US Army Video Games Office

As reported in Wired and Training and Simulation Journal, following the success of America's Army, the US Army's "Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming, or TPO Gaming" is a new "... project office, just for building and deploying games."

63% of US play videogames

A new report from NPD claims that nearly two thirds of the population of the USA play video games.

"In terms of the number of gamers in the U.S. and the amount of time spent playing them, 63 percent of the U.S. population plays video games - defined as console and portable games, PC games, games on kid-oriented systems or games on devices like cell phones or iPods"

More Video Games, Less Football

The Register reports,

"West Ham shot-stopper Robert Green has blamed England's pitiful failure in qualifying for the Euro 2008 finals on the increasing popularity of video games among English boys."

But just think of all those great cyberathletes we're training up!

Audio Games

My current project is to do with audio games, and I thought you might be interested to hear about them.

Essentially they're games which use audio instead of visual feedback, and they come in many different genres, including FPS, RTS and driving.

These games are mostly made by visually impaired hobby developers for other players, but some players can even play regular visual games simply due to the amount of audio cues they provide.

I find this an extremely interesting culture, the way these games reference other existing styles, how they remediate from visual media to aural, the enabling qualities of hobby programming, and the communication and organisational possibilities of the internet.

It's refreshing to consider non-mainstream cultures of gaming such as women, the elderly and now visually impaired players.

Fascinating stuff!

Audio Games, Memory, Aging

Dr. Elizabeth Zelinski, Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California recently presented a report at The Gerontological Society of America into the effects of memory in aging players of an audio game.

The Posit Science Brain Fitness Program was played by elderly users and compared to a control group who watched educational videos. It was found that concentrating on the auditory stimulation in the game enhanced the player's memory.

Mob Zombies

Nothing to do with FlashMobs, this is an Augmented Reality game.
It doesn't strike me as a very good idea to run around a crowded room without looking where you're going, though.

When work becomes a game

Look! Yet another article that acknowledges the fact that some of us gamers are over 30 :)

On a more serious note it's interesting that employers are now thinking of ways to incorporate play-like elements into work...

Are Video Games Art?

Smuts asks the same question that seems to keep coming up again and again, are video games art? He states that this question has not been addressed in philosophy of art field, despite it being asked over and over by players, developers and game studies scholars.

My personal opinion is yes, of course games like any medium can be art, but the more interesting question as Smuts raises, is what kind? i.e., what are the aesthetics of game play? This has to be a plural answer as the nature of interactivity and play varies with each game. It is possible to talk about the aesthetics of ludus and paidia as many have before, and about the aesthetics of embodiment as I have in my MA thesis, but to subsume all video game play under a single, comprehensive umbrella would be too broad to be useful.

Ebert, Roger. Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (Chicago Sun-Times, 21st July 2007).
gamepolitics. Are Video Games Art? (Game Politics, 9th September 2006).
Musgrove, Mike. Monster Fun. But Is It Art? (Washington Post, 15th September 2007).
Ochalla, Bryan. Are Games Art? (Here We Go Again...) (Gamasutra, 16th March 2007).
Smuts, Aaron. Are Video Games Art? (Contemporary Aesthetics, 2nd November 2005).
Smuts, Aaron. Video Games and the Philosophy of Art (Aethetics Online, 10th February 2007).
tmenezes. Are Games Art? (Kuro5hin, 10th September 2002).
White, Gareth. Embodied Evil - The Aesthetics of Embodiment in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (University of the West of England, 20th August 2007).

Caillois and Video Games

Chris Bateman (who it turns out, I used to work with when I started out in the games industry back in the late 90's) has a series of posts about Caillois' terminology for play and games.

Mario Manualist Vs Guitarist: FIGHT!

I think the Super Mario Brothers theme tune is to games music what the Utah teapot is to 3D graphics. It's the litmus test, the reference point to which all forms measure themselves against.



What's your favourite SMB version?



I think I like the Tesla coil best.

The Higher Stages of the Barbarian Culture

I came across an old article on The Escapist called "Theory of the Gaming Class" by Mark Wallace

It begins with a discussion of Thorstein Veblen's 1899 work on economics and society, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Wallace argues that leisure - and gaming in particular - are markers of social status, but I would argue he does so without considering the broader economic constraints in which games are produced and marketed to us as a consumer class. Consider for example, the analysis in Dovey and Kennedy's Game Cultures and Lister et al. New Media: A Critical Introduction

Soon enough, games will be the single most culturally important entertainment medium out there, the yardstick by which we measure our leisure time - and thus our station in society. When that happens, all your cool will belong to us.

Introducing Eludamos

There's a new video game's blog on the block and it's called Eludamos. It's only biannual but still it's good to see a new online publication.

Koster's Theory of Fun

I was at an interview with Ubisoft a couple of days ago, chatting to a designer who mentioned Raph Koster's book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. I haven't read it myself so I decided to do a bit of swotting up. Grand Text Auto have a review with a bit of reader comment and a reply from Koster himself. Slashdot also have a review and Terranova has some good, detailed discussion between readers and Koster.

At the end of the day it sounds like it's not so interesting for academics or industry folk, but rather is an introduction for people who currently only play but want to start thinking about them more deeply.

Ian Bogost on The Colbert Report

What a great combination!
I'm more of a Daily Show fan myself, but it's great to see Serious Games getting air-time.

Minesweeper: The Movie

Commander: "Why are you here soldier?"

Officer: "I'm here because I'm bored!"

So much for the Tetris Defence

Killer Whales Killer App: Games

The BBC report some interesting observations about progression in play of the dolphin family, of which killer whales belong,

Most mammals seem to enjoy play - but dolphins seem to like making their games as challenging as possible. A killer whale calf learned the trick of luring gulls to the surface of the water with fish. When the gulls landed on the water, the killer whale would then attempt to capture them in her mouth, without killing them.

Once she mastered this skill, she made the task more challenging for herself: instead of waiting for the gulls to land on the water, she tried to capture the gulls on their descent when they were more than a metre above the water surface.

She failed many times but kept going until she got good at it. More often than not, it was the naive juvenile gulls that were caught and subsequently tossed around. The next difficulty level entailed trying to catch the more clued-up, older gulls. As with human children, the activity itself, not just the outcome, has to be fun.

