Category: actual games

New Paper: The Game of Video Game Objects

I have a new paper out, just presented at the CHI Play’21 conference:

“The Game of Video Game Objects: A Minimal Theory of When We See Pixels as Objects Rather than Pictures.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY ’21. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ 

We’ve discussed immersion (for and against), but I argue that we’ve overlooked a much more fundamental question: Why and when do we think of pixels on the screen as objects, rather than as pictures of objects?

During the pandemic, I built a game for exploring this question and wrote an accompanying essay. This extends my previous paper Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK).

The game presents a series of game objects, and asks the player to consider their status:

  1. When would you describe something as an object, rather than a picture?
  2. When do you think of it as the type of object it represents – like a rock or a lamp?
  3. And when would you argue that an onscreen object is the type of object it claims to be, such as a calculator?

The conclusion is not just that games and VR are cultural forms (obviously), but that we judge game objects based on what we are trying to use them for, and game worlds are always designed for particular kinds of uses. And we know this. There thus can be no universal metaverse, only different worlds built for different purposes.

From the abstract:

“While looking to the future, we have overlooked what is right before us. With new technology, haptics, rendering, virtual reality, we have spent much energy discussing immersion and presence, thinking sometimes about current technology, but often about a hypothetical perfect experience or future perfect technology.

In this, we have forgotten something rather fundamental: How do we in the first place decide to see a group of pixels on a screen as an object to which we have access, rather than as a picture of an object? This paper explores this question through a playable essay. At first, we may think that we will identify anything interactive as an object, but the playable essay demonstrates that this is much more complex and pragmatic, and that this identification has three steps – identifying pixels as an object rather than a picture, reasoning about the object as a specific type of object (such as a ball), and identifying it as a real instance of a type of object (such as a calculator).”

Thanks to IVD at The Royal Danish Academy, Nick Montfort, Stefano Gualeni, Pawel Grabarczyk, Dooley Murphy, and Jan-Noël Thon for comments; to Andrés Cabrero Rodríguez-Estecha for visual design; Stephane Bersot for the calculator asset. The project was made with Unity3D and Low Poly Game Kit by JayAnAm.

Petscii Jetski – a C64 game in BASIC

Introducing Petscii Jetski!
 
Instigated by Nick Montfort, we returned to the Commodore 64 to write a 10-line game & visual poem.
A very long time ago I used to be into C64 programming, at first BASIC and later assembly. I have severe existential reservations about going back to “things that I gave up years ago”, but it really was like coming home in a holy & broken sort of way.
In a world full of ever-shifting Javascript preprocessors and package managers, a simple predictable machine is a comfort, and yet the BASIC implementation is excruciatingly slow and full of strange decisions. For example, on this 1 Mhz machine, the BASIC implementation only runs floating point, which is really slow. This meant that the C64 was special in that assembly was perhaps a 1000 times faster than BASIC, a much bigger difference than in modern languages.
 
Play Petscii Jetski online at https://nickm.com/montfort_juul/petscii_jetski/ and read a detailed discussion of BASIC optimization at https://nickm.com/trope_tank/TROPE-20-01.pdf

Notes on Running an Online World for 15 years

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:

Højhuset

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.

 

Smid!

(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.)

Tuesday Changes Everything (a Mathematical Puzzle)

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.

Continue reading “Tuesday Changes Everything (a Mathematical Puzzle)”

4:32 – the Life of a Conceptual Game

My conceptual game 4:32 from the 2010 Global Game Jam has taken on a pretty fascinating life of its own. (Blog announcement here.)

Here is Alec Meer’s post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the game was presented under the heading of “PC Gaming In 2010”. A long flame war ensued on the site, showing that some people clearly felt cheated by the game. Which they were, of course, but that sort of is the game. One commenter compares 4:32 to rickrolling and is taking the whole thing personally:

… I bet there will be many other people disappointed or outright enraged by this. This has got nothing to do with “playground attitude” as it deserves to be called out for what it is. There are good and there a bad jokes, but this one is completely off the mark.

Part of the strong reactions at Rock, Paper, Shotgun seemed to come from people who felt that the game had crossed some line by forcing them to install and uninstall plugins.

Over at Play This Thing, Greg Costikyan’s post about the game immediately led to a flame war about PC vs. console gaming.

Petri Purho also blogged about it here.

I am pretty happy with the response, but it’s also interesting to see how players interpret the game in their own way. I didn’t think it was about PC vs. console gaming, and I didn’t think that a conceptual piece like this could get people that agitated. But then again, it’s a long-standing observation that some audiences will get angry if they feel a specific “work of art” breaks the conventions they expect – and the audience may even take it as a personal insult. That wasn’t intended, but it seems I did succeed in making something that played with player expectations!

Statistics: 13.000 games played. 513 games completed. (Cheating may have been involved, but I think that’s part of the game.)

4:32, my conceptual Game from the Global Game Jam

The 2010 Global Game Jam took place this weekend at over 100 locations around the world.

I made a small conceptual game called 4:32.

The theme of the Global Game Jam 2010 was deception, and the constraint for the time zone of the NYU Game Jam was “Rain, Spain or Plain”. This game furthermore fulfills the achievement “instant gratification” by being playable in the browser.

Without giving too much away, 4:32 is a response to Petri Purho’s game 4:33, which in itself is a response to John Cage’s silent composition 4:33.

4:32 won the vote for “most innovative game” at the NYU game jam.

Play it here.

Update February 21, 2010: I have changed the game a little to prevent some of the more obvious ways of cheating. (Linking to the final page, for example.)

The Failure Game: Pierre, Insanity Inspired

pierre_posterFrom the not-so-casual department, here is a new game, Pierre: Insanity Inspired.

Pierre was created at my previous workplace, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

I functioned as a product owner on this game, which at GAMBIT means that I posed a research question that the game should answer.

Research question: How do different ways of communicating failure influence the player’s experience and performance?

The excellent team was then free make a game (more or less) within the constraints of that research question. You can play the game here.

For more about the creation of the game, have a look at the GAMBIT updates this week. Introduction video here.

As usual when I am posting games for research purposes, I will keep the further details close to the vest, and then post results later.

In the meantime, please play the game! Thanks!