Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective

It’s Gun Week over at Kotaku (seri­ously, though, when are guns not an issue on a video gam­ing site?), and Mike Fahey has com­piled a 102-second his­tor­i­cal overview of 18 years’ worth of get­ting shot, First Per­son Shooter-style. The video is inter­est­ing, and some­what depress­ing: The cal­cu­lus of pro­jec­tile weaponry meshes so well with the com­pu­ta­tional affor­dances of video games that we’ve been able to sim­u­late bul­let drop for decades but have yet to model a hand­shake with any accuracy.

Watch Get­ting Shot: A 103-Second Ret­ro­spec­tive. While you’re at it, con­sider this footage, too.

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University of Florida Honors Courses — Fall 2010

From the Uni­ver­sity of Terra Florida Uni­ver­sity of Florida Hon­ors Courses — Fall 2010 catalog.

21st Cen­tury Skills in Star­craft is an 8 week entirely online course that uses the pop­u­lar real time strat­egy (RTS) game Star­craft to teach valu­able 21st Cen­tury Skills through a hands-on approach. With soci­ety becom­ing increas­ingly technology-based and fast-paced, it is impor­tant for pro­fes­sion­als to be highly pro­fi­cient in skills such as crit­i­cal think­ing, prob­lem solv­ing, resource man­age­ment, and adap­tive deci­sion mak­ing. These skills are fun­da­men­tal in Star­craft and there­fore make the game a highly effec­tive envi­ron­ment for stu­dents to ana­lyze and take action in com­plex sit­u­a­tions. Com­puter and video games of all types have become a major part of today’s enter­tain­ment and tech­nol­ogy worlds. Also, online edu­ca­tion is an area of intense growth with many employ­ers and pro­fes­sions using online courses and work­shops for career devel­op­ment. This course syn­the­sizes the three threads of 21st Cen­tury skill devel­op­ment, gam­ing, and online edu­ca­tion into an inno­v­a­tive and expe­ri­en­tial approach that encour­ages stu­dents to iden­tify, learn, and prac­tice cru­cial skills and apply and relate them to real-world sit­u­a­tions. It does not teach about Star­craft, but rather aims to uti­lize the game and the com­plex sit­u­a­tions that arise within it to present and develop the impor­tant skills pro­fes­sion­als will undoubt­edly need in the 21st Cen­tury workplace.”

There’s clearly a lot of Gee’s think­ing at work here, at least in the remove, and, by exten­sion, a tra­di­tion of Amer­i­can prag­ma­tist phi­los­o­phy that goes right back to Dewey.

How­ever, from another angle, isn’t this really just a course in reme­dial com­pu­ta­tional lit­er­acy? With really sexy, 32-bit reinforcement?

Via CrunchGear.

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Pink on Incentive and Algorithmic Cognition

This semes­ter, espe­cially as we’re look­ing at mate­r­ial by James Paul Gee, we’ll talk about incen­tives to mas­tery, reward, and cog­ni­tion. This (fun! ani­mated!) excerpt from a recent RSA pre­sen­ta­tion by Daniel Pink is an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to an inter­est­ing behav­ioral prob­lem that the best games address in sur­pris­ing ways. The dilemma is this: Econ­o­mists would gen­er­ally have us believe that cap­i­tal is always the best reward, and pro­vides the great­est incen­tive. But as Pink explains (and as my friend, D. Linda Gar­cia, would have told you), it doesn’t always work that way.

As an aside: The RSA Ani­mate series is mar­velous — I hope that high schools are mak­ing use of these. It even makes Zizek’s unflag­ging mis­an­thropy look like fun. (Although you should know that, in my own expe­ri­ence as his stu­dent — con­sis­tent with sto­ries my col­leagues tell — Slavoj Zizek is an earnest, warm, and gen­er­ous man).

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Arcade Theory Almost Full

The Uni­ver­sity opened reg­is­tra­tion this AM, and CCTP628, Arcade The­ory, is almost full. If you are inter­ested in tak­ing the class but are unable to reg­is­ter (due to a hold on your record, et cetera), please email me to let me know, and I’ll save you a seat.

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Are Bugs Really All That Bad?

My nor­mally reli­able Mac­book Pro has been act­ing up this week­end, sput­ter­ing, whirring and churn­ing, so I’ve been think­ing a lot about OS crashes and ker­nal pan­ics. This semes­ter, in my new grad­u­ate course, Arcade The­ory (CCTP-628), we’ll spend some time on glitches, gaffes, bugs, and break­points. The dig­i­tal glitch is, to my mind, the com­pu­ta­tional equiv­a­lent of Barthe’s punc­tum, from Cam­era Lucida, which denotes “the wound­ing, per­son­ally touch­ing detail which estab­lishes a direct rela­tion­ship with the object or per­son within it.” (Wikipedia)

A pro­pos of this, Robert Over­weg, whose “Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sub­lime Art”:

Most peo­ple throw their con­trollers when a glitch ruins a per­fectly good game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. Robert Over­weg loves it; he turns it into art.

