Not a new video, but I keep thinking about this video of a level in Call of Duty: Black Ops where the game goes out of its way to make the player think that he/she is playing a major part in driving the action forward, as well as as being constantly on the verge of failing.

Except you aren’t. Apart from two scripted moments, you can play through this 15-minute section without doing anything.

Question #1:  is this wrong? Is it bad design?

I think there is an impetus to denounce this as overly slick, commercial and dishonest design.

But wait! Note how poorly this game example fits with some of the recent discussions (1 2 3) concerning the importance (or non-importance) of choices. I think we currently associate denials of player agency with experimental, subversive, art or personal games.

But Call of Duty probably rates among the games least likely to be described as “experimental”, yet we can also compare this video’s lack of player choice and consequence to some of the discussion of Proteus, whose status as a game is questioned on the Steam Forums, and defended vigorously as such by designer Ed Key.

Question #2: Are there honest and dishonest ways of breaking player expectations? Good and bad? Interesting and uninteresting? How can we tell the difference?

Just out, the inaugural issue of Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA).

ToDiGRA is meant as a venue for publishing some of the best papers from DiGRA conferences.

Vol 1, No 1 (2013)

A selection of best papers from the DiGRA 2011 conference in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

Table of Contents

Annika Waern, José Zagal: Introduction - HTML PDF

Jason Begy: Experiential Metaphors in Abstract Games - HTML PDF

René Glas: Breaking Reality: Exploring Pervasive Cheating in Foursquare - HTML PDF

Ioanna Iacovides, James Aczel, Eileen Scanlon, Will Woods: Making sense of game-play: How can we examine learning and involvement? -HTML PDF

Jonas Linderoth: Beyond the digital divide: An ecological approach to gameplay - HTML PDF

Gareth Schott, Jasper van Vught: Replacing preconceived accounts of digital games with experience of play: When parents went native in GTA IV - HTML PDF

(Someone remarked to me the other day that he used my blog as an archive for historical discussions in games. And it made me realize that I hadn’t posted about #1ReasonWhy.)

Here are two write-ups on #1ReasonWhy. #1ReasonWhy Brings Game Design Discrimination To Light and #1ReasonWhy We Are All Responsible.

More recently, the video from the Game Developers Conference #1ReasonToBe panel has been made available, featuring Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018080/

#1ReasonWhy prompted a number of horror stories, and made for very depressing reading. In addition to the raw quality of people’s experiences, I realized that it was depressing to hear that people had experienced something so different from what I experienced. My immediate personal association of game and computer culture was always one of inclusivity: feeling alienated and ill-fitted in regular and official congregations (such as high school), my experience was that game and computer culture was deep, welcoming, and inclusive – this was where I felt at home and accepted. Sure, people always challenge you on your skills and credentials (Did you play Dwarf Fortress? Do you write your own shaders? How many alts to you really have? Do you still use SVN?), but I felt at home in that.

It is depressing to realize people belonging to the same culture can also be so hostile and excluding on superficial grounds (e.g. gender). It is also clear that many have had the hardest time taking this to heart (see the Kotaku comments here), perhaps for the very same reason – they have personally had good experiences, so why would anyone feel excluded?

Hopefully this discussion is making us all smarter.

I find myself mesmerized by this gif.

Snake is another one of those games that has meant a lot to many people, but that we just didn’t get around to writing much about. Perhaps there could be a book on Snake, in the vein of  10 PRINT?

(Via Brandon Sheffield.)

New issue of G|A|M|E, the Italian Journal of Game Studies.

vol. 1, 2013 – Journal: TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION AND PERSPECTIVE INNOVATION

• Editorial Board – Technology evolution and perspective innovation. 3D and spatial depth today and yesterday
• D. Pietschmann, B. Liebold, G. Valtin & P. Ohler – Taking space literally: reconceptualizing the effects of stereoscopic representation on user experience
• A. Petrovits, A. Canossa – From M.C. Escher to Mass Effect: impossible spaces and hyper-real worlds in video games. How can hyper-real worlds be designed and interpreted in a 2D, 2.5D and 3D virtual environment and how will this implementation affect the stereoscopic 3D video games of the future?
• A. Larochelle – A new angle on parallel languages: the contribution of visual arts to a vocabulary of graphical projection in video games
• A. Işığan – The production of subject and space in video games
• D. Arsenault & P.-M. Côté – Reverse-engineering graphical innovation: an introduction to graphical regimes
• Z. Street – Polygons and practice in Skies of Arcadia

• D. Arsenault, P.-M. Côté, A. Larochelle & S. Lebel – Graphical technologies, innovation and aesthetics in the video game industry: a case study of the shift from 2D to 3D graphics in the 1990s
• E. Menduni & A. Catolfi – Digital aesthetic forms between cinema and TV. The need for new research directions

Get it here: http://www.gamejournal.it/issues/game-n-22013/

I am giving a talk on the Art of Failure this Thursday March 14 2013 at 5-7 PM, at Comparative Media Studies, MIT.

Location: 20 Ames St, Cambridge, MA Google Map. Room: E14-633

Art of Failure book launch w/ talks and game-playing:

Join us on Thursday, March 7th at 7PM for a conversation on the pain of playing video games!

We tend to talk of video games as being “fun,” but in his new book The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration. So why do we play video games even though they often make us unhappy?

At this book launch event, Jesper Juul will discuss game failure with Doug Wilson, PhD graduate from the IT University of Copenhagen and indie game designer at Die Guten Fabrik of Johann Sebastian Joust fame, and Frank Lantz, veteran game designer and Director of the NYU Game Center.

