More on how the body & brain react to games

 Posted by (Visited 6759 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 132009
 

Gamasutra has a report from a GDC Canada session discussion the role of emotions in games — that is, a researcher who is not Nicole Lazzaro! And it sounds like a fun and meaty discussion.

The counter is fear, which can cause physiological responses due to the “fight or flight” impulse. Many people love that sensation: “Look at the prevalence of the horror movie; it’s everywhere. Look at horror games.”

“Surely there’s no harm in that? Well, actually, there is,” said Chandler: Scientists have recently determined that after sustained fear, bodies stop producing adrenaline and being producing cortisol, which begins to break down non-essential organs and tissues to feed vital organs, increasing pain, promoting heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

So, here we have “games can cause heart disease!” 🙂 Though it should be noted, so can shock horror movies… or perhaps excessive rollercoaster riding.

There’s also a bit bolstering the arguments I made not long ago about how we have unconscious predispositions towards people and things that looks like people (such as avatars).

Speaking of which, there was a lengthy discussion on that topic on the latest “Shut Up. We’re Talking” podcast, which has led to even more debate and controversy.

Unfortunately, I think the SUWT crew missed the point a bit by saying “well, maybe mature or experienced gamers learn not to have these subconscious reactions.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that is true — any more than informed and mature people sail through those tests of their reaction times with photographs of people of mixed races. This is not an easy bias to remove…

Play This Thing on Brenda’s Train game

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May 122009
 

Play This Thing writes up Train, the controversial game that Brenda Brathwaite made that continues to stir discussion here on the blog.

She has sent me the rules to Train as well, but I don’t think I will write them up; my reaction is much like Greg Costikyan’s — the game is meant to be played, not the rules read with knowledge of the point. So discussing it solely from that point of view seems to undermine the actual work to some degree.

Another Perfect World documentary on VWs

 Posted by (Visited 10543 times)  Game talk, Watching  Tagged with: ,
May 092009
 

If you happen to be in Toronto, the Hot Docs 2009 Festival is showing a documentary I’m in called Another Perfect World (which I haven’t seen yet!). It premiered last night, but there’s another showing tonight. Thanks to Tony Walsh for the heads-up.

You can go here to learn more about the film.

Another Perfect World is a documentary about digital utopias, about online worlds created as places for work, play, friendship and love.

People have always created utopias, worlds that reflect the greatest, most enlightened and noble ideas of the period in which they live. The utopias of the future will be created online, in digital worlds capable of rendering photo-realistic depictions of whatever the mind can imagine with technologies that allow people from around the world to join in. We now have the chance to build a new world from scratch.

If you were going to do so, on which principles would you establish it? What is more important: freedom of expression; an active marketplace to encourage social interaction; or laws to define the limits of social relations?

News games on the rise

 Posted by (Visited 6454 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
May 082009
 

Dan Terdiman has an article on the rapid proliferation of “news games,” which were an unusual and even controversial genre a few years ago when Ian Bogost and others started pushing them. Today, they are all over the place, thanks to the huge Flash community: tiny games that serve as a replacement for editorial cartoons (editorial cartooning, btw, is a business that is apparently in trouble).

When we talked five to ten years ago about how games were going to be the dominant medium of this century, I don’t think most people were thinking in terms of this sort of tiny minigame, mostly made by amateurs. And yet, I think that is kind of where we’re going.

It makes me ponder, what other areas of media will have little games slip in and replace the old way of doing things? We could maybe walk through the newspaper and see: how about classifieds? Obituaries? The social column? The letters column? Anyone got a Flash game to replace the Arts page?

Some choice quotes:

Doherty’s Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.

That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci’s Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.

“It’s a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs,” said Doherty. “It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu.”

— ‘News games’ put public in charge of hot topics | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.

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