In this clip, rockstar/journalist Julian Dibbell interviews “gamification” researcher Sebastian Deterding on games and work, motivation, and design at the “For the Win” Symposium at the Wharton School. Sebastian Deterding interview from For the Win on Vimeo. You will note that there is a compelling parallel between the questions Dibbell and Deterding are asking and [...] Read more – ‘Gamification and the Ideal Self’.
A few of us have been beta-testing my Minecraft server (1.7.3) in preparation for the fall semester. So far, so good (although I hate Creepers with a passion). Now, using a terrific third-party app called Tectonicus, together with Google Maps’ framework, *nix workhorse rsync, and a few custom-built client-side scripts, I’ve managed to create a [...] Read more – ‘Minecraft, Mapped’.
Bonus update (7 August): Now with an extra reading! This fall, I’m offering a new graduate-level course about videogames and critique, inspired in part by a course I taught last year on the death (and reanimation) of critical theory: CCTP680, Videogames in Critical Contexts. I am still working on the syllabus, but here are the [...] Read more – ‘Book List for CCTP680, Videogames in Critical Contexts’.
Last week, I was pleased to participate as an invited speaker at the State Department's Tech@State: Serious Games conference. Everyone there was terrific, and it presented a rich opportunity to learn from industry leaders and gifted designers. Our formal statements were short, generally 10 minutes each, but were followed by an hour or so of energetic exchange. A few members of the audience at our panel ("Academic Perspectives on Serious Games") asked for a transcript of my comments, so I thought I'd annotate them and post them to the blog. Read more – ‘Transcript of my comments at the Dept. of State’.
In anticipation of its soon-to-be-released next-gen MMO, GuildWars 2, Seattle-based ArenaNet has published this short promo video that characterizes the company and its employees in all the right ways: They are portrayed as intensely collaborative, resolutely non-hierarchical, game-oriented, fun-loving geeks who believe in the power of digital community. I have no way of knowing whether [...] Read more – ‘ArenaNet’s First Ten Years’.
Always-thoughtful Georgetown alum and level–80 economist-mage Ted Castronova has been thinking about the ongoing recession and, in an interesting thought exercise, traces it back to the virtual world. An Exodus Recession? “I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far [...] Read more – ‘Terra Nova: An Exodus Recession?’.
At some point in his reflections on the coming information society (better, société de contrôle), Deleuze pointed to the American highway system as a metaphor for the affordances, and phantasmatic freedoms, of technology. At first, he says, the highway system seems to grant you unlimited freedom. But upon further reflection, you realize that the system [...] Read more – ‘Kinect-ing to Deleuze’.
I’m happy to announce that this spring, I’ll become a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University. I’ll be offering the following two graduate courses: Exploring Synthetic Worlds Synthetic worlds — persistent, networked 3D spaces that mimic certain aspects of reality — are increasingly popular sites for work and play. This [...] Read more – ‘Spring semester’.
Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience “Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.” Read more – ‘Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience’.
Reading Owen Good’s (excellent!) short article on the difficulties presented in bringing pro wrestling to the game console (The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face), I came across this little gem: “Calling pro wrestling ‘fake’ is neither accurate nor informed. The term is ‘kayfabe.’ Kayfabe isn’t a euphemism for false. Kayfabe is [...] Read more – ‘The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face’.
Posit the first: Virtual goods have real value. Posit the second: When a virtual good is destroyed, so is its value. Demonstration: This video, from the MMORPG EVE Online, depicts the destruction of approximately US$15,000 worth of virtual goods. Via Kotaku Read more – ‘The Real Cost of War’.
I’ve only just discovered analyst Nicholas Lovell’s terrific blog, Gamesbrief: The Business of Games. It’s an impressive, articulate, colorful exercise in the analysis of the games industry. Immediately clear to me, after reading an article like this one: Business can offer a flexible, concise vocabulary of critique that (out of old academic animosities) we’re ignoring. Read more – ‘Gamesbrief: The Business of Games’.
