Computer Games – Theoreti.ca

Replaying Japan 2023

Replaying Japan 2023 – The 11th International Japan Game Studies Conference – Conference Theme – Local Communities, Digital Communities and Video Games in Japan

I’m back in Canada after Replaying Japan 2023 in Nagoya Japan. I kept conference notes here for those interested. The book of abstracts is here and the programme is here. Next year will be in August at the University of Buffalo and the Strong Museum in Rochester. Some points of interest:

Nökkvi Jarl Bjarnason gave a talk on the emergence of national and regional game studies. What does it mean to study game culture in a country or region? How is locality appealed to in game media or games or other aspects of game culture?
Felania Liu presented on game preservation in China and the challenges her team faces including issues around the legitimacy of game studies.
Hirokazu Hamamura gave the final keynote on the evolution of game media starting with magazines and then shifting to the web.
I presented a paper co-written with Miki Okabe and Keiji Amano. We started with the demographic challenges faced by Japan as its population shrinks. We then looked at what Japanese Game Companies are doing to attract and support women and families. There is a work ethics that puts men and women in a bind where they are expected to work such long hours that there really isn’t any time left for “work-life balance.”

The conference was held in person at Nagoya Zokei University and brilliantly organized by Keiji Amano and Jean-Marc Pelletier. We limited online interventions to short lightning talks so there was good attendance.

He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him – The New York Times

The New York Times has a nice story about Keita Takahashi. He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him. Like many Japanese game designers he gets no royalties and has little say in the future of the game associated with him, Katamari Damacy.

The game itself is collection game where you roll a ever growing ball of things that you might see in a typical Japanese house. The balls will allow a prince to rebuild the stars accidentally destroyed by his father, King of All Cosmos. (The image above is of Takahashi as the King.) Rachael Hutchinson has a chapter in her book Japanese Culture Through Videogames about the game and Japan.

Takahashi has a new game coming out soon, to a T.

40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry

Entering a crowded field, the Nintendo Famicom came to dominate the market in the 1980s, leaving a family orientated legacy that continues to be felt today

The Guardian has a good story on the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom, 40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry The story quotes James Newman and also mentions Masayuki Uemura who Newman and I knew through the Replaying Japan conferences. Alas, Uemura, who was at Ritsumeikan after he retired from Nintendo, passed in 2021.

The story points out how Nintendo deliberately promoted the Famicom as a family machine that could be hooked up to the family TV (hence “Fami – com.) In various ways they wanted to legitimize gaming as a family experience. By contrast, when Nintendo brought the machine to North America it was remodelled to look like a VCR and called the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Female Experience Simulator

I recently played the Female Experience Simulator after reading about it in the thesis of a student. It is a “text adventure” where you choose your wardrobe and then go somewhere. Inevitably you get harassed. The lesson of the game is,

Did you think that maybe if you changed your clothes or avoided certain places that you could avoid being harassed?

Yeah, it doesn’t work like that.

Welcome to life as a woman.

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers to refine a virtual and mixed reality video game that can improve motor skills for older adults and sedentary people.

The Folio of the University of Alberta published a story about a trip to Japan that I and others embarked on, U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats. Ritsumeikan invited us to develop research collaborations around gaming, language and artificial intelligence. Our visit was a chance to further the collaborations, like the one my colleagues Eleni Stroulia and Victor Fernandez Cervantes are developing with Thawmas Ruck around games for older adults. This inter-university set of collaborations build on projects I was involved in going back to 2011, including a conference (Replaying Japan) and a journal, the Journal of Replaying Japan.

The highlight was the signing of a Memorandum Of Understanding by the two presidents (of U of A and Ritsumeikan). I was also involved as was Professor Nakamura. May the collaboration thrive.

The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game

Released in 1978, a socialist alternative to Monopoly sold over 200,000 copies and was translated into multiple languages.

Mental Floss has a nice piece of floss with The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game. Class Struggle, the board game, was developed by a political science professor, Bertell Ollman, who wanted an alternative to Monopoly, which ironically was based on the Landlord Game which had been originally designed to show the evils of property. Class Struggle was sold to Avalon Hill who eventually discontinued it. It looks like you can find copies on eBay.

Destroy All Monsters

There has recently been some fuss around the change in the Open Gaming License of Dungeons & Dragons. So here is a nice story about D&D and its history, Destroy All Monsters.

D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions, which cover everything from “Adjusting Ability Scores” (“Magic-users and clerics can reduce their strength scores by 3 points and add 1 to their prime requisite”) to “Who Gets the First Blow?” (“The character with the highest dexterity strikes first”). In fact, as I wandered farther into the cave, and acquired the rulebooks for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I found that there were rules for everything: … It would be a mistake to think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true whether you play by them or not. The rules induct you into the world of D&D; they are the long, difficult scramble from the mouth of the cave to the first point where you can stand up and look around.

All the (open) world’s a stage: how the video game Fallout became a backdrop for live Shakespeare shows

Free to roam through the post-apocalyptic game, one intrepid group has taken to performing the Bard. They have found an intent new audience, as well as the odd mutant scorpion

The Guardian has a nice story today about a Shakespeare troupe who are staging plays in Fallout 76, All the (open) world’s a stage: how the video game Fallout became a backdrop for live Shakespeare shows.

It seems to me that this is related to the various activities that were staged in Second Life and other environments. It also has connections to the Machinima phenomenon where people use 3D environments like games to stage acts that are filmed.

Of course the problem with Fallout 76 is the performers can get attacked during a performance.

Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games | CNN

Computer and video games featuring Nazi symbols such as the swastika can now be sold in Germany uncensored after a regulatory body lifted the longstanding ban.

CNN reported back in 2018 that Germany lifts ban on Nazi symbols in computer games. The game that prompted this was the counterfactual Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that imagines the Nazis won WW II. To sell the game in Germany they had to change the symbols like the swastika as it is forbidden to display such symbols of “unconstitutional organizations.” Anyway, Germany has changed its interpretation of the law so that games are now treated as works of art like movies where it is legal to show the symbols.

This shows how difficult it can be to ban hate speech while not censoring the arts. For that matter, how does one deal with ironic hate speech – hate speech masquerading as irony?

The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – The New York Times

For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.

The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.

The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.

The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.