Category: Computer Games

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

Scott Miller, a CEO of a game studio, in his blog Game Matters discussed definitions of games from the book Rules of Play. He ends with a definition of his own,

A game is a structured set of fun problems.

What makes this post interesting are the number of comments – the dialolgue that follows. In some ways the dialogue circles the family of resemblances between games. The play at defining is game.

LibÈration :†In Memoriam au-del‡ du virtuel is a review/comment by Bruno Icher in Liberation.fr about the game In Memoriam from Lexis NumÈrique. The review is of a game that includes fictional news in LibÈration – Recherche (you have to search for “Jack Lorski” to get these stories.)
Let me scribe the circle: a newspaper review of a game that relies partly on fictional news placed on the same real newspaper Web site – news of a game of news. Bruno is aware of the questions this raises, here are the questions he asks of this ludic circularity,

Il y a presque deux ans, Eric Viennot a souhaitÈ impliquer liberation.fr dans cette aventure. Si nous avons acceptÈ, c’est qu’on avait envie de jouer. Un faux site Web est-il possible ? Que croire de ce que l’on peut y lire, Ècouter, voir ? Voil‡ pourquoi quatre pages du site de LibÈration font partie intÈgrante d’In Memoriam.

I think “faux Web site”, even in English, describes such a phenomenon, and yes it’s possible if we can tell the difference. What Bruno doesn’t ask about is the advertising on the faux and real pages – are they for real? Is this a way for news sites to draw eyeballs to sell ads? Is it unethical for a news site to do this? Can we agree on a disclaimer that doesn’t ruin the game?
For an English review of the English version of the game with the title In Memoriam see, “Missing: Since January” a strange slightly spooky journey by Neil Davidson, Canadian Press, July 20, 2004.
The game, which I haven’t played in either French or English version, has apparently been a hit in Europe. It is a successful working out of an experiment that Electronic Arts failed at with Majestic which was terminated in 2001. See Can PC gamers handle innovation – Dec. 19, 2001 by Chris Morris in CNN Money.
Engines that can manage such chat/mail/faux Web games could have research/education applications. Suppose a course was designed as such a complex treasure hunt.

I, Pool Shark (The Globe and Mail, Anne McIlroy, Sat. July 24, 2004, p. F9) is a science story about Michael Greenspan‘s work on a pool playing AI/robot called “Deep Green”!
What is the connection between games and AI? Chinook, the checkers playing AI developed at the U of Alberta was the first “Man-Machine Champion” – the Guinness Book of Records says so. (See Chinook (ACJ Extra) by James Propp.) Deep Blue, got more attention as it mastered a more popular game – chess. Deep Blue is an IBM Research project that repeatedly beat Garry Kasparov in chess, demonstrating that computers could win at games we think of as complex and indicative of intelligence. Now Deep Green takes on a game with motor skils – pool.

Playing games is a paradigmatic human activity, for which reason, developing computers that can play them with us makes an interesting history. Games, in so far as they work within the constraints of simple rules and worlds, are easier to simulate on a computer than “real world” situations like conversation so they can stand in for Turing Tests. Programming a super-computer to win at some popular game is a way to get attention and support for an AI research project. I am tempted to say that just as we teach children through structured play, we are teaching computers by designing them to master one game after another. The difference is that the same child learns one game after another, and we don’t expect them to master games. Computer systems, in contrast, are being optimized for one game at a time and being developed until they beat the best.
What if the same system were taught to master one game after another? Could we see emergent properties independent of any particular game? What might be the games we would choose to teach it?
Continue reading Deep Green: Computers and Games

From StÈfan S.;Guardian Unlimited | Online | The net’s sleuths is a story about the fan community helping track down the hackers who stole the beta of Half-Life 2. It isn’t clear what the fan community did other than pass tips.
Continue reading Game Sleuths

Grand Text Auto ª Gettin’ Schooled in Games drew my attention to a new Master of Science in Engineering in Computer Graphics and Game Technology at the University of Pennsylvania. The program is open to students without a CS degree.
Continue reading Masters of Game Design