Worth reviewing: The Kotaku Guide To Fall Video Games Fall is supposed to be the best time of the video game year, the entree and the dessert after the first nine month’s meager salad and interactive appetizer. But in 2010, the winter and spring were bountiful and fall is at risk of seeming pathetic. Could [...] Read more – ‘The Kotaku Guide To Fall Video Games’.
This semester, my graduate course Arcade Theory (CCTP628) is looking at the ways in which gaming technologies (both figurative and literal) are being adopted outside of Huizinga’s “magic circle.” I call this phenomenon “game creep.” Blog Kotaku has this recent note about how Vail is gaming the slopes with RFID tags: “Starting this November five [...] Read more – ‘Powder Power-Ups’.
The White Sox of Chicago are on the eve of a do-or-die series with Minnesota’s noble Twins. But second baseman Brent Lillibridge’s mind is on the Array. From his twitter: Most important night of the year Halo coming out at 12 tonight and yes I’m in a line to get it… via Kotaku Read more – ‘America’s Future Pastime’.
If you haven’t yet read SF Weekly‘s delicious article on San Francisco-based Zynga, publishers of FarmVille, (“FarmVillains: Steal someone else’s game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.”), put down those seeds and drop that hoe and head over there now. Criticisms and speculation about Zynga’s theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry [...] Read more – ‘FarmVillains: “I don’t fucking want innovation”’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Getting Shot: A 103-Second Retrospective’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘University of Florida Honors Courses – Fall 2010’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Pink on Incentive and Algorithmic Cognition’.
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. Read more – ‘Arcade Theory Almost Full’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Are Bugs Really All That Bad?’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘GMU “Overwhelmed” by Interest in Game Design BFA’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup’.
Via Kotaku (via USAToday), word that Erskine Bowles has contacted Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to chat about a game built around balancing the U.S. budget. It’s an interesting idea that’s actually been done (and done well) already. In 2008, MarketPlace, from American Public Media, launched Budget Hero: Budget Hero tries to bring a level of clarity [...] Read more – ‘Obama Administration Asks Ballmer About Gaming the Budget’.
For your consideration, I commend to you — without comment– the following article, from the closely-followed Opinions page of the Wichita Eagle. “Are Video Games Causing Achievement Gap?” by John Richard Schrock, “trainer of biology teachers.” Advanced readers will want to be sure and identify by name each logical fallacy that appears in the op-ed. Read more – ‘For Your Consideration’.
I have started to build an information website to accompany the new course I’ll teach this fall at Georgetown, CCTP628: Arcade Theory. As of now, only the course description is available, but I will add more in the coming weeks. Visit arcadetheory.org Read more – ‘New Course: CCTP628 Arcade Theory’.
I’ve just discovered Boing Boing’s ongoing “Games to Get” series, a great collection of (mostly) indie studio games for various platforms. Many of my latest obsessions are there: Plants vs. Zombies, Chime, Clash of Heroes, Drop 7. Definitely worth reviewing. Read more – ‘Boing Boing: Games To Get’.
HASTAC (The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is definitely worth getting to know: I’ve been to two of their conferences, and they are terrific. Today, their blog calls attention to a new Call For Papers (Trento, Italy, Sept 2010) that is interesting chiefly for its desire to blend game studies with STS: CFP: [...] Read more – ‘CFP: Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice | HASTAC’.
Update: According to @JohnathanStray, the Habermas account was a ruse. I’ll bet Rheingold is rolling his eyes. So, this is fun. Jürgen Habermas (JHabermas) on Twitter. Read more – ‘Jürgen Habermas (JHabermas) on Twitter’.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, over at UMD, is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Director of MITH, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. His blog is chock full of interesting stuff, and his tweets are prolific. A year ago, he published a good little article in the Chronicle on why humanities students must [...] Read more – ‘Kirschenbaum’s Simulations Course at UMD’.
In addition to my work on games, play, and virtual worlds at The Program in Communications, Culture, and Technology, I am fortunate enough to coordinate the undergraduate senior seminar in American Studies at Georgetown. It’s a fantastic job. One of the goals of my work with these students is to find novel ways of leveraging [...] Read more – ‘Thesis Tweetstream’.
This has been covered in a few places, including Hypercompendia and Eastgate‘s useful HTLit.com, but it’s worth mentioning again. Digital literacy scholar Dennis Jerz set his eleven-year-old child in front of Colosal Cave Adventure and — using a piece of software like Screenflow — captured both the unfolding of the game on-screen and the young [...] Read more – ‘A Neophyte Takes on the Command-Line Interface’.
Now here is a class from which we could all learn something. Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Special Topics in Game Design and Analysis, Spring 2010. Georgia Institute of Technology. Hacks are works produced by making modifications to existing games by disassembling binaries, analyzing the meaning and purpose of the resulting source code, identifying desirable [...] Read more – ‘Syllabus: Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes’.
What we play as scholars is as important as what we read. Gaming is experiential, and there is no substitute for this activity. Many — if not most — of the best thinkers in the field recognize this, and a wealth of books and articles on the topic of games and digital play are sustained [...] Read more – ‘Now Playing: Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes’.
Professor Bogost, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, continues to be one of my favorite contemporary thinkers on matters digital. Following close on the end of MLA 09, he has weighed in on recent ruminations about the direction of the humanities with a brief, simmering note. He writes: Humanists work hard, but at all the [...] Read more – ‘On The Turtlenecked Hairshirt’.
Intriguing news from from Popsci (The weblog of Popular Science magazine): A school in New York City has announced that its emerging curriculum will be based entirely around games and play. The Manhattan-based NY City public school, called Quest to Learn (Q2L), boasts financial support from Parsons School of Design, MacArthur, Gates, and Intel, among [...] Read more – ‘NY School To Pursue Ludic Curriculum’.
Dr. D. Linda Garcia and I are excited about a paper we recently submitted to the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, entitled “Synthetic Excellence: Standards, Play, and Unintended Outcomes.” As the first co-authored paper I’ve ever participated in, it was a challenging paper to write. The paper’s interdisciplinary approach made for a lot of great [...] Read more – ‘Forthcoming in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research’.
Unable to sleep, Gail Nichols spent a lot of time in front of PopCap’s Bejeweled, a game notable for its non-competitive, flow–inducing modes. According to the Washington Post, Nichols liked the game so much that she got in touch with the manufacturer, PopCap Games. The inventors of the game were surprised to hear about its [...] Read more – ‘PopCap funds study on games, mental health’.
I know that it falls squarely into the “casual gaming” category, but PuzzleQuest has got to be one of my favorite games of all time. Lately, I’ve been playing it nearly as often as my wife plays Peggle (and my wife, like so many, is obsessed with PopCap’s Peggle). Read more – ‘Puzzling it out’.
Augmented reality applications and games have been a gleam in the eyes of developers (and the promise of trade show charlatans) for decades, but with increasingly ubiquitous video cam inputs and tons of spare processing power, they are finally becoming a reality. Via Gizmodo: Players interact with their virtual pet using a bundled card and [...] Read more – ‘Eyepet: Augmented Reality’.
Here’s a course description for the new graduate course I’ll offer next fall at Georgetown. Frankly, the course is a work–in–progress, and so the semester is still a bit blurry. Still, I’m excited about the early drafts of a syllabus, which will draw on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, robotic vacuums, gospel choirs, Aristotle, horror films, Star [...] Read more – ‘CCTP-628: Interactivity, Immersion, and Play’.
Last month, I finally joined a guild in World of Warcraft: Bound by Blood. Actually, that’s not quite it: ßøuñ∂ ߥ ßløø∂. Guilds are like that. But in this case, typographical idiosyncrasies aside, it’s been a rewarding adventure so far, and I’ve learned a lot from it. Take, for instance, the character of in-game guild [...] Read more – ‘Guilded’.
