I almost hate to post this, as I don’t want to spread the bad PR, but it has other value as well. A woman in Japan who, apparently was married online to a man and then abruptly divorced from him without her consent logged into his account and killed off his avatar. (From msn.com).
Today on slashdot I found a super interesting article that reports about a british game company called Positech Games, (which by the way makes the Democracy series, one of the most stimulating and interesting games I have seen in recent years) that decided to tackle the problem of piracy in the most unorthodox way ever: by asking pirates why they do it!. Aside from the fact that the insights from the survey they did shows the potential of blogs as research tools, what I found really interesting was the way in which, what I call in my work the “real player dialog”, played out to transform the way this designer thinks not only about his design, but about the industry as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »
I was a part of the WoW roundtable session last week at the GLS, and I was asked a question that made me pause for a moment. I was telling a story about players’ narratives about the developers of WoW, but I began by making it clear that this was a player narrative and that I had no information directly from Blizzard. I also added in that I had tried to contact Blizzard, but had been unsuccessful. It was at this point that I was asked why it seemed so important for me to verify what the players had to say about the developers with the developers. I didn’t have an immediate answer. It had simply been a reaction for me to try to get into contact with someone from Blizzard.
If what one is looking at is player narratives, then I agree, verification is not needed. Still, this makes me wonder…Do developers know or care about these player narratives? Do they effect the way in which games might be edited (or patched)? I also wonder how player narratives might compliment or conflict with the narratives developers might tell? Any thoughts?
I’ve heard of plenty of parents using video games as their carrot (or the threat of no video games as their stick) for motivating kids to do the things they don’t particularly love to do: housework, homework, um, anything else with the suffix “-work.” A recently-launched startup has formalized this give-and-take into the economic system of a new virtual world for kids (incidentally, as someone also working on a startup for kids and paying close attention to this kind of news, I warn you to get ready for a virtual world saturation point). Handipoints allows parents to build chore lists for their children and then award them points for completed tasks, points that they can spend in Handiworld, “a fun virtual world where kids adopt their own cartoon cat and use their points to buy clothes and gear for their cat.” I remember a time when parents would actually pay a cash allowance to their kids for doing chores, but I guess the most you can ask for these days is that your cartoon cat hase some nice bling.
I’m intrigued to see what kind of aftermarkets will develop for these points. Will kids do extra chores to earn more points and sell them on eBay to the kids who don’t have the patience for all of that “grinding.” Or will people start to hire immigrant laborers, real world “gold farmers,” to do their household chores so that they have more time to get ahead in the game? Can you imagine?
So I’ve been playing a lot of Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my DS before I go to bed at night and I find it amusing that “Critical thinking is the key to success!” is one of the professor’s key phrases. As a teacher, it would be great if all of my students thought that way, right?
Professor Layton is a lot like Brain Age with a narrative. You solve a series of puzzles to get clues from the villagers. The game offers an interesting cast of characters including the sloppy detective, the beautiful lady in distress, the flamboyantly queer servant with purple lip(stick) to match his purple suit who interjects “Woo Hoo” in a Tourettes-esque manner during his replies, matronly little old ladies, and an assortment of village idiots.
Oddly enough all of the villagers have puzzles that they want you to solve (and they can’t solve them for themselves). You need the clues that they give you to solve a series of mysteries that all feed into the larger mystery of the “Golden Apple”. There are disappearing artifacts, a murder, kidnappings, and final surprises. I have finally finished the game and the puzzles get a little more challenging after the first 4 or 5 chapters. What is (so far) obviously absent from the game is word puzzles. Professor Layton 2 has already been released in Japan and a third is the works so hopefully the the developers at Level-5 will pull in some wordsmithy types to develop some word puzzles!
Additional game features?
In addition to the clues that you get from the villagers for solving the puzzles you can also earn money (picarats) that can be used to “buy” bonus puzzles at the end of the game. The post-game puzzles are a bit more complex than the end game puzzles (in my opinion), but I found them less engaging because they were no longer progressing the narrative of the game
You can download new puzzles every week via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
Jack Thompson is still awaiting a decision that may or may not result in disbarment. Game Politics has procured transcripts of testimony from Jack’s misconduct trial despite threats to sue the site. The transcripts offer a keen insight into the pundit who still is able to provide “expert analysis” on Fox news.
(Image of Brain Age screen from Google Images)
I received a Nintendo DS and Brain Age 2 for Christmas this past year, and I have been playing it religiously since then. Anecdotally, I see a difference in myself; not a major one, but I feel like I am able to focus better and calculate faster than I could before. Interestingly, a short while later, I ran across this article, Keeping Your Brain Fit, from U.S. News, about the possible benefits of activities like my new morning ritual of Brain Age 2. The article is not centered on video games per se, but it does discuss them, with the adviso that most of these games have not been tested in relation to increased brain functioning.
Have you ever wondered what fun things you could do with a Wiimote other than playing super cool Wii games? Johnny Chung Lee, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon seems to have some good ideas. For example, using a Wiimote, an array of infrared LED´s that one could buy at RadioShack and some bits of reflective tape, he shows us how to make a system that will track the location of a person´s fingers in mid-air. In other words, one can use the Wiimote´s bluetooth connection to have the PC track the movement of the user’s hands and interact with windows a la Minority Report.
This is a post from the Wired Magazine site. (http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2007/11/tabularasa)
The main thread is that they have broken the MMO mold and created a model where you don’t have to commit countless hours of effort to the MMO to be successful. “a PC game that … was designed to appeal to the average Joe who’s probably not interested in learning what “gold farming” or “damage over time” means and just wants to amuse himself by saving the universe.”. Having done the “kill a dozen boars” to death in WoW, I am most interested to try this. Anyone online with Tabula Rasa yet?
Curtis
I <3 you, Scientific American, I always have. And I thank you for your latest post that finally tell us why some kids can be total jerks. “It’s a natural behavior and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant,” says Richard Tremblay in the article “Taming Baby Rage: Why are some kids so angry.”
