The Smithsonian Amercian Art Museum is holding an exhibit on the The Art of Video Games next year. They ran a vote on which were the best games and came up with a list of 80. There is a PDF here that lists the selected games.
Continue reading Exhibitions: The Art of Video Games / American Art
From the New York Times an article about how the Military Tests Apps and Other Digital Training Tools (Andrew Martin and Thomas Lin, May 1, 2011). The article talks about the US military is trying various games including mobile games to train soldiers. The Army help a content for the best smartphone application that generated all sorts of apps including “Army Physical Readiness Training” and “Luther’s Small Catechism”.
The article also talks about VBS2 (Virtual Battlespace 2) which is a “battlefield simulation system.” It allows trainers and even users (in the field) to develop or tweak simulations. Developed by Bohemia Interactive Australia the simulator predicts a world where all army and responders have editable simulation tools for modeling their local environment for training.
Thanks to Steve for this. (I’m now down to 5 more articles from the NYT this month and I’m only on the third day … hmmmm.)
Sean sent me to Game Pitches: The repository for video game pitches and design documents. The actual documents are in Scribd and they have about 35 documents at the moment. It is good to see such documents being gathered and made available. The site is aimed at helping game designers:
This site serves to be a free resource to game designers offering them the web’s largest single collection of game design documents and game pitches. Be they famous or obscure, big or small, successful or not, this site is intended to be a resource for learning how better to design and pitch games in the spirit of sharing information and improving the state of the art through freely available knowledge. Let’s make great games! 🙂 (From the About page.)
In the academy we also need to think about archiving such documents. We should find ways to help such projects.
From Boing Boing I came across this article by Mark Frauenfelder on Having Fun with Your Finances in Credit.com (April 25, 2011). The article reviews two sites that gamify your home finance goals, payoff.com and smartypig.com. It sounds like smartypig is the best, but is also still in beta.
I suspect we are going to see an explosion of sites gamifying things (and I’m actually working on one too.)
My vote for the best article on computer games in a long time is ‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. Ducheneaut and colleagues at PARC have found a way to gather data from World of Warcraft (WOW) and analyze it for social data. The paper gives a nuanced view of the social aspects of WOW summarized by the phrase “alone together.” Unlike some other MMOGs the game doesn’t encourage socialization. In fact playing solo is more effective for leveling up (until you get to the very top levels.) The social aspect of WOW has more to do with being seen as having achieved. You may not be actively playing with others, but players like playing alone in a game where there is an audience for their achievements and the potential for social interaction.
Interestingly, what seems effective in the design of WOW is the steady leveling. There is always another level achievable with a bit more work.
A student of mine, Calen Henry, has created a neat animation of the explosion of computer game genres, see IGN Genre Evolution on Vimeo. He is studying computer game genres and went through different game outlets tracking the genre topology they used. He created this animation to show the evolution of IGN’s game genres.
Reality is Broken is the recent book about gamification by Jane McGonigal (New York, The Penguin Press, 2011) that has been getting a lot of attention. My copy finally came in the mail so now I guess I have to read it. I sound reluctant because everything I’ve read about the book disposes me to dislike it. The vapid “computers are going to save the world” (once more) hype by and for the author is enough to choke on. The idea that gamifying can solve all sorts of problems reminds me of when I thought I could get students to learn by making games out of completing assignments (yes, I too used scratch-and-sniff stickers to gamify learning.) I say all this to acknowledge that as I write one or more blog entries on this book as I read it, I am not reading the work with a fair mind, so readers of my comments beware.
From Kevin a discussion of Gamification from Slate Magazine. The article by Heather Chaplin, Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds (Tuesday, March 29, 2011) discusses Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken among other things. Chaplin makes the point that gamification isn’t really that fun and that it is hardly likely to help with the serious ways reality is broken.
From Boing Boing I came across this report: Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential is a very interesting report on gold farming, microwork and cherry blossoming. The report describes the economics and value chain of these activities. It discusses some of the ethical issues, but is focused on how these activities could provide good work for developing countries.
As part of research we are doing in GRAND we decided we need a lot more experience designing games. Garry and Patrick ran our 1st Game Design Game (Workshop) on Saturday. (The link takes you to pictures Vadim Bulitko took – thanks Vadim.)
Patrick and Garry developed a meta-game (a game about games) where each team had to pick a card or two from each of three piles (who, when/where, and why). The cards then formed the constraints within which we had to design a game. Later we had to pick two more cards which constrained what sort of game it would be and how we were to present it.
The team I was on picked Who=Non-human, Where=Is Poor, and Uses a Microphone. We came up with a game that was so good that we are now busy patenting it. Above all we had fun making costumes and props.