Category: Computer Games

Grand Text Auto has a blog entry about, Another undergraduate game program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Thanks to StÈfan for this.

Earlier I mentioned the need for game engines for games research. Brad Nickerson at UNB sent me a link to Panda3D from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon. Panda 3D was originally developed by Disney and it sounds like it was used by them for some games.
Continue reading Open Source Game Engines

The Guildhall at SMU (Southern Methodist University) offers a 18 month certficate in digital game development. They seem to have a serious facility and faculty complement. The program allows students to specialize in Art Creation, Level Design and Software Development. The program appears to have been designed with industry people and aims to be responsive to the industry. I don’t see a lot of theory or narrativity, but the curriculuar sections are behind a password.
This came to me from Paul Taylor.

Serious Games is an initiative “to help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.” (Serious Games: About from “Our Goals”). the project is directed by David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. They talk about the “emergence of a serious games industry”. I feel about serious games what I feel about the hype around games in education – it isn’t really a game anymore when you “play” it in a utilitarian context. What makes playing a game is the entering into a non-utilitarian context where invented rules apply. Of course, any game, in the sense of a technology or instatiation (like Monopoly) can be “played” for reasons other than fun, and that is the beautiful irony of the phrase “serious games.” It is a contradiction that provokes sense.
In the philosophy of play we have the problem of professional poker playing. Is a card-shark still playing the game of poker if he/she does it for the serious purpose of making money? Some would say that the shark is not playing poker, but working at poker. Are games of chance played for money now serious? How does the money change the play? Tough issues.

The next challenge in the humanities is thinking about computer games. One way to do this is to start developing games as research. To do that we need open source game engines. Steve Ramsay sent me the link to Crystal Space 3D and an article about it at LinuxDevCenter.com: Crystal Space: 3D for Free. I’m not sure how, but my sense is that we are going to have to start weaving text tools into these game engines.

Glasgow based company Traffic launches JFK assassination game according to this story from USA Today. (“Company launches JFK assassination game”, 11/23/2004)
The game JFK Reloaded sounds like a mini-game where you are Oswald trying to shoot JFK three times. Traffic claims this is to interest people in history, Ted Kennedy’s spokesman calls it “despicable”. Would there be such a fuss if it was a book being released? It is the first-person character of games that bothers us – the idea of kids practicing doing despicable acts – which is what Plato was bothered about in the Republic when he banned the poets.

Video Game Studies and the Emerging Instructional Revolution by Joel Foreman in a new online education publication Innovate is a short survey of some of the issues around games studies becoming an academic and taught field. He makes these interesting points:

• To study games will take significant funding. Game engines are expensive to make as are effective games.
• He makes the case that serious simulations (games that are serious?) will come when we get a critical mass of students trained and these might be effective instructionally.
• Modding will be important and may the form that game studies happens.
• His main point – about revolution – is that game studies may not be just another program – it could lead to games/simulations becoming a serious form of instruction. Game studies could trigger a revolution thoughout the academy.

Some quotes

The emergence of video game studies would be no more or less significant than any other curricular expansion unless, as many believe, it is the precondition of something far greater: an instructional revolution.
…
Since the Gutenberg era, students have been trained in the productive skill (writing) that is responsible for growing and maintaining the dominant media. Likewise, current and future generations of students trained in video game technologies will advance a computerized, pictorial culture

Continue reading Video Games and Instructional Revolution

Ross Scaife of The Stoa drew my attention to the e-version of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas which is now available for free at the University of Virginia E-Text Center. See, for example, the entry on Game Theory. This is a great resource to have.

canada.com in a story “Want game? Bring your ID, retailers ward”, reports that major retailers like Walmart, The Bay, Zellers, Blockbuster and Radio Shack will ask for ID when selling mature games. The game business in Canada is about $1 billion and retail chains account for 90% of sales according to the Retail Council of Canada. The ratings system being used is the Entertainmenet Software Rating Board in New York.

Ancient Greece: Victory at any cost is an entgry in Jesper Juul’s blog The Ludologist which also deals with definition. Jesper has a paper online that has a topography of games, The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness. Why is defining games so important? Why do we continue doing it after Wittgenstein’s Investigations.
Continue reading The Ludologist: Game Definition Again