Category: game studies

good games, bad theory?

Bought a mini-arcade console with Pac-Man and some other Namco classics (from Jakks TV Games) yesterday for our Lab. It is definitely fun and also educational visiting those early 1980s games with a joystick and button that at least tries to emulate the original arcade experience. And these actually also can be classified into “casual games” under current standards. Particularly Bosconian (which I had never before played) had some genuine holding power.

There has been lately discussions in the DiGRA’s free mailing list (Gamesnetwork@uta.fi) on the value of “theory” for game studies. If you are interested in those lines of thinking, you might consider subscribing (link). But here just a snippet: this is part of what I mailed there today:

IGDA uses great motto, “Make Better Games”, and I have sometimes suggested that in DiGRA we could adopt something a bit similar, “Make Better Game Research”. There are numerous questions that our researchers, for example, are currently working on: Who are actually playing games? What games they play? Why they play those games? Are there some fundamental cognitive and emotional elements, or modes of visual aesthetic, “grammar and syntax” of interaction, or something from narratology, media studies, cultural studies etc. that we can identify, analyse and describe in games and game playing? And when we have some fundamentals like that in our hands, then we need some meta-level constructs, theories that help us to discuss how all these things relate to each other. In the long run, all this will advance science and our understanding of this odd thing, “games”, and what kind of beings we are as we enjoy and invent them.
[…]
And, I suppose, we need not only games-informed games designers, but also researchers, teachers, critics, and even school-children who are given tools that help them to put into words and analyse why certain games might carry value and significance, why some others are problematic, and precisely in which terms. I am not sure if the only thing we’ll say in academia to those teachers is “design, design, design”, that we’ll do the job we should.

evening news: toys, tech and games entering the academia

Some kind Anonymous reminded me that there is the Gizmodo blog on tech toys — thanks, I should have remembered that, of course. My world would be much more dull without its always stimulating series of posts where the latest Apple Powerbook meets Sega’s “Near Me”, the robotic cat (link).

There was a note on Grand Text Auto that pointed me to a GameSpot article on academics and computer games (link). If you are interested in learning particularly about work and thought of Janet Murray (Georgia Tech) or Gonzalo Frasca (IT University Copenhagen) then you do well by checking this piece.

Ok, I have to write some words of introduction to our game studies Masters’ Course students now. See you again later!

attack of gizmo sites

Yesterday, I posted a note into a fun site “We Make Money Not Art” into a thread which contained interesting list of location-based mobile games about our Mogame research project. Browsing its gadget-and-geek filled pages, I started to wonder how many interesting and enthusiastic art-sci-tech sites there are, after all? Taken from the top of my geeky favorites, there are: Slashdot, Wired Gizmo News, Tom’s Hardware Guide, Google Sci/Tech News, just to mention very few. — What are your favorites?

infra kicks

After spending best part of the weekend finishing couple of games articles and the course materials I have been working on, I decided to reward myself somehow. In this weird nerdie way, it definitely had to be something media-tech related (but not too expensive, since most of my money is already going to all this stuff). So I bought a Logitech wireless keyboard & mouse combo (the MX version), and then amused myself by configuring the output of my media server to the big-screen television for the rest of the evening. Since this thing does not have proper inputs (and it is not the LCD/plasma one I will get next) the outcome is only half satisfying. But: I can now have web information services, a game, a TV channel and a Winamp running simultaneously on the same big screen. Ok, when I started Word to write this note, I had to close a couple of windows, but yet. It is curious to study oneself and see what are the sources of pleasure. I had a Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided free 14-days download & account deal waiting there, too, but instead I ended up doing this. Perhaps this feels more like an “own” thing to do? Or then, perhaps I just get my kicks from working at the infrastructure level, rather than with the content. Hard to say.

version wars

Oh boy. Every time I nowadays start the MS Word, I am greeted by one explosion of a non-compatibility warnings, kindly suggesting I should immediately renounce any idea of working. Office 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 5 seem not to talk each other any more, and as our university will no longer provide us with Abobe licenses (I am told), I am put against the wall. Either Microsoft or Adobe: choose which camp you belong to.

I seem to have been overworking again. I should be able to read it from my calendar, of course, but sadly it needs to be my physics telling me that all meters have been on red for too long. Ok, I will try and stay in bed tomorrow as long as I can. There is just too much exciting stuff going on that I feel to be responsible, so it is hard to take any real breaks.

