Category Archives: Storytelling

Ludic Spray and Adult cultural preferances

10 August 2006

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Jeez! The folks over at Guardian Games Blog are back full swing after the summer and with impeccable style!!! I just have to cut’n’paste their stuff here!
Good pondering reliable Aleks has discussed with her friends and come up with a brilliant new word: Ludic Spray!

“At a meeting last month, a group of us decided to term this sort of thing “ludic spray,” inspired by Zimmerman and Salen’s definition of a “game,” from their book Rules of Play, and further extrapolated by Zimmerman here:

Game Play is the formal play of a game that occurs when players follow rules…

Ludic Activities are other kinds of activities that we would recognize as play (two dogs chasing each other, two kids rough-housing, someone casually tossing and catching a ball)…

The “spray,” therefore, is the stuff that is inspired by a formal game but doesn’t adhere to its rules. This can be anything from fan fiction to independent spin-offs to formal business ventures (as in the case of the previously-mentioned economies).”

I shout yay! for effort! But…I honestly have a hard time believing it’s not more complicated than that! Seems a bit too simple! Not that I mind simple, it just encompasses too much – and it becomes more like the dust bunnies I shove under the sofa, you know?
Anyways…she had a great link in there to a Zimmerman interview, where he discusses definitions of game, play, narrative and well…the usual yoo ha – Klabbers’ people and Young’un Stavelin should find it interesting!
Also!!! Greg comments

“And yes, I know games mags are aimed at a much younger audience – Edge aside – but seeing the sci-fi/fantasy hegemony splattered across 90 odd pages made you realise that the industry has a long way to go if it wants to gain or retain the interest of adults whose cultural interests extend beyond Lord of the Rings and Star Trek.”

Too right!

Sigh! Too many interesting reads!!! Too little time in the day!!! Need to get back to work!

Battleship:GoogleEarth

18 July 2006

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This is a very novel and great idea! Julian Bleecker, a Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication has come up with this game by using Google Earth as “a platform for realtime mobile gaming”:

“The mechanic I’m experimenting with is simpler. One person places their ships
using Google Earth and the other person goes out in the normal world with a
mobile phone, a GPS connected to the mobile phone. The phone has a small Python
script on it that reads the GPS and sends the data to the game engine, which
then updates the Google Earth KML model showing the current state of the game
grid. When the player who’s trying to sink the ships wants to try for a hit,
they call into the game engine and say “drop”. The game reads back the
coordinates at which the “peg” was dropped and shortly thereafter, the other
player will see the peg appear at the coordinate it was dropped. If the peg hits
one of the ships, it’s a Hit, otherwise it’s a miss. ”

I don’t see myself putting up the effort, though. But I have to say…the ideas are just blossoming in my head on something I might actually want to do! I’m thinking games that may take a while though!
Yeah…I would know absolutely nothing interesting if it wasn’t for Mark Wallace.

Oooh…and this might not be the right place to write about this – but you REALLY should check out the Project Good Luck blog! It’s a bunch of MIT students who are on a trip to explore “social networks and their intersection with mobile media” in CHINA(I’m so freakin envious)!! I emphasise ‘really’ because I haven’t been in for a look since Henry Jenkins mentioned it (trying to be selective on my subscription feeds)….and they’ve really done a lot of cool stuff since then!!! Very enjoyable and EXTREMELY interesting!!!

Frasca

12 July 2006

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This whole narratology vs ludology discussion is quite…well…ARGH! Just frustrating, I guess – and ofcourse this comes from the fact that we’re still trying to figure out the language of games.
So I had a glance at my huge ‘to read’ pile the other day, upset because I keep maneuvering myself into tight suffocating corners that I can’t spread my wings and fly away from. But I guess that’s what writing a thesis is all about ey? Narrowing things down to the bare essentials and constantly contradicting oneself?
Anyways! I pulled out some Gonzalo Frasca, which I had put aside because I naively thought I could escape the whole narratology vs ludology debate! He uses a Markku Eskelinen quote which I LOVE!

“As Markku Eskelinen argues, “outside academic theory people are usually
excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama, and games. If I
throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts
telling stories””

Don’t you just love that?! What a great way to mock the debate! Anyways…the article (or is it an introduction chapter?) can pretty much be summed up by:

  • representation vs. simulation
  • Aarseth’s cybernetic systems
  • simulation semiotics or “simitiocs” (what a lovely new word!)
  • “Simulations can express messages in ways that narrative simply cannot” (how bold!!!)
  • A discussion on Caillois’ definitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’; piadia and ludus
  • 3 act rule (which I’ll write more about in next post)
  • 3 different ideological levels in simulations
  • A typology of simulation rules

You’ll be reading a bit more about this later on today or tomorrow! I’m at work right now and I don’t have my Jesper Juul or Espen Aarseth notes available!

Hmmm….so why did I even bother writing this post? Well first off…you have to admit that quote is amusing, but probably because I’m in the middle of writing a job application to a really cool job, and didn’t want the first post they saw to be my emotional worship of the Sultan’s Elephant! He he! The dilemma’s of linking to your blog everywhere and at the same time trying to sell yourself as a sane desirable person!!

