From Slashdot a browser version of Wolfenstein 3D from Bethesda – Celebrating 20 Years of Wolfenstein 3D. You can play the game and choose levels (including secret ones.) There is a nice YouTube video with John Carmack, the director, talking about creating Wolfenstein.
The Guardian has a nice short story by Keza MacDonald that asks Are gamers really sexist?. It doesn’t really answer the question or propose solutions, but it documents again how people who speak out against sexist language get harassed.
Last week I was at the GRAND 2012 conference. GRAND (Graphics, Animation, and New Media) is a Networks of Centres of Excellence that brings together people across disciplines and across the country around gaming, new media and so on. You can see my GRAND 2012 conference notes here.
This year we had two of the best keynotes of any conference I have been to. Valerie Steeves talked about her research into parents and youth on the internet. The change in attitudes of both parents and youth to the internet between 2000 and today was dramatic. Ken Perlin was the closing keynote and he showed Java apps that he wrote as experiments. It made me want to learn to program in Java just to have as much fun as he was having.
Arts Technica has a photo essay on the Smithsonian American Art Museum show The Art of Video Games. The Smithsonian site for the exhibit is here.
From the photographs it looks like they didn’t just do the usual think of showing screen shots and concept art as art, but they have sequences of screens titled “Avances in Mechanics” that show, for example, how jumping has changed in games over time. The exhibit also seems to have a historical bent:
The Art of Video Games is one of the first exhibitions to explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies. It features some of the most influential artists and designers during five eras of game technology, from early pioneers to contemporary designers. The exhibition focuses on the interplay of graphics, technology and storytelling through some of the best games for twenty gaming systems ranging from the Atari VCS to the PlayStation 3. (from the exhibit site)
Sinead introduced me to a cool crowdsourcing game from the National Library of Finland called Digitalkoot. As your proof words from the OCRing of 19th century newspapers you create bridges for moles. The YouTube above shows the game. The company behind this will apparently build and run a game like this for you for a fee.
David, one of the students I work with was involved in a Hackathon and Global Game Jam in Edmonton. The team he was on developed a very cool game idea called, Life Goes On. The idea was to make dying a game mechanic. You can now download the game now and try it.
The Guardian has a good story on Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?. Despite the title, the story doesn’t really take sides. It documents the variety of ways that game companies and armies interact from companies like Kuma Games that make Kuma\War games out of current events. The article also links to an interesting grant award to Kuma from the Department of Defense for game-based second language training:
Utilizing our tools, experience, and huge library of existing 3D assets we can provide an effective, cost-efficient, rapidly-deployable and easily updatable language retention toolset for trainers and Soldiers deployed around the world. It is our intention to refresh languages skills in an intense and immersive 3D environment, which would be made available as part of an online/offline language exercise portal …
The article also documents games made from an Arab perspective by companies in Syria, developers tied to the Hezbollah and Irani organizations. These games (whether the Kuma\War games or those from other perspectives) can be seen as soft propaganda – making normal attitudes about who is good and bad. Such games don’t train people the way simulators might, but they can recruit people or legitimize a cause.
One could argue that just as in the Cold War the “soft power” of American movies played a key role, so in the percieved conflict with terrorism software is playing a similar propaganda role. The problem may be that the wrong people are being portrayed as the bad guys. The propaganda on both sides may be too crude and may make reconciliation harder.
In the meantime Iran has sentenced one of the Kuma designers to death accusing him of developing for the CIA. The game gets serious for this poor designer who was detained when he visited family in Iran.
While I was in Japan I had the good fortune to meet a number of people who were involved in the creation of fan circle or doujin manga, anime and games. These circles and the often very professional fan works they publish are a phenomenon that is important to understanding Japanese popular culture so I asked one if I could interview her about her experience. The interview was conducted over email in December of 2011, January and Februrary of 2012. I sent her questions, she sent back answers, and I edited them into this dialogue which she then checked and added to. In my editing I tried to keep her distinctive voice, but did edit for grammar where confident in her meaning. In some cases I have added explanations that are [in brackets and italicized.] I have kept her identity secret at her request.
I’ve posted some more sets of gaming related photographs on my Flickr account.
On Friday the 16th, of December I interviewed Masayuki Uemura who is a Professor at Ritsumeikan since 2003, but is also known as the head of the division that designed the Famicom when he was at Nintendo. Professor Mitsuyuki Inaba translated for us as Professor Uemura doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese. We talked mostly about his current research into patterns of play.
Uemura and his lab have developed a system that captures play activity as subjects play video games. They simultaneously capture:
This is combined into a single video with four squares so that they can review subjects playing and simultaneously see what they are doing. The controller buttons being pressed is also recorded as data that they can analyze. I asked if they had thought of capturing the controller data (when buttons are pressed and for how long) as MIDI and he said they tried that, but couldn’t get rid of latency in the capture. They are now experimenting with gathering more data like heart rate, but that is intrusive so they are also thinking of eye-tracking. The idea is to capture as much information about player behaviour as possible so as to compare players and try to understand differences between players. He is trying to see if there are types of players (like button mashers vs careful button pressers.) After they capture a subject playing they follow that up with an interview as he feels that there is a lot more to game playing than what happens on the screen. He would like to capture as much context as possible.
He talked about an interesting phenomenon where players repeatedly press a button that doesn’t do anything (the up in the cross-shaped joypad.) He showed me a slide with results of a test of 7 participants with the amount that they pressed the up button in 8 minute segments. Strangely the players that self-identified as experts pressed up a lot more. He has also been looking at when they press combinations of buttons. At the moment he is still gathering data and he is interested in cross-cultural comparisons of how players in different countries play the same games. He has gathered some data from Chinese players (who generally play pirated versions of games) to see if there are differences between Chinese and Japanese players. We talked about gathering data from Canadian players too.
While he described some of his preliminary findings, he was reluctant to speculate as to why there would be differences or why players would continue using a button that doesn’t do anything. It was clear to me that he wanted to be rigorous in the description of player behaviour and not indulge in speculation about the reasons for differences too early.
At the end of the interview (or I should say discussion) we talked a little bit about Nintendo. He has an article coming out in the journal of DiGRA Japan (Japanese) where he discusses his experiences at Nintendo and the development of the Famicom. He encouraged me to read that when it comes out.