Life at Rockstar

An ex-Rockstar employee has written a fairly long account of his time at the company.
It's a good read, with some insights about the culture there that you might not have expected.

Draughts Cracked

The BBC has an article about a Canadian Artificial Intelligence team who have compiled a complete database of perfect draught moves which cannot be beaten.

Tesla Coil Music

Featuring music from Mario and Tetris, apparently.

Animal Play

Aw, a cute otter playing with a ball :-)

Younnat - Wheel Experience

There's something really appealing about music made with video game controllers.
The driving gloves are a nice touch too.

Avatar Machine

The Avatar Machine is a project to bring 3rd person gaming aesthetic into the real world.

$40 Billion Industry

Ars Technica has an article about Pricewaterhousecoopers latest Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report for 2007 - 2011, in which the consulting firm expects the computer games industry to rise from today's $37.5 billion to $48.9 billion in the next 4 years.

Spectrum games on vinyl

Back in the day when computer programs were encoded with audio on tape, some bands released records with games on their B-sides.

Who would perpetrate such a monstrous hybrid?

• Inner City Unit
  
• Pete Shelly
  
• The Thompson Twins
  
• Chris Sievey from The Freshies
  
• Shakin' Stevens
  
• The Stranglers
  
• Urusei Yatsura
  
• Information Society
  
• Isao Tomita
  
• Carter USM
  
• Papa Dance
  
• Atomic Robo Kid
  

Cheesy 80's pop + Spectrum code + vinyl = retro heaven!

Now if that's not the epitome of geek chic I don't know what is.

Ludic Reality: a construct for analysing meaning-mapping and epistemology in play

I recently came across a paper by Dan Pinchbeck called Ludic Reality: a construct for analysing meaning-mapping and epistemology in play which is presumably part of the author's PhD in which he cites Dovey and Kennedy's discussion of Turner in their book Game Cultures:

"His concept of rituals as liminal spaces, that is, transformative spaces that suspend normal social rules, constraints and affordances, has been co-opted by games theorists to describe the extra-daily structure of play (Dovey & Kennedy 2006, Flynt 2006, Pinchbeck 2006). Dovey & Kennedy draw attention to Turner’s crucial distinction between the liminal and the liminoid, that “the liminoid... is a commodity, which one selects and pays for [rather] than the liminal, which elicits loyalty and is bound up with one’s membership or desired membership in some highly corporate group. One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid.” (Turner 1982: 55)."

p. 5

Here are my notes from the whole paper:

Pinchbeck proposes an approach to analysing FPS game content based on the phenomenological embodiment of player in the transitional object of a 'Ludic Reality'. He proposes a way to reconcile Juul's "real rules and fictional worlds" by viewing the 'reality' of the game to be constituted by the relation between a schema or mental set of rules for being-in-the-world and the player's embodied, meaningful experiences in that world. Furthermore, these rules become progressively more constraining as the player advances through the narrative of the game, thereby focussing the sense of immersion.

Four "homodiegetic devices" are presented as examples of ways in which the ludic reality is maintained.

1) Drama is presented as a cybernetic process of reduction to control temporal flow and focus player attention.
2) The world of the game is considered as structural limitation of affordances available to the player, as a liminoid domain in which schema from actual reality can be rewritten, and also as a space by which the temporal dimension becomes meaningful though virtually physical space.
3) NPCs or AI agents are devices which construct the impression of a world with fewer limitations for the player than really exist. Actions which the player expects as reasonable but which are unavailable are delegated to NPC agents. They additionally serve to position the player inside a world with the illusion of temporal and dramatic dimensions existing beyond the extent of the player's sessions.
4) Player avatars themselves often exhibit cyborg or other unusual qualities which function to limit what we might expect to be reasonable actions for them to take. Furthermore they are often embroiled in mysterious scenarios which force the player to construct meaning local to the ludic reality, thus putting further constraints on what they might consider reasonable. This reduction in affordances results in a vessel into which the player can project.

Each of these devices operates within the system of the game rather as content, but also serves to structure the form of the player's experiences.

Reference:

Pinchbeck, Dan. Ludic Reality: a construct for analysing meaning-mapping and epistemology in play. (University of Portsmouth: 13 February 2007) <http://www.danpinchbeck.co.uk/ludicreality.pdf> (Last accessed 14th June 2007)

Gender Stereotypes in Game Studies

Crikey!

I've just been doing a literature review for my dissertation and came across a quotation that stopped me in my tracks,

"Murray's vision of holodeck-like video stories implies stories that would also appeal to our active social skills and social emotions, like establishing friendship, exerting care, feeling jealousy, falling in love, and so on. Such stories would be more attractive to women, and the success of the dollhouse game The Sims shows the market potentials for games that take some steps toward modelling the nonaggressive social world." (1)

I take it Torben won't be coming to the next Women in Games conference then.


(1) Grodal, Torben. "Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles", in Wolf, Mark J. P. & Perron, Bernard (eds.) The Video Game Theory Reader. (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 151.

Poker Big Blind

"Erik has a very special handicap, he is blind. It was on Friday the 8th of June that Erik won the no limit texas hold'em tournament 'Cosmo monthly final' with a total prize pool of $140 000."

Masters Thesis: Sex Games

Jennifer Chowdhury presented her Masters thesis in Interactive Telecommunications at New York University wearing her underwear.

The project is called Intimate Controllers and Wired have an article about it.

The prototype is very proto but I could imagine lots of potential for the principle, in a similar way that the Wii has the potential for innovative, fun games. This isn't without precedent though, it reminds me of the Rez Trance Vibrator.

See also Talk2Me.

Here's Jennifer presenting the project at SXSW.

9 Year Old Professional Gamer

The New York Times has an article about probably the worlds youngest professional gamer, Victor M. De Leon III, A.K.A. Lil’ Poison.

"Victor’s aptitude for video games surfaced at age 2, as he begin mimicking his father’s play."

"'He kind of passed me when he was 4,' Mr. De Leon said."

"At age 5, he entered the Major League Games and ranked in its top 64 players internationally. By the time he was 7, Victor competed in Chicago against more than 550 contestants, placing second — behind Uncle Gabriel."