I hope we could play more Beyond Good and Evil. It seems to have the right balance and combination of different game elements (taking animal photographs is a nice touch), and the right, relatively smooth learning curve. But days are long, evenings needed for taking care of the emails piling up from the association, projects, students and other contacts (while working days are packed with meetings) and nights are too short. Ok, I will stop whining (at the front of computer!) and get into bed. See ya!

summer nights' action

Summer is perfect time to do whatever you want. At least in principle: I can just about still remember times when I spent long Northern summer nights reading or playing. Nowadays, other priorities take hold. Summer is perfect time to work; that is true for an academic. Winters are filled with dozens of projects, past, present, future: planning, reporting and administration work. And there is of course teaching and other things like DiGRA and other association work I am involved with. When summer comes, I am just desperate to do research: the work I actually want to do most of all. So, I just sit inside, read and write. Wonderful!

There has not been so much time for games of books. I did read some more from the Culture series by Banks. There was also some straightforward action, Top Spin (a tennis game) and PainKiller. Looking at the recent releases, I have not found so much originality, but then again – for a summer night of entertainment, even yet another tennis game, or first-person-shooter can do.

games as fiction and fantasy

After some days of driving around Finland during my summer holidays, we ended up into Finncon, the national science fiction and fantasy convention in Jyvaskyla. The event was its usual pleasant mixture of talks, presentations and good company (this time the invasion of teenage Anime fans in their cosplay outfits brought more colour to the geeky mix).

The foreign special quests were Robin Hobb, John Clute and Gwyneth Jones, whose readings I especially enjoyed. It is really pity that her work is so hard to find, at least in our country. We had interesting discussions both at the science fiction researchers’ meeting in Friday, as well as in the SF Research panel in Sunday. My personal highlight, however was the Games as Fiction and Fantasy session we had organised with Jussi Holopainen (Nokia/NRC), Mikael Kasurinen (Remedy) and Mike Pohjola (the author of Myrskyn aika RPG). The topic was impossibly complex, and time was ridiculously short, which made it all great fun. Audience was active in making questions, and I hope we created some conceptual clarity, even if much was of course left unanswered.

(The cat with a question.)

game studies, hybrid voices

Our Lab released the first course series to pilot game studies as online learning today. The phone has been ringing, and I have been busy (with my croaking voice, still in that summer flu) explaining various media people that yes, games are indeed researched, and that yes, there is need for education at this field, too. Later, while I was reading Jessica Mulligan’s Biting the Hand column series (1997-2003), I came across Raph Koster answering Jessica’s pro-entertainment piece with “The Case for Art“. There are other columns and discussions either openly or indirectly referring and linking in, and – rather than going to the debate itself – it got me thinking about the nature of column writing. This kind of blogs can be used, or perceived, as columns, too, but they can also be many other things. I enjoy reading several columns from traditional printed magazines, as well, but there is not similar kind of hypertextual openness in that medium. Some day, some way, I would like to be able to try and create a hybrid, a vehicle for truly polyphonic expression.

books and places

Last couple of weeks have meant transfer into the summer mode: mostly focusing on writing the game studies stuff that I cannot get done during the academic year. I have also started to read (both work and pleasure) as much as I can find time for. Summer nights in Finland are great for this. Look Windward, the latest of Ian M. Banks Culture novels, I think, my latest treasure. Not much energy for games, just occasional glimpse of Halo, then some gameplay videos of future releases (curious form of media art, in its own right). Last week I was spending my evenings working on the gameplay experience laboratory specs for our Lab. Looks promising.

worlds in battle

This weekend has meant some catching up with various game worlds. Tried (and got tired pretty fast) to play my way into the Middle-Earth with the EA’s Return of the King. As an interactive movie it works quite fine, but all that repetitive and linear action just is not for me. Just getting stuck and killed all the time, no fun. It might be that either much more experience in some beat-em-ups (Mortal Combat, anyone?) could have changed the situation. Or then just more save points along the way. Now the arduous process of repeatedly getting to the one really hard spot without any chance to save the game, then failing, and being forced to do the same thing dozens of times again is just painful and humiliating.

I was expecting more from the Eidos/Ion Storm Thief III. It is not yet released, but I downloaded and installed a demo version. The only problem was that there were some serious issues with the graphics. So no go there, too.

Most time I actually ended spending with the (now classic, for some) Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It has very strong emphasis on exploration, but I just wonder what would be the right balance. This time, scenery is beautiful and world rich and detailed in various imaginary cultures, races and intrigues. The only problem is that classic adventure game one: you end up walking from other side of the world to the other again and again in some petty errands, getting confused and distracted on the road. But if you give a player enough freedom, the risk of loss of focus is the necessary counterpart, or isn’t it?