The Ludologist

If you are in the neighborhood:

We are having an informal research seminar this Friday in Auditorium 2, the IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen S.

10:15-10:30: Welcome
10:30-11:00: Sara Mosberg Iversen (ITU): “Challenges, motivation, fun & games”
11:00-11:30: Espen Aarseth (ITU): “Quest theory: an introduction”

11:30-11:45: Break

11:45-12:15: Andreas Gregersen (Film and Media Science, University of Copenhagen): ?Cutscenes, Camera and Action: Halo, Half Life 2, Ninja Gaiden and Jade Empire?

12:15-13:15: Lunch

13:15-13:45: Jesper Juul (ITU): “Without a goal”
13:45-14:15: S?ren Svendsen (Film and Media Science, University of Copenhagen): “Japanese and Western Games”

14:15-14:30: Break

14:30-15:00: Jonas Heide Smith (ITU): “Homo Ludens Vs. Homo Economicus – may the best approximation win”

From BBC News:

Apparently an art collector in Tokyo couldn’t decide between selling a collection via Christie’s or Sotheby’s, so he asked them to play Scissors, Paper, Stone [rock, paper, scissors] for the right to sell the collection.

Sotheby’s reluctantly accepted this as a 50/50 game of chance, but Christie’s asked the experts, Flora and Alice, 11-year-old daughters of the company’s director of Impressionist and modern art, and aficionados of the game.

They explained their strategy:

1. Stone is the one that “feels” the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors first

Sure enough, the novices at Sotheby’s went for paper, and Christie’s scissors got them an enormously lucrative cut.

Without any data to back it up, I also think that stone is played more often because it feels “strong”, but apart from that I think the only consistent thing about rps/sps is that we all believe for a second that we can peer into the mind of our opponent. Don’t we?

Going to Bristol tomorrow to speak at University of West England.

I can’t make it to the bigger event in Bristol, Playful Subjects on May 13th/14th.

Also not going to the Board Game Studies colloquium in Oxford April 27th-30th. The latter is one of those things – we video game people do like to pretend that we made up everything about studying games, but there is another older and parallel field of game studies that we should get more in touch with.
David Parlett will be talking about What are the rules of a game and who authorises them? What sorts of rules are there, how can they best be expressed, and how do they get to be changed? A core question, indeed.
How do we enable more cooperation and communication with the non-digital games people?

Somewhat surprising, Sony is starting their own virtual goods for real money service as Station Exchange. It’s only for EverQuest II for the time being.

Wired writeup.

PS. As an aside, this site has auctions for H?jhuset, the children’s avatar chat I have been working on/for during the past few years. The currency for auctions are “monetter”, the in-game currency unit, but another price list values all objects in the world in the number of plant objects that they are worth. There are a lot of plants in the world.

This is the kind of stuff that the users are just excellent at figuring out, I would certainly never have come up with it.

If you have a weekend to spare, Ludum Dare is hosting a 48-hour game programming competition.
One person, one game, 48 hours.
Competition Time (UTC): 2am April 16th (Saturday) to 2am April 18th (Monday), 2005

I don’t have a spare weekend unfortunately.

(Via Grand Text Auto.)

In case you missed it, ourcolony.net appears to be an ilovebees-style promotion for XBox 360.

The password for the first page is “play”.