Another Perfect World documentary on VWs

 Posted by (Visited 10563 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 6467 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.

Avatars aren’t tokens

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May 062009
 

A little bit ago there was a kerfuffle over an event in World of Warcraft that ended with female characters getting bunny ears put on their heads. This post isn’t about that — not directly, anyway.

Rather, it’s about the reaction that many users had regarding avatars, characters, and players, and the divides between them.

The key quote that sets me off is this one from Tobold:

Ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible.

Continue reading »

New art game: Today I Die

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May 062009
 

How can I resist a game that combines poetry and puzzle and art game? Here’s Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die. There are multiple endings, by the way.

The game is brief, but interesting and affecting. Worth checking out, and it runs in the browser, so no download required.

His donation model is interesting too. Custom work for people, for a price, akin to how some musicians are offering house concerts for people who buy ultra-fancy packages of their recordings.

All-Everquest Game Studies issue

 Posted by (Visited 6067 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
May 052009
 

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

  • Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
  • Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
  • Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
  • Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
  • Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
  • Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.

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