"Besides prizes and product endorsements, Victor has a deal worth about $20,000 annually, plus expenses for trips to tournaments, from his sponsor, 1UP Network, a division of Ziff Davis Game Group, owners of gamer magazines and Web sites. Mr. De Leon declined to specify how much his son has accumulated, but said that it was almost enough to cover a private college education."

Wow! Check out the article, he sounds like a well adjusted kid too.

Urban art

Ok, so this doesn't really have anything to do with games, but could we agree that it's a playful art project?

City / Social Networking

A couple of my friends and ex-Rockstar colleagues have a kind of social networking concept that involves physically 'tagging' locations in the actual world and projecting that back onto Google Maps along with user comments on the locations.

This movie's mostly in German, but Mike speaks in (American) English to explain what it's all about,



I notice that Bristol's not on the map yet...

Literacy And New Media

I just wanted to bring to your attention an interesting discussion going on over at a friend's blog. It all started out as something of a lament about the decline of second hand book stores but is now dealing with things like literacy and gaming. All the action's in the comments. Read on and get involved by posting over there.

Here are some excerpts by a variety of authors:

"this is not about print versus internet, but about serious intellectual engagement with literature by a culture versus superficial engangement with literature, or no engagement at all. This is orthogonal to print versus internet, at least insofar as those media are equally hospitable to the sorts of texts that drive literary culture (though I am not sure that they are, to put it mildly)."

"Bookstores are not closing down because people are starting to read books online. No one I know reads books online. They are closing because people are simply reading less, there is a decay in our literary culture."

"YouTube most clearly indicates the new, and in my view inevitable, trend away from writing back towards an oral/visual culture."

"One further thing to add about the decline of the local bookstore and the rise of the internet is the phenomenon of Amazon, of course. The internet has not only made many industries virtual, it has also enabled an incredible centralisation that has destroyed local business cultures of many different kinds."

"Some random thoughts of some values of long prose: the massive and detailed role of the imagination in interacting with long textual works (as an aside, this is also why avant garde music has always been better than mainstream music, but that is a rant for another time), the inherent suitability of text to building an argument, the way engaging with complex texts better enables us to communicate with one another, the brand of sheer aesthetic joy that can only be produced by an encyclopaedic novel"

The Acoustic Ecology of the First-Person Shooter

I've just come across a PhD thesis by Mark Grimshaw of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, which deals with audio in video games, entitled The Acoustic Ecology of the First-Person Shooter.

Interesting because audio tends to get overlooked in favour of visual spectacle, but also interesting for me from a phenomenological perspective of considering the range of sense engaged during game play.

In other news, Australasia really looks like it's becoming a hotbed of game studies.

Tetris Effect

I mentioned that I'd written an essay recently which touched on violence and videogames. Well Terranova has a short piece on how repetition can change the way we see the world, which is very much like the Tetris Effect I spoke about in my piece.

The rewards for pro-gamers were far better than those available to pro-tennis players

An article from the BBC last year about David Kinnarid of the 4 Kings professional gaming clan.

Interesting because he was a pro tennis player before he quit to become a pro gamer.

"The excellent hand-eye co-ordination that helped him to become a good tennis player would make him a better gamer too, he said."

"It requires the same sort of ideas as tennis," he said, "though the physical side is not as much you are still using your head."

Augmented reality gaming...

This video was posted on the HP mscapers forum... It's meant to show the potential for location based technology. All very exciting and fun n'est-ce pas? Except I'm still a little dubious as to whether they'll really ever manage to get the real/virtual to merge quite as seemlessly as presented here. I'm also rather uncomfortable about the target audience for the clip, as I pointed out (perhaps a little too strongly!) on the forum.

Good to see the blog is still getting new posts! Hope everyone enjoys the summer break.

French tax cuts for "cultural" games

I just came across an article on Wired about the tax cuts the French government wants to give game development studios. However, they have an interesting set of conditions which reminds me of Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play, the discourse on high/low art and ludology vs. narratology,

Not all video-game makers will necessarily benefit from France's tax-break incentives, either. Only video games with "cultural content" will qualify.

"The games must have a narration of some kind and a scenario written in French with elements of adventure or simulation games," said Marc Herubel, an adviser to the culture ministry. He cited Fahrenheit and Missing as games that would have probably qualified for the tax break.

And among some of France's intellectual elite, such as professors of art theory and history, video games also have a long way to go before they are taken seriously, some say.

"Intellectuals in France who defend the traditional culture like the cinema, literature and music, etc., generally don't care about video games and say they have nothing to do with culture," said Frank Beau, a consultant and writer who specializes in new media and the video-game industry. "On the other end, the intelligent set who defend video games in France are usually involved in psychology and social sciences, and they tend to favor role-playing games. "

Videogames and violence

Just a couple of days after I handed in an assignment for my other module (Researching New Media) which dealt with violence in video games, the topic hits the headlines again:

• Joystiq ponders, "The Political Game: How old is too old for game blame?"
  
  "When pundits, culture cops and massacre chasers espouse their theories about the forces that drive real-world killers, exactly how old does the perpetrator need to be before video games get a pass?
  Based on recent events, that magic number is ... 30."
  
  "It's bad enough that some critics will reflexively point the finger at video games when a 15-year-old commits a violent act. It's indefensible to blame games for the actions of a man in his mid-20's."
  
  



• GamersWithJobs reckon games are "No Cause For Murder"
  
  "The argument that games cause terrible acts of homicide implies that movies, music, or even other people can have the same power over anyone."
  
  "Lasting, positive change will only come when we stop reaching for causes and start creating conditions that will support kids and teenagers who need it. We can’t make anyone put the pin back in the grenade, but by supporting active, caring people who want to help, we might be able to influence some of those fateful decisions before it gets that far."
  
  



• ./ Games is discussing whether "Games Are No Cause For Murder"

Zombies Attack San Francisco

They just wanted to eat some brains.
Pictures and article.

Online Iraqi Hunt

Domestic Tension, an installation featuring a live webcam, paintball gun and an Iraqi / American.

Is it a game or is it art?

The interview makes interesting reading.

DJ WiiJ

Engadget has a short article about using the Wiimote as a DJ interface.

Guitar Hero

The Guitar Zeros play music with two guitar hero controllers,

Women In Games

I've begun posting my notes from WiG 07. More to follow shortly.