Over­weg is a self-proclaimed “pho­tog­ra­pher in the vir­tual world.” In his “Glitches” series, he cap­tures whacked-out char­ac­ters and sna­fued build­ings in screen­shots that look like what René Magritte might’ve pro­duced had he been a big ol’ gam­ing nerd. These are absurd apoc­a­lyp­tic land­scapes ren­dered even more absurd by shoot­ers sus­pended in mid-air, as if leap­ing off a tram­po­line, while a sky­scraper burns omi­nously in the dis­tance, or, our favorite, by two char­ac­ters flee­ing the zom­bies of Left 4 Dead 2 and paus­ing for a homo­erotic embrace

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GMU “Overwhelmed” by Interest in Game Design BFA

Via Game­Pol­i­tics, news that the new-ish Game Design BFA offered at GMU has met with“over­whelm­ing” stu­dent response.

A story in the Fair­fax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 stu­dents into the pro­gram, best­ing an inter­nal goal of hav­ing 110 stu­dents in the pro­gram by 2012. As Scott M. Mar­tin, Assis­tant Dean for Tech­nol­ogy, Research and Advance­ment at the school stated, ‘We’ve been over­whelmed. Our antic­i­pated enroll­ment for the fall is 500 per­cent higher than we expected.’

One of US News and World Report’s top “Up and Com­ing” national uni­ver­si­ties, GMU has an espe­cially solid rep­u­ta­tion in all sorts of tech-oriented stud­ies. In par­tic­u­lar, their Cen­ter for His­tory of New Media is giv­ing impor­tant thought to bet­ter­ing our dig­i­tal future (even though they now must do that think­ing with­out Roy).

So a Game Design degree at George Mason makes some sense. Bioware Mythic (owned, like every­one else, by EA Games) is right next door: Their stu­dio is respon­si­ble for a num­ber of world-class MMO’s, includ­ing Warham­mer Online. Bethesda Soft­works, devel­op­ers of Fall­out 3 — and CEO’d, curi­ously, by Won­der Woman’s hus­band — is just over the Potomac and to the north of GMU. And AOL — cur­rent host to a siz­able col­lec­tion of extremely pop­u­lar, if unin­spir­ing, online games, but at one time a real hub of inno­va­tion — is just a scenic bike ride to the north.

Still, I am filled with mis­giv­ings about a degree like this. Oth­ers have weighed in on this issue at some length, gen­er­ally cit­ing a con­cern that by train­ing under­grad­u­ates exclu­sively on con­tem­po­rary plat­forms with of-the-moment toolsets, the stu­dents who emerge from BFA game design pro­grams will lack a con­cep­tual core — some­thing upon which to fall back when those plat­forms become irrel­e­vant and those toolsets outdated.

That makes some sense to me, but I see a dif­fer­ent dan­ger. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, I worry that for this gen­er­a­tion of code­work­ers, we are fram­ing game and sim­u­la­tion design exclu­sively as the province of cre­ative expres­sion and tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, rather than under­stand­ing them as inher­ently polit­i­cal forms of techne.

Case in point. When Game­Pro mag­a­zine pre­sented Prince­ton Review’s wrap-up of the top 8 game schools in the United States, this is the way they sum­ma­rized the growth of inter­est in game design programs:

Time was to be a game designer, all you needed was a com­puter and a base­ment or garage owned by your mother. The only edu­ca­tion you needed to be a truly great game designer was a stack of Atari 2600 games and maybe a few issues of Pop­u­lar Sci­ence mag­a­zine. Those days are done.

If you want to be a game designer in the matur­ing mar­ket we have today, you need a lot more than your mom’s base­ment and some mag­a­zines. You need imag­i­na­tion, deter­mi­na­tion, and prefer­ably a job with a major game pub­lisher or an indie game devel­oper. And before you can have any of those things, you just might need a for­mal education.

Intense per­sonal expe­ri­ence and ambi­tions to engage with the mar­ket; imag­i­na­tion, deter­mi­na­tion, and an “in” with a pub­lisher: These might also describe those qual­i­ties required to start a band or make it as a comic book artist. “For­mal edu­ca­tion” as I read it here does not sig­nify a critical-analytical lib­eral arts back­ground, but instead stands roughly to large-scale cor­po­ra­tions (i.e., EA) as a guar­an­tor of employee qual­ity and uni­for­mity. Is the can­di­date famil­iar with the con­ven­tions of code doc­u­men­ta­tion? Does she under­stand the dif­fer­ence between a class and an object? Does he know under­stand the premise of Soft­ware Qual­ity Assurance?

