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.