I spent this morning curled up on my sofa with breakfast and coffee and watched Nick Yee’s presentation at PARC – “The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction”. Every now and then it’s good to have a ‘step back and see the whole picture’ presentation – I thoroughly enjoyed it! Ofcourse Mr. Yee’s fabulous work on why people play is represented, but he also covers the terrain of addiction, gold farming and ‘the new golf’!
Definitely a good start for anyone wanting to look into MMORPGs and what they’re all about. Any new students wondering what to write about? Watch, watch, watch!!! To me, it was a joyous breakfast, but now…I’m gonna be late for a lecture!
Tag Archives: play
Ludic Spray and Adult cultural preferances
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!
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
Too right!
Sigh! Too many interesting reads!!! Too little time in the day!!! Need to get back to work!
Western vs. Eastern gamers!
This just desserved to be blogged about and not just del.icio.us’ed! Aleks at Guardian’s gameblog has posted a great piece about the ‘Cultural Differences in Gameland’. It focuses a lot about the differences between Eastern and Western gamers. She mentions a hell of a lot I didn’t know about. Like the fact that we don’t get so much ‘gore’ because of Germany’s strict rules. And there’s an excellent quote from Ren discussing Prof Rischard Nisbett’s findings:
“Another point that Nisbett makes is that Westerners tend to assume
linearity but Asians assume circularity. For example he gave in a recent
interview was a stable set of circumstances a Westerner will tend to think that
this signified a trend and that things will continue in the same fashion but an
Asian will tend to think that it is indicative of the potential for change and
ultimate return to some pre-existing state.”
Well that explains a whole bunch to me! The whole article is interesting! You truely should have a look!!!
So…anyways…
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.
Griefers
The Guardian has a great article on griefers and the evolving community counter measures to tackle them.
I think it’s interesting how the journalist brings up 2 examples of ‘griefing’ that have caused the debate about gaming ethics (although it’s a discussion that’s been going on forever – at least since the LambdaMoo days).
The first is the EVE Online incident where a group calling themselves the Guiding Hand Social Club, cunningly infiltrated the Ubiqua Seraph corporation and basically ruined them! They worked on this for over a year! I first heard about this after watching one of the State of Play III debates, where Dr. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson brought this up as an example of how sometimes developers just have to shrug and say “Hey! It’s all part of the gameplay!”. I remember being so amused and uttering a little ‘Yay!’. The debate harrowed in the community, however.
The second example, is ofcourse when World Of Warcraft mourners (mourning the death of a real life player in WoW) were completely ambushed by a rival guild. Which was ofcourse seen as disrespectful and awful.
But these two examples are not griefing incidents, in my opinion! And we can’t start punishing players for how they’re playing the game. I mean most of these outcries are like children screaming “BUT IT’S SOOOO UNFAIR!”. It reminds me a lot about my life at the moment. I’m moaning and groaning about my thesis and my friends and family are hitting back with “For crying out loud, Linn! Will you please just get over yourself and finish the goddamn thing! Stop taking yourself so bloody seriously!” – the analogy here is me being the screaming child and my friends being the ‘griefers’! My point is….thank God for ‘griefers’!!!! Sometimes it’s good to have players come along and take the piss of those taking the game way too seriously! Which, in my opinion, doesn’t make them griefers at all!!! So what are griefers? I would call advanced players living off of stealing and hassling new players, griefers – but why? They’re still playing the game, are they not? I’m rambling here, sorry about that – it’s just that I feel we really need to define what griefing is before we start making executive decisions about who’s playing the game the right way and who’s not. I don’t believe that anyone should be punished for these two ‘griefing’ examples, but others may disagree.
So who gets to decide what griefing is and what actions are offensive enough to merit punishment? Who should decide? Game masters or democraticly organised groups? Community or an authoritative power?
I’m gonna leave you with these questions which have so often been thrust at you in this blog – and promise to come back with some reflections on what works and why tomorrow! It’s about time, right?!!
GAM3R 7H3ORY
Wow! This is just so awesome it desserves it’s own post here and not just a del.icio.us tagging!
GAM3R 7H3ORY – which is a networked book on games.
“All in all, an envelope-pushing endeavor, in both form and content. Eventually, GAM3R 7H30RY will be published by a conventional press, but between now and then we’re trying to investigate new creative strategies in the peer-to-peer environment. We call this a ‘networked book’ — the book as social software. We’re hoping to spark discussion about that as well.” – copied from Boing Boing.
This according to Ben (Vershbow?) from The Insitute of the Future of the Book! This just combines everything that I love about my field of study – just like my thesis is beginning to do! I really do love this stuff! I haven’t read all of it yet – or contributed – but it seems GREAT! I was a bit troubled by the lack of references – but this is discussed in the forum – and it seems he’s going to do some linking to the bibliography! Oh how I’d love to hand in my thesis in this way!!
The Love Thing in Games
Guardian Games Blog led me in the direction of an interesting piece at Apogeevr, about ‘real’ emotions in virtual worlds.
It reminded me a lot about the dramatical yoooha in The Sims Online. There was always someone who had been hurt by another because of cheating or being unfaithful! Private Investigator’s in virtual worlds are thriving from their business! Lots of them are employed by real life husbands and wives who want to know what the hell their spouse is doing in-game, but a lot of business is being generated from virtual relationship drama as well! If a virtual spouse ‘suddenly’ disappears, the PI will try and see if they’ve started a new account as a different avatar a.s.o.
So keywords here is real emotions, real relationships in virtual worlds. But I’ve never truely understood this! I don’t understand how anyone can form a relationship without trust! And I suppose that’s what I came across most often with lovesick avatars; their constant paranoia which led to constant and tedious drama! But it is impossible not to get emotionally attached to the world – so I guess I understand it to some extent.
"To me the proof of success was that the fans didn’t hunt me down and kill me"
Words uttered by Louis Castle on the success of Blade Runner at the E3 Workshop: The Inner Game: What Goes Into The Industry’s Best-Selling Titles.
He apparently considered being true to the story as a success – I thought that was quite charming! It seems failures have a lot to do about lack of sales. Tetsuya Mizuguchi listed Rez as a failure because of the lack of sales success: “I love Rez! I spent a lot of time and energy to creat it, but commercially it failed. Marketing said they couldn’t find any words to describe the game. ‘Is it a shooter? Is it a music game?’ So it was like a wall going up. I felt miserable…I still want to break this wall!” – yeah!! Go for it!! It’s a shame that a game doesn’t do well on the commercial market because the marketing staff are having a hard time defining what the game is! That definitely is a pathetic and useless wall!!
Player vs. user
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!”.
Come Out & Play
Oh, this link is going straight to Bergen Kommune!!
New York City (ofcourse) is having its first annual Come Out & Play Festival September 22-24! Oh what fun!!!!
Ofcourse we already have ‘Game Days’ during the summer! But they can be soooo much more than the great stuff they’ve already got going! Infact!! They should just hire me!!! He he!!
There’s just so much play can bring to a city! And I’ve just deleted a whole lotta hippi’ish peace, love and happiness words – but you get my drift, right?! Lots of drunken violence going on? Bring the people out to play!! Things that will bring strangers together – make them laugh together! And OMG I can’t go on about this without falling into a trance of pl&h talk!!!
And why not make stupidly placed ugly buildings the center of dazzlement for one night of Tetris or anything else truely spectacular!!!! Oh you know that this just has to be done!!!
Remember What The Dormouse Said 