Flow and Seduction

I've come across a blog post about a paper by Torill Mortensen called "Flow, Seduction and Mutual Pleasures". The post makes the paper sound really interesting, but I haven't had time to read the latter yet. Here are some quotes from the blog,


"Mortensen takes a look at Csikzentmihalyi's theories on flow and Baudrillard's theories on seduction as they may be applied to the pleasure players derive from online gaming."

"The flow experience ... is one of achievement, not interaction, an achievement that is rewarding in itself, not through the rewards from others."

"the quest element in gaming is only seductive when it is unresolved"

"Mortensen points out that players who derive their pleasure from mastery and control of the game - from being functional and productive - fit Csikzentmihalyi's theories on flow. On the other hand, players who value the social, interactive and uncertain nature of gaming fit Baudrillard's theories on seduction"

Flashmob: 5th April 2007 @ Victoria, London

On Thursday, the 5th of April, a 4000 person strong flashmob occurred at Victoria train station in London. Sounds like great fun!



It's just like a real club when everyone cheers together! Or pehaps it's rather a simulacrum of a club. Or is it just playing at being a simulacrum of a club...?



I love the guy with the glowsticks!

FBI visit Second life!

It seems it's not just academics who are visiting Linden Labs' Second Life. The FBI have reportedly visited casinos in the virtual world to assess their legality, given recent changes in online gambling laws in the States.

Someone on a gaming forum I frequent asked in disgust whether they'd be taxing people for moeny made in virtual worlds next... but I'd assume that if you are converting income in Linden Dollars into Real Life money then you should probably declare it in your accounts, but if you don't convert it then what?

Anyway - guess this is an example of people playing at gambling, but who may actually be gambling... if you get my drift ;)

Video games are bad III

At first I thought this might be an April Fool's... but it looks like it is genuine. It's certainly the usual well-balanced fare you would expect from the Mail. Rather than try and analyse the cause of the 'problem' they take the usul lazy approach of using video games as a scapegoat. It could be argued that it's the increased fear of abduction, that tabloid journalism has done such a good job of instilling in parents, that means they don't let their kids play outside. The other problem with this is the implication that 'childhood' is some kind of sacrosanct period in a person's life; isn't the concept actually an invention of the 20th century... and limited to wealthy, developed countries?

Japanese Go prints

Thought I'd also post a link to the site where I got the Go prints that I used in my presentation. It's a very poor website: frames, links opening in new windows, the quality of the images isn't always great... but there's plenty of info about the prints, the story behing them etc...

More Wii links

Just to follow up on the Wii discussion yesterday, and Gareth's post, here are some interesting Wii-related links. I haven't yet got the Wiimote working with my Windoze laptop - there are some issues with Bluetooth drivers which I hope to resolve next week - but all the info needed to do this can be found at this first link:

• WiiLi - A project to produce a version of Linux that will run on the Wii. At the moment more interesting because of the information available about the technology, and in particular the 'Wiimote'.

• LiveMove - A video demo of software designed to record Wiimote 'gestures' that can then be used in games...
  
  
• People playing Wii - IMHO a superb piece of publicity - footage showing 'normal' people playing the Wii...
  
  
• Iwata Asks - Obviously this is to some extent intended as publicity for the Wii but it gives a little insight into the reasoning behind the Wii design.
  
  
• Wii radio control car - The WiiBot is interesting, but it seems to me that the input is basically acting as a switch to set off pre-recorded movements. If genuine this clip shows some Wiimote control without latency...
  
  
• Cooking Mama - Just for fun... a trailer for a rather amusing looking game, which for some obscure reason reminds me of the utterly bizarre fish chopping game :)
  

Wiimote

During our meeting today we mentioned software which can read the Wii controller's data. I use DarwiinRemote on OSX and I guess you Windows people would use WiinRemote? Post a comment if you try it out or have a better suggestion.

Also mentioned was this sword-wielding, Wiimote contwolled wobot (or Wiibot if you will):

Baudrillard GTA Mashup

Here's the footage of GTA dubbed with Baudrillard that Helen mentioned on Tuesday,

PS3 Cures Cancer, Alzheimer's, World Conflict, etc...

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project from Stanford University using home computers all over the world to help research cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's amongst others.
You can install it on your own computer, but it looks like PS3s are considerably more powerful and are revolutionising this project.

Burning Man

A few years ago I went to a festival in the Nevada desert, called Burning Man.

I've just come across a paper entitled Burningman and the Ritual Aspects of Play which cites Huizinga and Turner. This paper appears to be a prelude to the author's PhD dissertation “Reckoning Ritual and Counterculture in The Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography and the Self in Reflexive Modernism." which also sounds very interesting.

I haven't read these yet but I'm going to leave them here as a bookmark for myself and any others who might be interested in reading it for me and commenting on their thoughts about it :)

Television -> Pong -> T-shirt

While Jason Wilson has been rethinking the relationship between television and Pong, the crew at ThinkGeek have been rethinking the relationship between t-shirt and Pong.

Machinima

I've just added a new link to The Machinima Archive (more of which can also be found at Select Parks on their Machinima section), and while I was doing that I also went and found the original Top Gear footage which was then made into machinima that I posted about earlier. That post now has both the original and the machinima interpretations so you can compare and contrast.

I really like the way the machinima one is shot, and the intro sequence is very nice in particular.

I also used to read Concerned a lot. I followed the whole run actually. It's a web comic made with Gary's Mod in Half Life 2 and is pretty funny if you've played the game. If not then I imagine it wouldn't be terribly interesting for you.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

"If anything, the constant cycle of playing the game versus thinking about playing the game - the association, then dissociation - helped to sharpen the line between game and reality, not blur it."

Gamasutra are running an article about Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. You might have heard of this game as it's been quite controversial. The article reviews the reaction from press, developers and players and discussing serious games in general and why the industry, academia and government should be supporting them.

It's a good read.

Game Focus

A good friend of mine and ex-Rockstar colleague, Thad Frogley, has written up his notes from the recent Game Focus Germany event in Hannover.

There's a movie which features footage of another friend of mine, Babsi Lippe.
Don't worry, there's only a little bit of German at the start and end:



In the text, Thad covers amongst others, Babsi's talk about gender, games and Japan, and Richard Bartle's talk about games, art and culture.

