Category: games

Following my earlier discussion of external rewards, here’s a video discussion how increased monetary rewards can lead to decreased performance. The studies mentioned here suggest that monetary rewards work well for mechanical tasks, but have negative impact on cognitively challenging tasks.

The video then discusses how things like open source and personal purpose fly in the face of traditional ideas of economical incentives.

There are many things to say about this, but I have been entertaining the idea that the “surprising finds” in the video are an artifact of a cognitive bias: Many people (such as economists) are fully aware that they are personally motivated by many different things such as pride, ambition, personal interests, social relations and so on … but nevertheless assume that everybody else is only motivated by money and gold stars.

Silly, isn’t it?

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I am not sure how directly this can be translated into the question of achievements and rewards in video games as there appear to be big differences between monetary and symbolic rewards. More about that later.

Jon Radoff has posted his history of social games. I am obviously a fan of such diagrammatic histories because it helps us think about how games have developed over time. (Such diagrams are simplifications, of course, but that is what makes them more useful than simply listing every game every made or played.)

Pac-Man is officially 30 years old today. (This is what the internet has settled on, even though Bandai claims that it’s tomorrow.)

Just this morning the cleaning lady here professed that Pac-Man was her favorite of the arcade games we have in the NYU Game Center.

And I do think it is one of the few arcade games that remains as playable today as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Is it the Citizen Kane of video games? How would we tell? What would that mean? It certainly has a kind of internal coherence and perfection, a stylized graphical style that does not date, a gameplay that is clear, strategies that are sufficiently interesting, and little tricks like the fact that the ghosts switch between aiming for the player and wandering aimlessly, leading to many exciting near misses. It works.

It also happens to be playable on google.com:

Update: News.com writeup on Pac-Man, Google’s implementation.

I was previously writing about how Apple’s apparently random iPhone App Store policies could actually be so by design. (Because they save Apple from having to define and defend a universally acceptable set of policies, and because it can easily give special treatment when it so desires.)

Another example here, with a political cartoon app banned and then unbanned after the story got out.

Weirdly, what really got to me was how Apple recently changed their policies to prohibit developers from working in their language of choice:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

As a programmer, I find this particularly offensive because:

1. I think developers have a right to use whatever tools get the job done.
2. There are great applications out there written in Unity3D, for example, and horrible apps written in Objective-C.
3. Apple’s benefits are fairly obvious and obviously hurtful for everyone else: Prevent cross-platform development; control innovation. (Flash included, of course.)
4. It means that you cannot have a programming environment on the iPhone. Ever.
5. The official argument from Steve Jobs is unashamed BS: “Intermediate layers” decrease application quality. Actually, no. There is a reason why developers use middleware, 3D engines, scripting languages and so on: Because they increase application quality. Apple’s argument is a variation on the old claim that “we should write everything in assembler because it runs faster”. This, like Apple’s claim, only holds true for developers with infinite resources and infinite time. There aren’t a whole lot of developers like that, so maximum application quality is reached by using the best tools for the given task and resources. Publishers should not try to decide those tools ahead of time.

A lot has been made out of how the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad prevents access to most video on the net. Perhaps that is a red herring. Video could run in HTML5.

The bigger program is that there are a lot of interesting (indie) games being done in Flash, and HTML just isn’t close to be being a game platform. (Can you even play sounds yet?) No indie Flash games for you, buy something from the app store instead.

Bad Apple.