Wired makes the case for more torture in games

 Posted by (Visited 7041 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Dec 152008
 

If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.

So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.

This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.

For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?

— “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired

Are games about torture evil?

 Posted by (Visited 17144 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Dec 122008
 

…please explain to me again why killing NPCs in games is fine but sticking them with a cattle prod is evil.

Here’s your explanation, from my theory-of-fun/game-grammar point of view.

In killing NPCs (or popping any other sort of experience balloon), we are definitely seeing a “kill” dressing put on top of a statistical exercise. We are being entrained around measuring odds, optimizing behavior towards success, and then receiving a reward. The reward is generally utilitarian in some other aspect of the game. In other words, you do it, and there’s a reason for it — you kill the mob and you get back the loot, the XP, etc.

Although the killing is itself morally dubious as a ‘dressing’ for these underlying mechanics (see my previous writings on the subject), players do learn to see past the fiction fairly quickly, and cease seeing this as a moral issue, because they are smart: they know it’s just a game, and they move onto the underlying systemic reality very quickly.

Continue reading »

Amazon says Theory of Fun is coming

 Posted by (Visited 4713 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.

Game Informer on “Impostor” games

 Posted by (Visited 13834 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 152008
 

Is Wii Music a game?

Games That Aren’t Really Games…Should We Be Concerned? is an article on the Game Informer website (and maybe the mag too, for all I know) that explores the area of games that aren’t really games, such as the recently released Wii Music.

Curiously enough, the article leads off by using A Theory of Fun to try to figure out what a game is. 🙂 They arrived at this definition:

…for our purposes we needed something solid, and settled on several qualifications mentioned in his book. Ultimately, we chose the most important elements and decided that games are formal systems with rules that require choices, are competitive, have explicit goals and quantifiable outcomes. There…that is a little easier to swallow isn’t it?

They note that I myself think many of the distinctions are sort of irrelevant. Why? Let’s say that you have a game with a quantifiable outcome — Quake, perhaps. Now strip all semblance of score or feedback from it, but still track that stuff internally. What you have left is an activity wherein you shoot, but cannot tell if you hit; and if you hit, you cannot tell if you are doing better than other players. Continue reading »

From the Mailbag: Where’s A Grammar of Gameplay?

 Posted by (Visited 5846 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 112008
 

We have a game development program here at UCC, and I’ve been trying to get a copy of “A Grammar Of Game Play: How Games Work” for our library without any luck. Has it been published yet? If it has, where can we get a copy; and if not, will it be and if so, where and when?

— Bill Schryba, Union County College

It has not been published – or finished being written! 🙂 Sorry… it doesn’t quite exist yet. That said, there is material out there along similar lines, and at this point Dan Cook’s stuff is probably the most user-friendly game grammar material out there.

Some quick links I dug up:

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