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."