I am speechless

 Posted by (Visited 10407 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 092008
 

…the Richard Bartle comments on the torture quest in WoW (and subsequent kerfuffle) hit BoingBoing, but nevermind that. Check out this comment in the discussion thread:

For about 9 months I’ve been working on a game that had torture as one of its selling points. Even though half of the team balked at being asked to design torture (“interrogation”) into a game, they still kept pushing it.

In my experience, people will watch torture, but don’t want to take part in it. Watching it is immersive enough. This idea did not go over well with certain people who just wanted that over the top sensationalist type of game.

On top of that, try making torture “fun”. Either you go full immersion, first-person in your face (scare and disgust most of your audience) OR you make it into a stupid mini-game (disgust a similar amount of people, but bore them to death).
Also, none of the choices in games ever amount to much, so the whole idea of “false intel” is flat. If it’s wrong to begin with, you are just going to teach the player that he played the game wrong, the moral lesson won’t be apparent.

Luckily our studio was shut down a month ago, so that game will never see the light of day.

Torture in video-games — a moral dilemma – Boing Boing.

The ludic fallacy

 Posted by (Visited 22135 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Dec 092008
 

I was just pointed to this wonderful essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

First Quadrant: Simple binary decisions, in Mediocristan: Statistics does wonders. These situations are, unfortunately, more common in academia, laboratories, and games than real life—what I call the “ludic fallacy”. In other words, these are the situations in casinos, games, dice, and we tend to study them because we are successful in modeling them.

–Edge: THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It’s not the only ludic fallacy I can think of. Recently I had a discussion with a management and leadership consultant, and we were discussing the generational characteristics of Millenials versus Gen X in the workforce, and we were talking about how a gamer mentality may have affected the way Gen Y behaves in the workplace: more likely to follow the rules, more likely to work in teams, more needful of reassurance, less creative and risk-taking, less likely to see the full scope of irreversible consequences of a choice, and less likely to see things in shades of gray. In a way, these sound like thinking trained by games. Continue reading »

Gaming officially mainstream

 Posted by (Visited 7262 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Dec 082008
 

We always said that it would happen, that eventually the non-gamers would start to age out of the population, and we would be at a place where games would be more accepted as a mainstream entertainment medium simply because most people would have engaged in gaming. Well, we’re officially there now with the news that over half of American adults are gamers.

More than half of American adults play video games and one in five play just about every day, according to a survey released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey of 2,054 U.S. adults was conducted late last year, with a margin of error of about 2 percent.

People from all walks of life play, though younger adults are far more likely to play than seniors, proof that video games are mainstream entertainment for the generations that grew up with them. In all, 81 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 said they play games, compared with 23 percent of people 65 and older.

–breaking news – national news – world news – azcentral.com.

There are additional interesting stats in there — higher education seems to be correlated with more play, not less; and basically all teens are gamers. There’s also interesting stuff around gamers with kids.

Amazon says Theory of Fun is coming

 Posted by (Visited 4711 times)  Game talk, Writing  Tagged with:
Dec 052008
 

Sort of. Several folks let me know they got order update emails — and i got one too. What does it say?

We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on August 29 2008 20:02 PDT (Order# 002-8006376-3950630):

Raph Koster (Author) “Theory of Fun for Game Design [Illustrated]”
[Paperback]
Estimated arrival date: 05/07/2009

Sigh.

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