The Ludologist

Two days of a game design research symposium coming up, this time closer to home, at the ITU in Copenhagen.

I won’t exactly be live-blogging (which I still consider quite odd), but there should be some interesting talks to comment on.

The symposium should to some extent answer Chris Crawford’s recent Ivory tower column where he criticizes academic game research for not coming up with anything useful for game designers.
The first answer to his claim is that this symposium should prove him wrong. The second answer is that direct industry applicability just never is going to be the only stick by which academic game research can be measured. Some times we just will be going off on a limb, trying to answer basic philosophical questions that do not matter much in the actual design phase.
And then of course, when the philosophical questions and the game design issues go hand in hand, it’s music.

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Crawford also discusses C.P. Snow’s point about the two cultures, and painting with the big brush he claims that science and humanities get along better in Europe than in the U.S. (which I am not entirely convinced is true) and that European academics are less inclined to work with business (which is true).

Crawford is surely right about the two cultures, and the division just never seems to go away. Even at the IT University which is supposed to be strictly cross-disciplinary, I continue to meet computer science people who wouldn’t dream of learning anything about any kind of humanities field, and humanities people who would rather die laughing than spend a few minutes reading anything about science.
And even after all these years, the voice of my humanities training still tries to tell me that reading Scientific American, Edge or anything about CPU architecture is basically naughty.
The really odd aspect of the two cultures is that there is no particular reason why we would have that split?

I previously mentioned satirical Norwegian online games, but this one is right in the middle of an authentic controversy.

Background story: One of Norway’s famous inhabitants is Mullah Krekar, former leader of the Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam. Since he has been acquitted for the charges brought against him, it’s unclear what the man has actually done, but he really is an out there totalitarian fundamentalist with some dubious friends. (Which is, of course, not a crime.)

Mullah Krekar has recently published an autobiography, and during a debate, the (female) Norwegian-Pakistani stand-up comedian Shabana Rehman performed a stunt of picking up the big man and proclaiming that if she could pick him up like that, he couldn’t be posing a danger to the country.

Krekar did not find this funny. So he has sued Rehman for “bodily violation” (no, I don’t think he will win the case).

Here’s the lift the mullah-game, Jeg bare Tulla, Krekar. [Krekar, I’m only joking.]

The goal of the game is to lift Krekar by clicking the mouse as fast as possible. (“Klikk som en gal Mullah p? musa!” [Click the mouse like a mad mullah.])

Update: Jill points to another lift the mullah game.
And yet another Krekar game.

I don’t think Krekar finds the games funny either. So this touches on some genuine issues of fundamentalism, terrorism, cultural sensitivities, and freedom of speech.

English language article in Aftenposten.

PS. The game is pretty bad of course, but I wonder why all satirical games tend to end up being jokes about the game format as well? Why is it hard to do a satirical game that is also a plainly good game?

The Philadelphia Inquirer mentions ludology in a news story on video games and learning. People quoted: James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Justin Hall, Greg Lastowka. (I.e. US-centric, but never mind.)

I guess the use of ludology without any references is an indication that the word is now mainstream. Yup.

I will be posting some more detailed few things about Japan, GDC, and games in general in the following days, but as a quick warmup, here’s a picture of a Japanese women’s magazine:

It’s much like the example of the “narrative” clothing section at Nordstrom, and the question is this: What makes it an attractive idea that your life would be like a story? I guess it is a content-oriented view of story – a story consists of meaningful and interesting events. Buying the Nordstrom clothes or the Story magazine means that your life won’t just be “one damn thing after another”, but a series of interesting and important events.

And it’s true that many games (like life sometimes) consist mostly of not-too-meaningful events, too much drudgery and too few things really interesting. Some of the game/story discussion comes from this.