Grand Theft Auto IV: Panic Magnet or Cultural Criticism

Screen Capture
Well, Grand Theft Auto IV is on sale today and the news is predicting it “will break sales records.” More importantly the media are warming up for a juicy story about game violence while the gaming news is ready for the moral panic of the mainstream media. Take Kotaku:

One might also suspect that, when the game is finally release (sic), opportunistic, fear mongering elected officials, clueless mainstream media and glory seeking attorneys may find extra content not listed, including Virtual Rape, Cop Killing, Overt Racism, Gerbil Abuse, Being On Someone’s Lawn and Buggery. We’re looking forward to a fun ride.

I think the gaming community expects that GTA IV is going to be a magnet for media stories about violence and videogames. Remember that hard core gamers have been following GTA 4 for a while and thinking about its reception while the audience of the mainstream news (if there is such a thing left) are just waking up to it as the stories go mainstream. Rockstar may even have placed some content designed to spark controversy since nothing sells games like controversy, even when the game is rated Mature. In the case of gaming, the media have little credibility compared to the narrow gaming channels that gamers read, but gamers love to have their opinions of n00bs confirmed when the mainstream seems to parachute in the day before a game is released or when some kid goes postal. Thus we end up with two solitudes that feed off misunderstanding each other: parents who can panic after reading that they should and gamers frustrated that they aren’t understood when they knew they wouldn’t be. That’s the essence of commedia – the fun of watching groups creatively misunderstand each other in public. GTA IV promises to be another chapter in a comedy of misunderstanding that goes back to Socrates complaining about the poets teaching youth to practice disreputable characters (and Aristophanes making fun of him doing so.) I note that Rockstar has made a brilliant first move on the Information page of the web site for the game by stealing some cultural criticism high-ground:

What does the American Dream mean today?

For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past.

For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity.

As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t.

Think about it – a Scottish game development company making a game that claims to critique the emptiness of the American dream in order to make lots of money the American way. But seriously, some interesting aspects of the story are:

  • How do companies manage blockbuster games? GTA 4 was delayed (possibly to avoid other big releases like Halo 3) and now seems to have been well timed (and built up) to take off. Given how much it cost to develop GTA 4, the launch probably has to be carefully staged to be perceived as the next “fastest-selling” so that they make a profit. How do they stage blockbusters? Should we care about them?
  • How do blockbuster games intersect with other forms of entertainment “properties”? Will GTA 4 really affect movie going among young men by taking them off the streets and out of the theatres (and into the gaming room) for a few weeks? Will it have a measurable effect on sales of other types of entertainment as some speculate?
  • A related question is how they manage the tie-in with Amazon for music? I think games like GTA 4 have real potential to sell other merchandise – especially music, given the way radio stations entertain in the game. They apparently have some deal for selling tunes through the game in the US. Will it have an effect on Amazon’s music sales?
  • How effective is the game engine (Euphoria) that they are using? GTA 4 is one of the first major games to use Euphoria – will it make a difference players respond to?

Old Bailey Online

Image from Web Page
The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.

Bravo to the team that developed it!

Bytes & Bites: e-Portfolios

Slide Image
Yesterday I gave a talk for McMaster’s Bytes & Bites – e-learning cafe about e-Portfolios: Helping students represent themselves (PDF of Powerpoint). Our way of teaching students to do portfolios is different than how e-portfolios are usually structured as we can expect of Multimedia students that they create a web site from scratch on a server off-campus (where they can update it over time as their career matures.) There seem to me to be two challenges to the use of e-portfolios in learning:

  • Faculty Consensus is hard to secure. E-Portfolios work best if there are meaningful assignments throughout a program where students are asked to put their work in the system. This means your colleagues have to understand and agree to use the system and to encourage the self-reflection portfolios support. But consensus among faculty, especially when half your courses are taught by sessionals, is hard to get.
  • Privacy and Publication. One of the incentives for students to post their work to a portfolio is the opportunity to publish the portfolio when they graduate, but that also raises privacy issues. What rights do students have to not keep stuff they aren’t proud of. We have to make sure they get to choose what to publish and that they have the ability to remove stuff. Further, and this is where our simple go-get-your-own-domain-and-ISP model works well, a structured portfolio system on campus will always constrain the way students can publish their material.

Intute: Researching videogames with Intute

Intute has a nice summary page about serious games, Researching videogames with Intute. The page is just the right length and builds on records in Intute. I note that they don’t mention the Serious Games Institute that I blogged recently.

This is the first time I’ve noticed that Intute is publishing longer guides. They call them Limelights and describe them thus:

Limelight, from Intute: Arts and Humanities, is a monthly feature showcasing individual artists, topical subjects, new and noteworthy websites, or forthcoming events, exhibitions or festivals. Each feature gives information, links to related sites in the Intute: Arts and Humanities database and suggestions for possible searches.

Digital Humanities And High Performance Computing

This Monday and Tuesday we had a workshop on Digital Humanities And High Performance Computing here at McMaster. The workshop that was sponsored by SHARCNET was organized to identify challenges, opportunities and concrete steps that can be taken to support humanists interested in HPC techniques. Materials for the workshop are now on my wiki philosophi.ca, but will soon migrate to SHARCNET’s.

The intersection of the humanities and HPC is heating up. We aren’t the only people developing encounters. The NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) has a Humanities High Performance Computing Resource Page that describes grant programs for humanists. One program with the DOE gives humanists support and cycles on machines at the NERSC. The support will be crucial – one thing that came out in our workshop is that humanists need training and support to imagine HPC projects. In particular we need support to clean up our data to the point where it is tractable to HPC methods.

The workshop brought digital humanists, HPC folk, and grant council representatives from across Southern Ontario. Pictures are coming!

Update: Materials about this workshop are now on the SHARCNET DH-HPC wiki.

Serious Games Institute

SGI Logo

I just stumbled upon the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry University. Their aim is, “to become an international centre of excellence for serious games and a model of best practice for regional development through technology innovation.” (About Us) They seem to be focused on developing games to teach business, and the games seem to be fairly sophisticated. (See their Showcase.) It is interesting how serious gaming is being used to revitalize a region. nGen (Niagara Interactive Media Generator), recently announced by Brock, is a similar initiative that is connecting with Silicon Knights to kickstart game development as a way of generating new industry.

The Serious Games Institute seems to use Second Life a lot where they have an island.

Clemens: Virtual Wiiality Redux

Photo of me with Wiiality on

One of our students Joel Clemens gave a demonstration of his impressive fourth year project, Virtual Wiiality Redux. He used common consumer components like the Sony SIXAXIS controller, which has motion sensing, to create an virtual reality system. In the picture above you see me with the helmet (with the SIXAXIS velcroed above) experiencing the 3D space (a version of our lab with a gaping chasm below my feet.) The strange broom thing was Joel’s solution to tracking where I am in the space. It has a small bowling ball with rollers to capture movement. The broom “floor mouse” didn’t work as well as the head tracking set, which was very responsive. With hackers like Joel and cheap motion tracking controllers, DIY VR may be a real “wiiality”. Check out his extensive web site.

Game Physics – Half-Life: Havoc

Graphic from web site

Two of my students have been getting attention for an original senior thesis they did for Multimedia. Calen Henry and Jacob Karsmeyer created a mod for Half-Life 2 to explore game physics. You can get the mod and read their essay on the history of game physics on the web site the created, Half-Life: Havoc. As of today, Sunday, April 13th they are ranked 5th on Mod DB. Kotaku has also blogged their project which seemed to have started a long thread about whether one can trust downloads not to have viruses (and some comments about the writing.)