Nice.

Music and Games

After the last Mario flute / beatbox extravaganza, I offer you "Super Mario Medley",

Baudrillard's Reality

On Tuesday, the 6th of March, Jean Baudrillard, the famous contemporary French philosopher, died.
Terranova has a discussion about reality and hyper-reality in his memory.

Homebrew Games

An article from December 2006 discussing Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express project with which home, amateur developers can make their own XBox Live games.

Console manufacturers normally keep a stranglehold on the games that are developed on "their" machines, and also because they always have final say over whether a professionally finished game can even be released to market. This case is particularly interesting because of the reference to YouTube in this quote,

"It is about sharing games and is envisioned as a YouTube for games," said Andrew Sithers, the academic lead at Microsoft UK.

Perhaps they've finally realised that there are ways to make money from developers without maintaining such a strong grip on authorisation: allow anyone to develop, but ensure that the means of distribution (which they own) still directs revenue to the publisher. I'm still sceptical about how ideologically close their implemention will be to YouTube community model, and I imagine there will be restrictions to what is made available. There are regulatory legal concerns with allowing the public to release content through a commercial channel, as the commercial entity then becomes responsible for that content.

On the other hand it sounds like fun and Microsoft game development tools are generally excellent. I'd be interested in buying an XBox 360 (and a PC to develop on). One concern that I have which is shared by other industry people is with getting new people into the industry. Making games now is much more complicated than when I was a kid in the 80's. You turned the machine on and it just begged to be programmed. You had everything you needed to make games on your own. There wasn't really any difference between amateur and professional developers. My concern is that because there's no imperative for kids to make their own games that will negatively affect potential industry recruits. On the other hand, there's a much greater number of computer owners and users now, we have internet access, the games industry is mainstream, etc.

Swings and roundabouts.

Interdisciplinary game studies

"The researcher needs to get online and get her hands dirty interacting with 733t d00ds forthwith"

I've just been reading a thought-provoking article by Dmitri Williams about interdisciplinarity (or the lack thereof) in game studies with regards to humanities and social science research, Bridging the methodological divide in game research

Lego MMO

NetDevil and Lego have announced that a Massively Multiplayer Online game is in the works.

Imagine a combination of Lego Racers/Starwars and Second Life. I can think of a couple of games researchers who might be interested in that.

In the mean time, I recently heard about people playing WoW for free on pirate servers such as MaNGOS.

Video games are bad II

I shouldn't think that BSM have an anti-gaming agenda, so these results are interesting - though I'd question the accuracy of their survey, given the narrow and targeted sample group. Still, perhaps this is an example of the idea of play as having no consequences being carried over into everyday life? Perhaps simulation games are problematic because they're close enough to reality, whilst at the same time allowing you to do things without consequences, or that you wouldn't normally be able to do?

Gamers in Society

There's a really interesting conference coming up soon (17-18 April) in Finland called Gamers in Society:

"The two-day event consists of themed sessions that discuss the social and cultural aspects of gaming"

Unfortunately it's immediately before the Women in Games conference (19-21 April) which makes it pretty inconvenient. Doh!

Here's the brief anyway,

"The social aspects of digital gaming are gaining increasing attention by academics, game developers and media alike. Popular controversy on the supposedly detrimental effects of games are countered by growing attention to the social value and cultural significance that contemporary games present to their players. New research is probing the precise roles games and playing occupy in the lives of various groups and individuals, producing interesting data about the multiple domains of life within information technology saturated societies. Simultaneously this kind of socio-cultural studies of game players require novel approaches into existing theories and methodologies in human sciences, informed by dialogue within the emerging field of game studies."

The Call For Papers has now closed, but this should give you an idea about the kind of material likely to be presented:

"The list of possible presentation topics includes, but is not limited to:

• ethnographic studies of particular groups of game players
  
  
• studies about social networks or communities created around, or within games
  
  
• research into the social roles and dynamics within such game communities
  
  
• inquiries into the everyday uses and social significance of games
  
  
• studies into issues related with status, value and social norms that govern the position of games and gamers within the wider context of contemporary society
  
  
• demographic studies mapping the time, money or other investments into games by various parts of the population
  studies discussing the concept of game culture, or applying cultural and social approach into game studies"
  

When does a game stop being fun?

I thought this piece on the BBC technology news site was rather interesting. It's clear that there comes a point when unlocking bonuses in games stops being fun and becomes a chore. With some of the MMORPGS this has led to people being paid to play the game to level up a character... so the game stops being a game and becomes a - probably rather tedious - job. But in this particular case I'm wondering how you'd describe the activity taking place?

In a sense the creation of the machine that presses the buttons is a form of play... but if we take that out of the equation and assume that there are people who may actually be doing this manually (i.e. starting a game, quitting then restarting etc.) then what are they doing? It's not work, but nor is it play... so what is it?

WoW Birthday cake

A very understanding and creative girlfriend of a World of Warcraft player has made him a really cool themed birthday cake.

Greatest Sex Symbol

I just watched a programme on channel 4 about the top 100 sex symbols in film.
Not only did "Lara Croft" come in at number 6, but Angelina Jolie, who hit the big time playing Lara in 2001, came in at number 1.
Regardless of what you think about these results, it certainly says something about media and contemporary culture.

For further discussion, see this paper.

CSS Modifications

I've been editing the CSS for this website, stretched the main panel where the posts go (because it suits my 1024x768 12" PowerBook), and added a search box on the right.

Let me know if this is inconvenient for any of you viewing this on a small screen.

Video Game Advocacy

Gamasutra is running a feature on Doug Lowenstein's swan song speech for the Entertainment Software Association at the D.I.C.E. summit, in which he criticises game developers for not defending their creative rights.

Personally I think this comment from one of the conference delegates hits the nail on the head,


"While censorship and game content have long been recurring discussions, I see them merely as a distraction to a larger issue. The issue is for game developers to take more control over how their work reaches the public. For two decades, the game development community has continued to allow proprietary hardware manufacturers to dictate the marketplace. The history of this transformation could fill a book. But the fact is that the circumstances that made this arrangement so necessary and successful no longer exist. Today interactive content is far more important than the hardware. But the games industry has continued to allow Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony to call the shots.