George Mason logoLook: There’s lit­tle doubt that stu­dents from GMU will find ample employ in the indus­try when they grad­u­ate. That job mar­ket is only going to expand (although I’m not sure that it will expand on Amer­i­can soil). But while a BFA is implic­itly about expres­sion and craft, those jobs are unlikely to be about either: Pro­gram­ming at giant cor­po­ra­tions like Mythic or BioWare is increas­ingly com­part­men­tal­ized and insti­tu­tion­al­ized. There’s fre­quently lit­tle about the every­day tasks of a low-level Pro­gram­mer to dis­tin­guish “game pro­gram­ming” from, say, “account­ing soft­ware pro­gram­ming” or “ware­house inven­tory programming.”

But, at the end of the day, there is an oppor­tu­nity cost here that I really worry about. There’s no doubt that many of the young peo­ple who enter GMU’s pro­gram will be bril­liant, but how much effort is being devoted to the devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing skills? We’re busy teach­ing Amer­i­can Stud­ies majors to think crit­i­cally, but I imag­ine that few of them will be involved in build­ing next-generation inter­faces or script­ing online rep­u­ta­tion sys­tems or admin­is­ter­ing com­mu­nity gov­er­nance databases.

It seems to me that we need at least to find ways of inte­grat­ing the critical-analytical con­ven­tions of a lib­eral arts degree with a Game Design BFA. We need to be wor­ry­ing about pro­ce­dural lit­era­cies; about the anthro­pol­ogy of gam­ing; about sacral­ity and the ludic; about the pol­i­tics of sim­u­la­tion. We need to ask: What kinds of worlds are you build­ing? For whom? And to what end?

You can read (a lit­tle bit) more about the pro­gram, as well as see a list of course require­ments. And — my anx­i­eties and mis­giv­ings aside — good luck to the new Pro­gram and every­one involved.

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What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?

In Jan­u­ary of this year, on the day fol­low­ing the death of his­to­rian Howard Zinn, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz deliv­ered a thought­ful lit­tle talk at SUNY Buf­falo. In so doing, I think he man­aged neatly to extend Zinn’s 20th Cen­tury civ­i­tas a lit­tle fur­ther into our own time.

“I’m wor­ried that stu­dents will take their obe­di­ent place in soci­ety and look to become suc­cess­ful cogs in the wheel,” writes Zinn. Liszkiewicz points to Far­mville, that scourge of net­works, and sees some very suc­cess­ful lit­tle cogs.

Per­haps it seems a waste of time to dis­cuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a seri­ous dis­cus­sion, and games are sup­pos­edly friv­o­lous things. Most any con­cerned par­ent might say, “Play is an occa­sion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, inge­nu­ity, skill, and often of money….“[1] So said Roger Cail­lois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Cail­lois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from respon­si­bil­ity and routine.“[2] For Cail­lois, as for Aris­to­tle, games are in fact essen­tial to cit­i­zen­ship: they allow us to refresh and renew our­selves, help to social­ize us, and afford us oppor­tu­ni­ties to cul­ti­vate our imag­i­na­tions and rea­son­ing skills.[3]

While it will not be the sole topic of inter­est to Arcade The­ory in the fall, the pol­i­tics of the pro­ce­dural will fig­ure promi­nently in our con­ver­sa­tions. So take a look at Liszkiewicz’s talk, and spend some time lin­ger­ing over some of his recent dig­i­tal poetry, Count As One.

And then, if you’re inter­ested, read more about CCTP 628, Arcade The­ory. Be sure not to miss the lat­est addi­tion, a sug­gested sum­mer read­ing list of ready-to-print essays and arti­cles (noth­ing too heavy, I assure you).

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Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup

Close on the heels of the Ital­ian government’s recent pub­lic state­ments on the civic and aes­thetic mer­its of video games (and the tax­able appeal of game stu­dio rev­enues, no doubt), Asso­ci­azione Ital­iana Opere Mul­ti­me­di­ali Inter­at­tive (AIOMI) has released the first of what will be sev­eral video shorts pro­mot­ing inter­ac­tive media in Italy.

And like a Bruno Bozzetto short, this promo is unmis­tak­ably Ital­ian. Indeed, I think that my reac­tion to this video is not unlike that of La Gio­conda her­self: In the right light, you might believe that you saw on my face the barest trace of diver­ti­mento. But you can­not be sure: For the most part, I am ambiva­lent and unmoved.

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