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."
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!
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.
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.
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...
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
gamepolitics. Are Video Games Art?
Musgrove, Mike. Monster Fun. But Is It Art?
Ochalla, Bryan. Are Games Art? (Here We Go Again...)
Smuts, Aaron. Are Video Games Art?
Smuts, Aaron. Video Games and the Philosophy of Art
tmenezes. Are Games Art?
White, Gareth. Embodied Evil - The Aesthetics of Embodiment in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (University of the West of England, 20th August 2007).
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.
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.
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.
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.