The game business is always looking for parallels to Hollywood. As frequently as possible it is pointed out that the video game business grosses more money than Hollywood. But Hollywood never would have become Hollywood if the manufacturers of movie projectors took 40% of the movie business’ revenue. It sounds silly, but there is your parallel. Even sillier, imagine movie projector manufacturers dictated what could be shown on their projectors. That’s censorship!

Anyone can make a video or movie that is easily disseminated to the general public. Any musician can create content for everyone to hear. Certainly writers have no trouble reaching their audience. But the most talented artists in the world have been divided and conquered by a few hardware manufacturers.

Even more important to the development community than their fight against censorship should be the fight to distribute their work on an open platform; a platform that allows developers to be rewarded for their effort, and not destroyed for their failures. This is a realistic goal that everyone in the game development community should be working towards.

-Eli Tomlinson, Gamix"

Sony PSP Viral Marketing

As mentioned in our seminar this evening, here are some links about the Sony PSP viral marketing scandel.

Geeky game music

Ok - just found this and it tops the Mario flautist and pretty much all other game theme-music playing groups I've seen online (admittedly not that many). I don't actually remember this theme tune but it's the way they perform it that's most entertaining....

[Edit: I've embedded the movie for convenience - Gareth]

Virtual Graffiti II

This is somewhat drier in tone than Gareth's post, but whereas that dealt with the projection of light into a physical space - which isn't entirely a 'virtual' phenomenon - this is perhaps the real thing. HP are pioneering the 'mediascape' - basically using GPS (and other systems such as infra-red) to associate particular locations with digital media such as audio, images, video, interactive content etc...

Taken to its extreme - anyone with a GPS enabled device could digitally 'tag' a particular location... in this case you need to have an iPaq with the relevant software installed to be able to see the content (my cynical side says this is just a way of selling more iPaqs!).

Anyway it just so happens that it's also what I'm going to be working on in my other module... so if anyone wants to try this out I'll hopefully have access to the kit soon and will allegedley have produced my own mediascape in 10 weeks time!

Hacking the city: Virtual Graffiti

Playful use of the urban environment, crossing boundaries of the magic circle.

LifeLogging

This is nothing to do with games, but I'm just posting it here because I thought you might find it interesting.
Apologies for the spam if you're not.

---

Scientific American are running an article about MyLifeBits, which is a project to record one's entire life, a process called "LifeLogging".

"GORDON BELL, one of the authors, launched a research project aimed at creating a digital archive of all his interactions with the world. Bell's digital memories include documents from his long career in the computer industry, all the photographs he takes and conversations he records, every Web site he visits, and every e-mail he sends and receives."

They also quote Vannevar Bush's Memex as inspiration for this project.

It sounds like a fascinating research project with curious by-products. For example, the SenseCam which automatically takes photographs whenever it detects a change in location or proximity to another person, and its application in helping retention amongst memory-impaired patients.

A discussion about this article over on Slashdot is mostly concerned with questions of security, about unlawful / unethical access to one's own personal, searchable, random-access life history.

There are also some interesting quotations from another site which remind me of Latour's concept of delegation in "Where are the missing masses? Sociology of a door",

"It gives you kind of a feeling of cleanliness," Bell tells me. "I can offload my memory. I feel much freer about remembering something now. I've got this machine, this slave, that does it."

And also of Marshall McLuhan's concept of sensory extension and the discourse on cyborgs,


"He has a superhuman brain: Does that change the nature of being human?"


The spectre of Foucault also crops up here in a maddening vision of absolute surveillance,


"What's more, knowing that everything is being logged might actually turn us into different people. We might be less flamboyant, less funny, less willing to say risky but potentially useful things, much as politicians on-camera tamp down their public statements into stifled happytalk. "There'd be a chilling effect," particularly early on, says Mark Federman, former strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, a high-tech think tank. "We'd all be on our best behavior. Reality would become reality TV."


I enjoyed reading this article with its witty and imaginative style,


"And even when his system is failing, Bell remains pretty bemused about everything, displaying the perpetual geniality of all brilliant, accomplished, wealthy older men who've long ceased to care what anyone thinks of them. Still, as I watch the hunt for the missing call, it feels like some creepy sci-fi version of Alzheimer's, or a scene plucked out of a bleak Philip K. Dick novel: Our antihero has an external brain with perfect recall, but it's locked up tight and he can't get in--a cyborg estranged from his own limbs."

Geeky comics

I've been reading some comics over at XKCD, a pretty geeky webcomic which mostly seems to be jokes about mathematics, but I also came across a couple of funny video game related ones:

Pong
Counter Strike

Surgeons Playing Video Games

CNN have a very interesting article about a study indicating that surgeons who play video games perform better surgery. But this article is interesting not only because of that conclusion, which in itself is perhaps not so surprising, but because of some extra commentary bolted on at the end. There are five sentences right at the bottom of the article all with a very strong tone warning about the dangers of excessive gaming amongst children. This is totally disconnected to the rest of the article, which suggests to me its usefulness as a piece of cultural 'evidence' for underlying negative societal attitudes towards gaming.

N00b Vs Pro

This appears to be an English test for primary school children. The child has understood 'pro' in the sense of 'professional', and uses online lingo to form the opposite: n00b (although one could argue that the correct opposite of n00b is 1337 :-)

History of Mobile Gaming, or "Snakes on a Train!"

I've just read an interesting article called "Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement". In it the authors trace a genealogy of mobiles games (such as playing 'snake' on your phone) back into the 19th Century, through developments in transport and entertainment.

Here are a few quotations to give you a flavour of the piece:


"The printed book, arguably the first mass-produced object (the first type of object that required and benefited from large-scale investment) was a successful medium of mobile entertainment almost from the start, when the octavo and duodecimo ‘pocketbook' formats of the sixteenth century started to appear. Printing and mass production also made possible a mass culture of portable entertainment, focused on all sorts of games - board games, dice games, card games etc."

"Lighter (both in content and as artifacts) newspapers were more suitable for mobile reading situations (Schivelbusch, 1977, p.62-66). Newspapers and similar media objects designed to be used in trains represent the first stages of mobile entertainment."