The Sultan’s Elephant

11 July 2006

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Just look at this magnificent beast in the streets of London!!!! The Sultan’s Elephant!!! The Sultan’s Elephant, you ask? Well…first off, it’s a story by Jules Verne – which I know you’ll enjoy!!!

“The belly of the elephant and the engine room now more closely resembled a
psychiatric hospital. This hampered their progress enormously. Addressing the
sultan, the captain said the protentous word: ‘Ballast’.

As a capable Time traveller, he had understood that the unconscious or
delirious passengers would gradually slow the machine to a stop. The outlandish
vessel depended on practical theory: in short they must divest themselves of the
sleep-walkers.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the story – it will be worth your while! So anyways…yeah…the elephant is the Sultan’s time machine and they’re trying to catch another timetraveller, ‘this little girl’!

 

I don’t know if we can even call these enormous things puppets – but I guess that’s what they are. They were made to comemorate the centenary of Jules Verne’s death by Royal De Luxe, an’ extraordinary’ European street theatre company. On May 4th they were in London and the event lasted for 3 days – for….that’s how long it takes to tell the story!

Maybe I’ve been too enthralled by narratology lately and I just get way too emotional when such a lovely spirit of adventure, fantasy and

imagination is made available for ALL people to enjoy – inclusive art, if you will. I mean…can you imagine this story being told in magnificant LONDON?!!

I don’t know how this passed me by, because I truely would have loved to see this in London! It’s just sooooo beautiful!!! But they’re doing Calais on September 28th and I’ve already been in touch with my favourite travel agent! Let me know if you’re tempted to come along!

Oooh…and look…it’s now been in Belgium according to Dagens Næringsliv! I wonder….they’re too big for Bergen aren’t they?

 

Joi Ito on…well…’the state of the metaverse union’?

4 July 2006

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So I specifically turned my back on an absolutely glorious sunny day today, to work on a job application and finish up some thesis thoughts I had this morning (burnt the midnight oil) – but first things first – feeds need to be skimmed through!
Rather annoyingly erikso.com had a truely informative and extremely interesting post, loads of stuff I’ve just automatically loaded on to my iPod for the walk home tonight – but I ended up watching the whole of this charming videoblog by Loïc Le Meur (loads of other interesting things on his blog – I became a subscriber instantly), where he talks to Joi Ito about – well…everything important!!!! Joi Ito gives the best description of what playing World of Warcraft is about, EVER!!!!! What we can learn from MMORPGs and how we can incorporate several models into the business world. Ofcourse gold farming comes up -and Ito brings up an interesting observation that the Chinese had a hard time understanding what we have against gold farmers, according to them it’s a given that people with money should be able to pay their way to the top in games. Really ironic – that we in the capitalist world believe every MMORPG gamer should be equal, while the Socialist Chinese are all for money buying gaming fame and fortune! Amusing. Then they have a great talk about videos, music and copyright – and ofcourse the Creative Commons – and what all this sharing business is all about. It was really interesting!!! And it was so relaxed listening to them just have a conversation! Very inspiring! Definitely worth skipping a film or tv program to watch! But now – must work!!

Picture stolen from erikso.com! Thanks!!

Public Diplomacy Through Games

7 May 2006

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The University of Southern California has come up with the novel idea of hosting a competition to create a game promoting public diplomacy. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the results for months now!

“The USC Center on Public Diplomacy is looking for people to showcase their talent with a bit of world class game-making. The challenge to the game mod community, and current and aspiring game designers is as follows: design a prototype or modify a game incorporating the fundamental characteristics of public diplomacy”

The finalists’ presenations are now available and the winner is to be announced today.

Looking at these, I was searching for something creative and fun. As much as I adore and admire simulations such as Peacemaker – I was hoping something less ‘obvious’ would make the finalist list as well. I’ve often thought that the trick to learning in computer games is to hide the ‘message’ behind humor and absurdity. For a game to be truely successful in teaching something like the promotion of diplomacy, I feel it has to lure those who just want to go and have a great gaming time as well. I know of very few who play to learn something and having played my fair share of dreary simulation games for the jobs from my past (I’ll have to tell you about those some day! ) they usually don’t work (at least I can’t remember what I was supposed to learn).

I truely love the idea behind Hydro Hijinks, it actually made me think about Myst and the game of consequence.

The others are brilliant as well! Ambitious but lovely! I would however, love to see more fun and absurdity!

Anyways it’s a great initiative and a big ‘yay!’ to Second Life for making them all possible!

Games For Health

17 April 2006

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So...Games For Health is hosting an event right before E3 (May 9th if you’re in the area). They’ve made a promotional video which I think deserves some attention here. You’ve got to admit that this is a brilliant initiative.

I’ve started my own secret campaign here in Bergen! I’m sending e-mails to different departments at the university on different games and topics I think are relevant to them. I very seldom get any response, ofcourse! But what do I have to loose?