula with only one star – Widow – nearby and clearly visible. A few others are only faintly visible through the gas. [Error: Lore]

5. Kai Leng kills a krogan by slicing into the back of its neck and severing the spine – Krogan biology does not work this way. 1) There is a large hump that makes access to the rear of the neck difficult. 2) Most blades (save for a molecular blade) cannot penetrate the thick hide covering the rear of the neck. 3) Even if the spine was severed, the krogan still would not die, as krogan are uniquely equipped with organ redundancy. Instead of an analogue to the human nervous system, they have a second circulatory system with an electrically conductive fluid. [Error: Lore]

Via Gamespot.

Drew Davidson has just posted volume 1, number 2 of the Well Played Journal.

BioShock and Portal: A Discussion of Poetics
Yotam Haimberg

We should be heroes… A case study of community building as a dominant strategy
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen

Cracking the Code: Untangling Game Structure, Properties and Player Experience
Elizabeth Goins

A Life in Baseball, Digital and Otherwise
Abraham Stein

Get the PDF here.

There is some truth to this video.

http://www.dorkly.com/video/30941/dorkly-bits-mario-is-too-mainstream

A team at Microsoft has created a gamification (if you will) extension for Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio Achievements, which adds points for various Visual Studio actions. Full video about it at this link.

As you can tell, it’s on the ironic side of things, but it comes complete with a leaderboard.

Ars Technica has done us the favor of reviewing Visual Studio as a game, perhaps not the funniest post ever, but still.

The gameplay can be very uneven. Some play sessions are an exercise in frustration. It can be difficult to even create a dungeon in the first place, and the game gives few indications of what you’re doing wrong. When it comes to hunting down the monsters within the dungeon, you’re really on your own. But the experience can also be rich and rewarding. The spell-casting system is enormously flexible and varied, and the resulting constructions can be exquisite.

It’s all very Jesse Schell, but I think it points what to we could call the game-vs-tool problem inherent in the idea of gamification: it’s perfectly fine for a game to set up an arbitrary point system, because that then is what matters in the game.

But when I am programming, I am the one who knows that is or isn’t important in what I am trying to do, and somebody else’s point system is likely to be in conflict with my own personal goals.

People often ask me about the origin of the idea of the “gamer”, as something that you may or may not identify as.

I discussed this kind of “I am/am not a (casual) gamer” posturing briefly in A Casual Revolution, but what about the word itself?

Here is the Google Ngram viewer showing the frequency of the word gamer from 1900 to the present day.

I suppose the graph at first looks like what you would expect, but note how “gamer” only really becomes popular from 1990 and on – it was rarely used in relation to arcade games or early home computer games.

On a personal note this also explains why I never wondered that hard about whether I was or wasn’t a gamer: the word only became popular after my formative game-playing years in the 1980′s…

PS. Why is the curve flattening around 2005? Could it be that the rise of casual games is making the question moot?

For your theoretical pleasure, here is the latest issue of Game Studies: Game Studies 2011-03.

*
A Survey of First-person Shooters and their Avatars
by Michael Hitchens
A survey of over 550 first person shooters, The titles are compared by year of release, platform and game setting. Characteristics of avatars within the surveyed titles are also examined, including race, gender and background, and how these vary across platform and time. The analysis reveals definite trends, both historically and by platform…

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Against Procedurality
by Miguel Sicart
This article proposes a critical review of the literature on procedural rhetoric, from a game design perspective. The goal of the article is to show the limits of procedural rhetorics for the design and analysis of ethics and politics in games. The article will suggest that theories of play can be used to solve these theoretical flaws…

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The pastoral and the sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
by Paul Martin
The landscape in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is seen here as a central aspect of the game’s theme of good versus evil. The analysis looks at the game’s distinction between the pastoral and the industrial realms and the way the player’s encounter with the landscape transforms over the course of the game from the sublime to the picturesque mode…

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Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in Bioshock
by William Gibbons
The science-fiction world of the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007) presents a dystopian vision of mid-century America. The game explores the creation and ultimate destruction of the underwater city of Rapture, an Ayn-Rand-inspired capitalist Utopia. Though the game features an award-winning original score, its soundtrack also borrows…

Beautiful little video of a lizard playing Ant Crusher.

Now, the lizard is playing a video game (this is the activity it is performing).

But is it playing a game? As in: does the lizard perceive this activity as  to be different from crushing/eating real ants?

Discuss. (I think the answer is no.)