"One of the most basic uses for mobile media technology has been fulfilling the uncomfortable or dull moments for individuals using public transportation. The context of use causes certain requirements of size, weight, durability as well as user interface of mobile media of today."

"Card games have obviously been popular, but chess also spread in the early nineteenth century to industrial towns in Great Britain for example (Eales, 1985). Chessboards, dominoes, board games and other entertainment products spread throughout Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, both as home entertainment and as amusement used while travelling for example on steam boats."

"The logic that supported the Kinetoscope and the phonograph - that is, the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject - is replayed today in the increasing centrality of the computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption of electronic entertainment commodities"

"The stereoscope functioned as the equivalent of the modern mobile entertainment device in its ability to capture the user and transport him or her to another universe: "The immersiveness of the experience was always one of the evocative aspects of stereography. In its basic construction the stereoscope continued the tradition of all kinds of ‘peep-show' devices, which were popular entertainment in the nineteenth century at country fairs and even in children's rooms. The person who ‘immersed' his/her eyes into the ‘hood' of the stereoscope was in a sense alone with the scene s/he was observing. The situation resembles the experience of wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display, as had been pointed out" (Huhtamo, 1995) Huhtamo refers to virtual reality devices, but equally as justified as an example would be the mobile device with a screen that is basically meant to be a personal hole for "peeping into.""

Substitute Lecture

Despite being ill last week and unable to physically be present, I came across a virtual lecture from Helen while at HUMlab, which makes for a good substitute and also features robot ludologists!

Music Map

Seeing as the piece by Marie-Laure Ryan is discussing virtual space I thought it would be worth posting a link to the music map site I mentioned before. One problem with visualising data from databases is that representing it in standard 2 or 3 dimensional space - whilst useful as it displays it in dimensions we can easily comprehend - limits the ability to represent complex relationships between data.

Adding interactivity can increase the representation beyond simple 'cartesian space' and this is something that happens with these dynamic 'topic-maps'*. The item at the centre is the current point of focus. The closer any other item is to the centre, the closer the relationship between the two. Clicking on any of the orbiting topics places it in focus and displays a new set of associations. The end result is a set of connections that would be very difficult to represent (meaningfully at least) in standard/static space... and it's fun to play with too.

Probably also worth looking at www.gnod.net/ for a bit more info and some alternative applications.


* From xml.com: "...an information structure that breaks out of the traditional hierarchical straightjacket that we have gotten used to squeezing our information into. A topic map usually contains several overlapping hierarchies which are rich with semantic cross-links..."

Cult Game Studs

I've just read an awesome manifesto by a Canadian sociologist for a kind of culturally oriented game studies that I'm interested in:

The potential for game studies in my view lies in the possibility of offering an analysis of computer games and game cultures as critical locations for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating and constituting the social interaction and organization of subjects in late modern information societies.

Simon, Bart. "Beyond Cyberspatial Flaneurie - On the Analytic Potential of Living With Digital Games" in Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.62-67 (2006), DOI: 10.1177/1555412005281789

This was from the fist issue of Games and Culture, the new journal from Sage which began last year. I really must go over these back issues. It looks like there's a lot of great material there.

An educational game that works?

Tssk.. I only just realised that the post titles were also links. Not being an experienced blogger this wasn't immediately obvious to me. With my web design hat on I'd actually say it was bad practice, but I digress...

I managed to find the link to the bbc news article about an apparently successful educational game. Perhaps this is one example of how aesthetics can play an important role in the perception of a game. The fact that the developer makes a comment that educational game graphics can 'look a bit iffy' would certainly suggest that he feels part of the success of his game adaptation is down to its aesthetics.

Pac-Man Fever

Ok, I know today's been pretty prolific for posts, but just one more before bed:

If you're a Generation Xer like me, odds are you have at least one specific arcade you can recall, where you probably spent your weight in quarters every summer. Don't you miss it?

On the beach at Hayling Island near my grandparents' house :-)

This is a really interesting article by Wil Wheaton about game arcades. It reminds me of the piece by Seremetakis on the physical constitution of memories ('The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory' in Seremetakis, C. Nadia ed. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity), which I connect to the Gibson quote about the cybernetic loop between a player and the arcade machine:

I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids' eyes, neurones moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game.

(Lister, et al., New Media: A Critical Introduction, p. 370)

In Wheaton's case the memories of his passing culture are richly associated with the physical senses too, but rather than being absorbed through food, they enter the body through the cybernetic feedback loop: game -> eyes -> hands -> game, and hence are retained as memories in the brain.

Game Love Song

A beautiful song about video games and love.

Videogames == bad

An older (August 2005) article which illustrates the use of videogames as a negative cultural value.

65 out of 490 young ladies who attend Timkin High School in Canton, Ohio are preggers, and video games may be to blame

I also present a comic from the brilliant Penny Arcade videogames blog, and the corresponding Gamasutra article,

A controversial new academic study has suggested that playing violent video games can lead young men to believe it is acceptable to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol

Game Boys for Play Girls!

An interview (August 2006) with one of my friends, Babsi Lippe, who completed her PhD on girls, Japan and games last year.

Any old monkey can play Miss PacMan

I'm not sure where this fits in the syllabus. Perhaps I have to admit I'm just recycling old links now to make the blog look more impressive.

Top Gear Vs Battle Field 2

This is just great

It's a Top Gear episode recreated using graphics from a popular military videogame called Battle Field 2.



[Edit: 2007_03_14] I've just found the original footage, so you can compare them side-by-side:


Top Gear - Range Rover Vs. Tank - Funny bloopers R us

Book list

It seems Ernest Adams has a book list 'for everyone in the game industry'.

Now, while we're not in the industry per-se, it might be interesting if you want to follow up on any further material. Also particularly interesting is the inclusion of some texts that have come up during this course and elsewhere in my New Media MA (Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith, Juul, Zimmerman, Murray, JP Gee, Csikszentmihalyi, McLuhan, etc, though there's clearly a couple of important texts missing...

A short history of videogames

Just going over some older material that you might be interested in.
This one's nothing terribly special, and I don't go in for the 'evolution' thing, but this short film does give you a taste for the progression in videogame graphics over the last twenty years.

