Author: Jesper

This Thursday November 5th, the NYU Game Center is hosting a panel discussion about independent games.

Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
721 Broadway, Lower Level, Room 006, New York 10003

The Indie Games panel will be a discussion of the design, development and culture surrounding independent games with three innovative and provocative indie developers:

• Anna Anthropy
• Mark “messhof” Essen
• Jonatan “Cactus” Soderström.

The talk 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.

Refreshments will be served.

Anna Anthropy kindly made an unofficial poster for the event:

I believe that games can help you consider ethical dilemmas, but it requires that the player takes the game seriously as such, rather than simply optimizing …

(Via the Rampant Coyote.)

In time to satisfy our late-October theory cravings, Eludamos maintains a good publication velocity and now brings us a new issue, volume 3, issue 2.

Vol 3, No 2 (2009)

Table of Contents

Positions

Doubly Real: Game Studies and Literary Anthropology; or, Why We Play Games	Abstract HTML PDF
Philipp Schweighauser	115-132

Perspectives

Generations and Game Localization	Abstract HTML PDF
Darshana Jayemanne	135-147

Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation	Abstract HTML PDF
Dominic Arsenault	149-176

Generations of Game Analytics, Achievements and High Scores	Abstract HTML PDF
Ben Medler	177-194

Fahrenheit and the premature burial of interactive movies	Abstract HTML PDF
Jonathan Lessard	195-205

Articles

Chopin’s Dream as Reality: A Critical Reading of Eternal Sonata	Abstract HTML PDF
Johansen Quijano-Cruz	209-218

Letter from the Wilderness	Abstract HTML PDF
Mark Mullen	219-244

Just Gaming: On Being Differently Literate	Abstract HTML PDF
Alex Kendall, Julian McDougall	245-260

An Analysis of Persistent Non-Player Characters in the First-Person Gaming genre 1998-2007: a case for the fusion of mechanics and diegetics	Abstract HTML PDF
Dan Pinchbeck	261-279

Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games	Abstract HTML PDF
Alec Charles	281-294

Repelling the Invasion of the “Other”: Post-Apocalyptic Alien Shooter Videogames Addressing Contemporary Cultural Attitudes	Abstract HTML PDF
Ryan Lizardi	295-308

Ten years later	Abstract HTML PDF
Gerit Götzenbrucker, Margarita Köhl	309-324

As if it was response to my earlier discussion of paragaming (the enjoyment of bad games), XKCD posts this commentary:

Good question how that translates to games! Having watched the Star Wars Holiday Special, I agree with the sentiment even if I do feel my having watched it gives me a kind of positive cultural capital.

The Big Rigs game that Jason discussed at our bad games panel is clearly as bad as to be on the very far right end of the graph in the drawing – but it’s nevertheless enjoyable as a paragame. So the question may not be how far along the game is on a “good/bad” scale, but about having a sufficient number of laughable moments pr. minute. A laughable moment, I think, involves open conflicts between the contents of a “bad” game and the game quality criteria we operate by.

A game level that is 50% too long is not enjoyably bad, but a game level that is 500% too long is. A bad game has to be much too much to be useful for paragaming!

For your theory pleasure, the proceedings from the DiGRA 2009 conference at Brunel this September are now available online.

Get them here.

A must-read if you are interested in what’s happening in video game studies right now. (Hint: Many different things at the same time!)

Over the summer, I finally succumbed to peer pressure and got myself an iPhone.

As a game platform, I find it interesting not for the high-budget games like Super Monkey Ball (disappointing) or Hero of Sparta (yawn), but for the strange off-beat games.

Take, for example, Enviro-Bear. You have forgotten to prepare for winter and must collect food and get back to your cave before winter comes. In a car. Avoiding the other cars,  also driven by bears.

There is something to be said for the pairing of the slick hardware of the iPhone with the crude graphics of a game like this. Nintendo probably wouldn’t have approved this on the DS.

The app store is great in making such content accessible on your phone, but it has two major issues:

1) Organization: The in-phone app store remains pretty crude by being organized around top seller lists. This strongly favors hits, pushes prices to the bottom, and makes it harder to sell niche content. A simple fix would be to integrate an Amazon-style recommendation system. Then I could be recommended games that I would actually enjoy rather than forking out money for the next Hero of Sparta.

2) Fear of Objectionable Content: A string of app rejections. For example, Trent Reznor’s app rejected due to “objectionable content” (the F-word as they say here). Of course, you can buy “objectionable” songs (the same song in fact) on iTunes, so this is a simple double standard.

Why assume that games (and applications) should never be objectionable?

We understand, and Apple understands, that media may have content that is objectionable to some people. In music. In books. In art. Film. But video games are still being hampered by the strange idea that they, somehow, should be the only clean and non-objectionable art form in existence. This shows up in Apple’s rejections. It shows up in the fact that the platform holders continue to decide what is published. It shows up in the fact that Australia does not have a mature rating for video games.

And yes, I do think it is holding video games back, as an art form.