The Ludologist

A few people are up in arms over a comment made by Sony’s Kaz Hirai to the effect that Sony deliberately made the PlayStation 3 a difficult console to develop for:

We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?

I think it does make sense from a certain angle: If game quality improves throughout the lifetime of a console, owners are more likely to keep buying more games rather than getting the latest new console from competitor X.

The counter-argument would be that developers are usually able to improve quality over time even with easy-to-use development tools.

Certainly, it is a strategy that works best if you start from a position of absolute strength – which Sony to their own surprise didn’t this time around.

My old colleagues Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca have published a study on the role of fashion in World of Warcraft, “‘Because it just looks cool!’ Fashion as character performance: The Case of WoW“.

Findings: WoW players care about the way they look, even when the look has no effect on stats – and that goes for men as well as women.

Abstract:

“This paper explores the neglected area of clothing and fashion in computer games, particularly MMORPGs, which we claim is an important aspect of game aesthetics and player performance. Combining knowledge from the cultural studies of fashion with a study of the function and importance of clothing in the gameworld World of Warcraft (WoW), and drawing on qualitative methods, we argue that fashion in an online gameworld like WoW is a vehicle for personal storytelling and individualization.”

This also gives me the opportunity to mention the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, another interesting academic journal on games.

Worth a discussion. From The Onion.

Learned a new word the other day: Brand Slapping is when you take a well-known game genre (say Snakes and Ladders or platform games) and apply a brand on top of it without really changing anything.

Behold one of the top characters on the Check Mii Out Channel (that’s the Mii Contest Channel for some of you).

I haven’t been following the channel that closely, but I think Obama is the first politician to be voted a top Mii.

This post is therefore not your everyday “look how far video games have come”-post, but “look how far politics has come –  it is now so popular that we have politicians made into cute game characters”.

Last post about the Global Game Jam: Participants were treated to a very precise keynote by Kyle Gabler of World of Goo-fame: