Category Archives: Avatar

Maretind (working title)

22 July 2006

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Nina Svane-Mikkelsen is a Ph.D. fellow (umh…I still get confused by university titles, so…) at my department (Information Science and Media Studies) and is working on a project entitled: Affinity and Battlefield. New media and museum communication – Communication design under imperative of database. Artistic intervention as a narrative grip.
They’re working on a computer game which is for the time being called, Maretind.

“A short description of the overall goal.
The goal is to develop a digital game that integrate knowledge regarding the MAR-ECO research project and key issues and findings of this maritime research in order to reach, engage and inspire children on the subject through game play.

The research project represent a vast collection of data to the inspiration of the game plot. As one of the maritime researchers put it: ”Our data collection have ranged from oceanographic and acoustics, to various studies on organisms that range in size from microscopic plankton to large whales. Dephts ranged from the surface to 3000 meters and extended from the cold-water environment south of Iceland to the tropic environment north of the Azores.” (mar-eco cruise journal 1. july, http://www.mar-eco.no/)

Good games combine a number of complex elements such as situations, where decisions must be made, challenging goals and a satifying feedback. Without these basic elements a game will easily become boring. The result must be that the way the gamers interact with the game, the game process, is parallel with what the game is about. (almost-quotes from “Learning to play to learn” by Nick Fortugno and Eric Zimmerman, Learning Lab Newsletter)”

I’m so pleased that this is going on at my department! And oh what fun it would be to be a part of it!!! Anyways….they’re still at the starting line and I just wanted to wish them good luck! I just love the combo of museum, art, information communication and learning through gameplay!!

So…anyways…

3 July 2006

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I know I’ve been doing a lot of cut’n’pasting on this blog lately, I do apologize to those who are waiting for my analytical academic insights . I guess I’ve been trying to resist my first impulsive of “Ooh! There’s a thought! I should blog about that” and instead diving straight into my thesis and documenting it there! So my blog writing is just amusing little tidbits I come across on my daily surfsessions. But maybe I should be pasting some extracts from my thesis in here? We’ll see what happens. Right now I’m just obsessing about sewing all my random thoughts and analysis together so that something that can at least resemble some wholeness is presentable. It’s really scary how many times I contradict myself in this process! But yeah…before I go off on a “I take myself too seriously” tantrum – for your amusement:

The spectacular Raph Koster’s written “The Ten Commandments of Online Worlds”, which is, as expected, insightful and adorable!

1. Thou shalt not mistake online worlds for games, for they encompass far more; nor shalt thou forget that play is noble, and game is no epithet.

2. Thou shalt not disrespect thy players, nor treat them as mere database entries or subscriptions, but rather as people, for thy power is granted you by them.
3. Thou shalt not remove fun or implement unfun for the sake of longer subscriber longevity, nor shalt thou consider thy sort of fun to be the only sort of fun to be had, for many and mysterious are the ways of enjoyment.
4. Thou shalt not blindly do what has been done before, but rather shalt know why all is as it is, and how it could be different.
5. Thou shalt create and follow rules that bind thyself as well as the players, for thou art of the community, not above it.
6. Thou shalt not make thy world a place for players to do real harm unto one another, or for thee to do harm unto players.
7. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s userbase, but instead be true to thine own userbase, for thou hast made them a garden, and thy job is cultivation.
8. Thou shalt make every activity within thy world one that stands alone enjoyably; if it be a game, then thou shouldst make it a fun game on its own merits; if it be other, then thou shouldst make it true to itself. Thy world doth not make boring things into enjoyable things merely because it is thy world.
9. There shalt be no number nine.
10. Honor thy ancestors, for they solved most of thy design problems.

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Player vs. user

10 May 2006

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Before I design some lethal weapon to kill the bird that’s franticly chirping outside my window telling me that I’m still nowhere and it’s morning – I thought I might vent out a bit in here!

Last year I had an incredibly difficult time discussing narrative with my fellow students in Games and Game Culture! They just refused to discuss with me the meaning behind the aesthetics of the worlds we were playing in. I remember someone, slightly frustrated with me, explaining to me that narrative is something that has happened. You can’t be playing narrative because narrative is story telling and you’re not telling a story. When I then (stubborn as I sometimes can be) emphasised that the whole geography we were in (Prince of Persia at the time) was basically telling us something, they usually sighed and gave me a whole song and dance that it was all code. When I then further persisted in stating that “well the game designer must have had some intention by designing this temple that I just can’t seem to get out of!” – respons: “No, Linn!!! It’s all just obstacle to reach your goal!”.

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Am I cheating if I do this?

9 May 2006

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So…I’m really into a flow of writing (expect a post on what soon) and I’m trying not to get caught up with ‘who said what and did they really say that’ glitches that often lead me astray to even more interesting reading which in the end leaves me with an even more immense sense of low selfesteem!

But along the way I keep using the phrase ‘sanbox games’ and a question popped up in my head (I’m sure if you could look inside my head you would probably only see a big shiny question mark, anyways). So I thought that I would just use this blog to put the question out there instead of using an hour to track it down and loose my ‘flow’!

Does anyone know who came up with the term ‘sandbox videogames’? I feel very strongly that it must have been Will Wright – but then again, Henry Jenkins is a strong candidate as well. So if you know who started using the term and where first – I would love a little hint in the right direction! But I seriously do feel like I’m cheating by asking and not doing the fundamental research that I should do all by myself! Oh the morals of life and the desire to do things right!! Will they ever stop tormenting me?

Sony Station Exchange and GMs responsabilities

25 April 2006

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So, yeah! I’m still trying to write about intellectual property rights within MMORPGs. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that reputation is a commodity in MMORPGs, both for the game developers and the gamers themselves, and I’m wondering if it is this reputation that is or should be protected within intellectual property rights! Firstly I’ve used Eriksson and Grill’s DiGRA 2005 paper “Who owns my avatar? – Rights in virtual property” for inspiration to illustrate the different interests game developers and gamers have in intellectual property rights. From their excellent paper:

“Two main interests are discernible in connection to the game producers:

  1. Subscription interest – virtual trade may decrease a game producer’s income from subscriptions. If new players buy advanced characters for real money they won’t have to spend time in the game (which they consequently would have to pay for) advancing their own avatars. The subscription interest is also affected by the fact that the game producer may get a bad reputation by letting people with more money than time buy themselves into the game, resulting in gamers leaving the virtual world
  2. Control interest – developers have an interest in remaining in control over their creation. In part, this may be a purely creative interest, quite separable from the subscription interest. Often, producers wish that their virtual world should remain a game only. The recognition of ownership rights in the virtual world of their game may thus conflict with their wish to control that world. Producers therefore try to establish norms implying that trade in virtual property with real money should not exist”

Games are the democratization of fiction!

18 April 2006

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Awwww…aren’t those words just vigorating? They’re not my own, ofcourse, it’s Tappan King who’s uttered them to Greg Costikyan. It’s so revolutionary, isn’t it?! Games are setting fiction free to the people!

“the Artist creates, the audience consumes. Games, contrariwise, allow individual players to participate in the creation of their fictional experience. The developers still shape and constrain that experience, to be sure, but there is no experience without the active engagement of the player; the player may well do something with the construct that the developers had not anticipated; and the ultimate experience is a collaboration in which both sides participate, not something handed down from On High by the Great Artiste. It is, in other words, the antithesis of aristocratic; games are a way for everyman to participate in creating his or her own narrative experience. Games are a democratic artform for a democratic age.”

But alas, I’m not ready to say that ‘play’ is fiction or that playing fiction is democratic and nonlinear. It’s just a nice and powerful notion. I suppose I fell for this completely because it is right at the core of my arguments on MMORPGs. There is a sense and a feeling of democracy, but come right down to it, it’s all an illusion. One could maybe compare it to the illusion of democracy in Iraq! Or the freedom to say whatever you want in your e-mails!

But, then again, this is not really what he’s saying either, is it? Democratization of fiction! We’re creating fictions that people can interact with. But we’re not exactly creating a collaborative art form are we? Or are we?

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"It’s like escaping the real world and finding what you don’t like about it"

12 March 2006

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The Washington Post has an article out on the whole GLBT friendly WoW thing.

They even include some quotes from Sherry Turkle, which I thought was nice. I’ve missed her voice on some of the MMO topics being discussed lately.

“The reason that being gay is relevant to gaming is because gaming nowadays enables people to construct and reconstruct their identities.
We’re at a transition point in how we view these online games. We’re so used to the dichotomy: real life, game life. But these online games are at a place somewhere in between. It’s not just a game. They spend hours there. They have friends there. They have a life there.”

But the quote that really got me was from the Sara Andrews who started this whole discussion and has now stopped playing WoW:

“Maybe it’s not a very good escape from the real world, playing a game online and dealing with a bunch of other people,” says Andrews. “It’s like escaping the real world and finding what you don’t like about it — the slurs, the homophobia — in the online world.” – isn’t that absolutely charming!!! And so spot on!! The sociability in MMOs is so real and people do tend to bring their biggotry and opinions into them, which I suppose does kinda emphasise real world issues! Interesting!

Oh, by the way! The last two sentences of the article:
“These days, she’s busy rereading “Through the Looking Glass,” the follow-up to “Alice in Wonderland”.”