Category: Computer Games

DFC Intelligence is a game industry research company that produces reports for sale. They have some articles online for free like Monthly Briefing on “Who will benefit from the growth of online game subscription revenue?” (March 7, 2006). This briefing article makes some interesting points, including, “Most notably, over 50% of online game subscription revenue in 2005 came from Asian countries outside Japan, most notably South Korea, China and Taiwan.”

A welcome caveat in the article,

The online game market has supposedly been on the cusp of booming for 20 years or so. There has been a great deal of trial and error in getting the market to where it is today. Many of the success stories have seemingly come out of nowhere. Future growth will require companies to take some significant risky investments. Most companies that have invested with a conscious goal of growing their online game business have not been successful. Right now there is even a question of whether traditional publishers need online games for growth over the next several years.

The Current Issue of the International Review of Information Ethics is dedicated to “The Ethics of E-Games”. I haven’t read the issue, but it should be of interest and Charles Ess, one of the editors does good work on information ethcis.

“The people who were video game players were better and faster performers,” said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor at York University. “Those who were bilingual and video game addicts scored best — particularly at the most difficult tasks.”

According to a story in The Globe and Mail on February 9th, 2006, research at York shows that playing video games has a similar effect on mental abilities as bilingualism. The story by Carolyn Abraham, Better living through video games?, is based on research by Professor Bialystok that will be published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Biology. The research looked at 100 university students in Toronto.

Prof. Bialystok suspects video gamers, like bilinguals, have a practised ability to block out information that is irrelevant to the task at hand.

This explains why my kids don’t hear me calling them for dinner.
Continue reading Mental agility and video games

What is the relationship between gesture and dialogue? Paul Boussac and Jack Sidnell of the Toronto Semiotic Society organized a two day symposium titled, Semiotics And Pragmatics of Gesture, Conversation and Dialogue. I gave a talk with the pretentious (but actually relevant) title, Dialogues of the Dead: Reanimated Interaction in Computer Games in which I tried to show that the same concerns found in dialogue theory from Plato on around the way we animate disreputable characters are feeding the public anxieties around computer games. It is Dr. Frankenstein’s problem all over, if we animate the dead we need to take responsibility for them. I was trying to find a way to engage in an ethical discussion of interaction which combines gesture and conversation.
Continue reading Dialogue of the Dead and Games

Another tragedy that is being tied to computer games. On Thursday one of two teenagers racing their parent’s Merc T-boned a taxi driver killing him … days before he would become a Canadian citizen. The Globe carried it on the front page with a photo and diagram, see A Canadian dream cut short.

One of games in the EA series, The Need for Speed was in the crashed Merc.

The video game police found in the car allows players to select custom-made cars to race in urban traffic, Det. Lobsinger said.

“You have this game that’s all about fast cars and racing through city streets. It’s actually really ironic,” he said.

Is there a causal connection, or is it just irony?

Courtesy of Slashdot, an article, Trials and Tribulations by Nadia Oxford (Dec. 14, 2005) on the history of video game lawsuits. The history concludes,

As long as there is money to make, personal morals to uphold (however noble or whacked) and profits to defend, courts will never lack for activity. Gamers and non-gamers alike have reason to shake their heads as the strong foundation of Democracy is smothered by frivilous and petty lawsuits launched by weasels looking to get rich quick. But it’s undeniably important–as well as interesting–to review those historic copyright lawsuits that formed the prosperous industry of today.

A bit facile .. but true. The law is a form of commerce; another game for some.

The New York Times has an article on the growth in university computer game programs titled, Video Games Are Their Major, So Don’t Call Them Slackers (Seth Schiesel, Nov. 22, 2005.) This is part of a series on the training of artists across disciplines.

Traditionalists in both education and the video game industry pooh-pooh the trend, calling it a bald bid by colleges to cash in on a fad. But others believe that video games – which already rival movie tickets in sales – are poised to become one of the dominant media of the new century.

Certainly, the burgeoning game industry is famished for new talent. And now, universities are stocked with both students and young faculty members who grew up with joystick in hand. And some educators say that studying games will soon seem no less fanciful than going to film school or examining the cultural impact of television.

Continue reading Majoring in Games

In a previous blog entry I linked to a conference on Serious Games. Last week I was interviewd by Bob Greiner of the Washington Post for a story titled, Game Industry Finds Serious Outlet for Creative Energies. The article is quite good. Greiner has written an in-depth article looking at the opportunities for gaming in education.

According to a story in the Daily Telegraph online titled “Sony’s game’s up“, an electronics “geek” won a ruling against Sony to the effect that there was noting illegal to mod chips that overide the region specific coding that lets Sony control prices by region.

Matt pointed me to a story in Slashdot about a Procedural Arts free interactive drama called Facade.

From the developers:

Facade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and story-intensive interactive entertainment. Facade is freely downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Facade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and TripÔø?s lives Ôø? motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.

There is also a conveniently mirrored copy of a New York Times article Redefining the Power of the Gamer by Seth Schiesel (June 7, 2005) which discusses the innovations behind Facade. If I undestand it, the developers have built the AI equivalent to a set of laws of physics so that you don’t have to script the interaction. Instead you use ABL (A Behavior Language), a drama manager, a rule language and a discourse management framework to describe the characters, their goals, the units of the story, and natural language understanding. Very cool. Lets hope this idea gets woven into games.