During the talk, the panelists will play painfully challenging games, and the audience will be invited to share the pain.

Jesper Juul is an assistant professor at the NYU Game Center. He has been working with video game theory since the early 1990′s. His previous book are Half-Real and A Casual Revolution, also on MIT Press. Jesper is a sore loser.

This event is free and open to the public.  Seats are limited, RSVP here: http://bit.ly/YsnWK1

Copies of The Art of Failure will be available for purchase following the lecture.

My name is Jesper, and I am a sore loser.

And my new book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games is fresh out on MIT Press!
(On Amazon.com. UK.)

To wit: I hate to fail in games. I think I enjoy playing video games, but why does this enjoyment contain at its core something that I most certainly do not enjoy?

We tend to talk of video games as being fun, but in The Art of Failure, I claim that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration. So why do we play video games even though they often make us unhappy?

In the book I compare game failure to tragic literature, theater, and cinema. Where stories concern the inadequacies of others, game failure is special in that it concerns our personal inadequacies

The book covers the philosophy and psychology of failure, as well as the problem of interactive tragedy, and it shows how different types of game design makes failure personal.

Finally, I argue for our right to be just a little angry, and more than a little frustrated, when we fail.

Where to get it

Get The Art of Failure from your neighborhood bookstore, your favorite online retailer, or from the book’s companion website: http://www.jesperjuul.net/artoffailure/

The book is available in both paper and ebook formats.

Official MIT Press page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-failure

Thanks to everybody who made this book possible!

-Jesper

Endorsements

• “Frankly, I hadn’t expected to enjoy a book about failure nearly as much as I did. Jesper Juul brings many different fields of study to the table and provides an engaging learning experience.”
  —Brenda Brathwaite Romero, game designer, COO and Co-Founder of Loot Drop
• “I can think of no other medium that so constantly forces its participant to contemplate their own demise. The act of playing games is one dotted with near-endless failure. Yet we plow on. Jesper Juul’s new book is exactly the sharp examination of failure I need to keep myself from stabbing my eyes out when I get frustrated.”
  —Jamin Warren, Founder, Kill Screen
• “In The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul explores an interesting idea and asks provocative questions. This book will be of interest to developers, players, scholars, journalists, and readers with related interests, such as chess players or athletes.”
  —Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Stanford University

You know about that online world that launched in September 1997 and is still running? No, not Ultima Online, the other one.

I was reading Raph Koster’s notes on the launch of Ultima Online back in 1997, and it made me realize that the online world that I programmed also launched just over 15 years ago, nearly at the same time as UO. If you didn’t grow up in Denmark, you have certainly not heard about it, but it’s called Højhuset (literally high-rise, from the metaphor that it was a series of stacked rooms). It’s still running at www.n.dk (only go there if you speak Danish).

This is what it looks like: It’s made up of non-scrolling rooms in a diagonal grid. Users can dress up, chat, and so on as expected. Users have their own apartments which they can decorate. Here is a screen shot with a celebrity visiting:

And most importantly: You can have nice things. The world was always a bit of a compromise between a chat system and game-like elements such as inventories and a currency, but it turned out that this was quite a feature. There have historically been long-running feuds between users who think of it as a chat system, and those who think of it as a game with the goal of amassing the most items. I initially thought that this would be a problem, but in practice this created social cohesion in each group – this was a valuable lesson for a game designer, that an external enemy does give users reason to come back.

As someone who is into game definitions, the height of the “is-it-a-game-or-not” feud was when a user had found a “Player” class in my program, and used this as proof that yes, this was a game. (New game definition: A game is a piece of software that declares itself to be a game.)

My role in this was always as a subcontractor, but I have been providing support and updates for 15 years now. One of the things I did learn as a programmer was to document my code and avoid any quick & dirty fixes which could come back to bite me. The main program (in Java) has always run on a single server. At the height of popularity, there were 2000 simultaneous users, but the improving speed of servers always just always made it unnecessary to spread across multiple machines.

Of course, there were also numerous attempts at hacking the system, which always is a point of pride for a programmer. People still try, here is even someone posting some debug output from such an attempt on Pastebin.

There were also microtransactions going back to the late 1990′s (this mostly paid via text messages).

Having read & written so much about video games since, it is hard to remember what thoughts went into my head when I was first starting out on this project, but I had played MUDs at the time, and I am sure I had read an article about the need for artificial scarcity in virtual worlds. And the strength of scarcity was one of the things that made the biggest impression on me. In the very early versions, there was no automatic dropping of items – this had to be done manually by a superuser referred to as the “superintendent” (“vice”). When going online, that user would always be met with cries encouraging the dropping of items (“smid!” in Danish). I leave you with a bit of user art, in which the superintendent gets fed up with being asked to drop items.

(There was actually a brief period of time in which a new chat system was introduced on the site to replace the one I made, but users demanded the old one back. Warms your heart.)

International Journal of Role-Playing Issue 3:

• Editorial: The state of our art.
• Karl Bergström: Creativity Rules. How rules impact player creativity in three tabletop role-playing games.
• Petri Lankoski and Simo Järvelä: An embodied cognition approach for understanding role-playing.
• Mikael Hellstrom: A tale of two cities: Symbolic capital and larp community formation in Canada and Sweden.
• Mikko Meriläinen: The self-perceived effects of the role-playing hobby on personal development – a survey report.

http://www.ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/issue3/IJRPissue3.pdf