Cyberpong

Following on from our discussions of the body and it's relationship to videogames, I refer you with an article from Wired nearly two years ago:

Matt Nagle is 26 years old, and is a C4 quadriplegic, and he can play Pong with his mind. You might also describe him as cybernetic, part biology, part technology.

Four months after the operation, I watched Caplan take Nagle through a typical training session. He tracked Nagle's mental activity on two large monitors, one of which displayed a graph of red and green spiking lines. Each spike represented the firing of clusters of neurons. As Nagle performed specific actions in his mind's eye - move arm left, move arm up - the electrodes picked up the patterns of nearby neuron groups. Then BrainGate amplified and recorded the corresponding electrical activity. Over dozens of trials the computer built a filter that associated specific neural patterns with certain movements. Later, when Nagle again mentally pictured the motions, the computer translated the signals to guide a cursor.

MMO Ritual

The excellent videogames blog Terra Nova has a recent article and discussion on ritual and community bonding in Massively Multiplayer Online games.
I've added this site to the links section as it's a great resource you should check back at regularly.

Beatboxing Mario Flautist

How cool's that?!

The World of Whorecraft

Kotaku has an article about the bizarre cross-over between the gaming and pornography worlds. Now there's an ethnographic study just waiting to happen!

Psychoanalysis in survival horror

I just came across an article which appears to be a psychoanalytic analysis of a couple of popular video games. I haven't read it yet as it seems quite heavy, but here's an excerpt from the introduction to whet your appetite,

"Two years ago, we presented a psychoanalytic interpretation of the survival horror series Resident Evil and Silent Hill entitled "Playing with Ourselves." Drawing on Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Ian, we attempted to illuminate the overlap survival horror games shared with psychoanalytic theorists. The Resident Evil series conservatively positions a player as a defender of Lacanian "symbolic order," the psychological force constituting subjectivity (discussed further below). On the other hand, Silent Hill subverts our anticipation to occupy this position. If Resident Evil comfortably positions us as analyst, then Silent Hill mischievously collapses the distinction between analyst and analysand-undermining with it the surrounding symbolic order upon which such distinctions rely."

Juul

I've added a new link on the right hand sidebar, to Jesper Juul's blog, The Ludologist.
If you've got time before our next seminar, take a look at his site to get some kind of background to his work.

Game On - Field Trip

Ok gang,

We don't have much time to arrange our trip to London, so perhaps you should take a look at the information online, and check your diary for when you're free. The Game On exhibition is at the Barbican in London, and runs until Sunday the 25th of February.

Unfortunately we've missed the opportunity to hear Jonathan Smith's (TT Games) presentation about the development of Lego Star Wars.

Give it some thought and we'll decide upon a plan when we next meet in person.

Second Life (German)

A short programme about Second Life and World of Warcraft, dealing with questions of identity, reality and economics.
Featuring a friend of mine, Melissa (Talulah), this programme is in German with no subtitles I'm afraid.

College Saga

There is also a BBC Technology article about this film which can be accessed here:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/games/story/0,,1997608,00.html

Golum and Smeagol sing Barry White

My justification for including this is tenuous, but we mentioned the Lord of the Rings intermediality during this evening's seminar, plus this is clearly playful, user-created (or remixed / mashedup) content.

Good enough?

Blast Theory

I've just added a new link to Brighton's Blast Theory, a playful interactive art group who's work deals with the boundaries between actual and virtual, between the serious and play, with convergence and our relationships to technology.

I once had the pleasure to play one of their games, I Like Frank, which was physically based in Adelaide, the city I used to make video games in when I lived in Australia, but which also co-existed simultaneously online. Players ran around the city looking for clues, while communicating to online players who were hunting for clues on the project's website and trying to direct their real world counterparts.

It was interesting and fun. I was playing with a close friend who I'd not seen for months, and it gave us a way to be co-present in a shared space: partly the real city, partly a virtual representation of the city, and partly our imaginations and memories of the other. I was able to see her avatar on the virtual map reflecting where she physically was, and she was able to see my avatar on the same virtual map displayed on her mobile phone. My avatar was like a ghost - it was physically located but only visible through the map on her phone. Our interaction and 'communication' was limited to being able to move our avatars relative to one another, as well as me being able to send SMSes through the game to her, which she could only reply 'yes' or 'no' to. Despite these incredibly limited means of expression, our shared knowledge of one another facilitated a wonderfully rich level of signification and interpretation to these acts.

This kind of mediated interaction fascinates me, and is incredibly important to games like poker. Think about our session last week and how we were trying to second-guess one another, trying to emphasise with each other and interpret body language and playing style. I was intentionally using what I knew about each other's personality to guide my play - to estimate when I could force other players out of the game with a bluff, or to know when someone else was trying to do the same.

In professional poker this kind of unintentional semiotics is probably more important than the individual's 'skill'. As Ben mentioned, it is technically classified as a game of 'chance' (hence gambling), but the skill involved is more subtle than statistical analysis or card counting; it is the skill of 'reading' obfuscated human communication mediated by the unusual, novel channels of the game. By this I do not only mean the formal rules of the game, but the environment and actions the game affords and the cultural history developed through play that inform our current relationship to it; Poker is a 'serious' game, it has a wealth of associations in film which can lend it an intimidating presence. We've all heard stories about the crazy things that can happen if it goes too far. It's interesting to think about this in terms of crossing the 'magic circle', where bluring the lines between play and the real world can be dangerous. This is a common argument against recreational drug use too.

Scriptwriting for videogames

Videogames industry website Gamasutra are running an interview with Susan O'Connor, a scriptwriter for titles such as Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeon Siege II, Act of War, and Gears of War. In this article she discusses the construction of narratives, which are clearly at least part of what defines videogames.

She also has some (tentative) things to say about being a woman in a male-normative sector,

I want to be careful what I say here, but men and women are probably, in some ways, wired a little bit differently.

Shocking!

Huizinga article at Game Studies

I've added a couple of links to the right hand sidebar, at the bottom. One of these is to my favourite scholarly computer games site, Game Studies, and I just noticed that they have an article about Huizinga up there. I haven't read it yet but it strikes me as something we could discuss, particularly in light of our recent reading.

Tetris documentary

To get the ball rolling I offer this tale of two cultures, a BBC documentary about the commercial development of Tetris,