D. Linda Garcia and I, together with Hanan Gazit at H.I.T., will serve as guest editors for a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. In addition to regular papers, the special issue will feature some of the papers presented at the SLACTIONS conference in late September. The metaverse is emerging, through [...] Read more – ‘The Metaverse (Some Assembly Required)’.
How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the captions to still images released on developer Project Whitecard’s website are any indication, not much. Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”): “Contructed from an advanced smelting process and lunar factory, it is a [...] Read more – ‘Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex’.
Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress. Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as [...] Read more – ‘Tetris and Torture’.
The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA‘s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned. Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away [...] Read more – ‘The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes’.
At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, a behavioral sciences professor from Northwestern University has called into question the idealism of much of our rhetoric on the potential diversity of human networks in MMORPGs. “Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities” appeared as part of a panel called “Analyzing Virtual [...] Read more – ‘Against the Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism’.
Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly. WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your [...] Read more – ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Silly’.
When the Macintosh computer introduced desktop publishing (DTP) to the world in the eighties, one wag observed that “Now everyone can create bad design.” While we frequently applaud tools and technologies that promise to level the playing field, the fact of the matter is that a good toolset is never enough. Good storytelling is a [...] Read more – ‘Machinima, Done Well’.
In a recent post over at the Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project (Raid Gaza! Editorial Games and Timeliness), the indefatigable Ian Bogost holds up a recent editorial game, Raid Gaza!, as exemplary of the kind of critical work games (“newsgames”) can do for journalism. Like editorial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong position. [...] Read more – ‘On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness’.
Winston Churchill once observed that first, we make our buildings, and then they make us. By which he meant, quite sensibly, that the spaces in which we live and work condition and determine our behavior. With Mario CarBarn, our desire was to reappropriate the space, if tentatively, on behalf of the ludic. The Situationists were [...] Read more – ‘Unintended Nostalgia Delays Revolution’.
In The Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou assembles ten “Theses on Theater,” which, at first glance anyway, offer game studies some compelling parallels. Indeed, he begins generously, furnishing us with the very link that we require. The purpose of the theses? “To establish—as we must for every art—that theater thinks” (72; emphasis mine). In a [...] Read more – ‘Badiou and Theatre’.
Today’s New York Times features a brief article on video games and U.S. Army recruiting efforts in a Philadelphia mall. The facility, which opened in August, is the first of its kind. It replaces five smaller recruitment stations in the Philadelphia area, at about the same annual operating cost, not counting the initial expenses, said [...] Read more – ‘Be All You Can Be (For A Quarter, To Start)’.
For December, among American gamers who play Warcraft, Nielsen finds it played on average over 11 hours / week. Years ago, I was a “Nielsen family.” The unwieldy set-top box, hard-wired into the TV and the Cable Box, was a mysterious, exciting presence, and leant an air of authority to my cable TV watching choices [...] Read more – ‘The News from Nielsen’.
According to a recent press release, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft now boasts 11.5 million subscribers world-wide. Subscriptions and virtual-world populations are a frequent topic of discussion in game studies, but the facts are notoriously hard to come by, since population density — often perceived as an index of popularity — is a selling point, and [...] Read more – ‘Warcraft population’.
Contrary to the oversimplified characterization of a “magic circle” of bounded, inviolable game activity, gamic activity — and video game-play especially — always unfolds over otherwise rigid boundaries. Video game-play makes simultaneous and unbridled use of multiple media, unfurls across imbricated (and frequently exclusive) narratives and procedural norms, and often challenges the player to gauge [...] Read more – ‘Unwrapping a Warcraft Christmas’.
GameSpot: Shakespeare booked on DS “The Times of London reports today that Nintendo has partnered with preeminent book publisher HarperCollins to bring a slate of literary classics to the DS. Labeled The 100 Classic Book Collection, the software will reportedly include works from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. Details on the [...] Read more – ‘GameSpot: Shakespeare booked on DS’.
