Valuable Games

A lot of popular “genre” fiction is laid out as a puzzle, each with different rules to resolve the puzzle. Mysteries are the most obvious example, but so too are romance, science fiction, and even nonfiction (Malcolm Gladwell is particularly fond of setting up his books and book chapters as puzzles).

Video games, too, are often puzzles, each also falling into particular genres — the platformer, the RTS, the tycoon game. The game engine reinforces the genre by defining what puzzles are possible; the genius of Portal was to discover that the physics engine of the FPS could be used to create new puzzles. But while we’ve seen increasing sophistication and complexity in physics-based puzzles, we’re not seeing quite the same diversity in what I call “social physics engine.”

Not that games are totally lacking in social physics. Fable 2 simply refines the kind of interaction found in Harvest Moon and other “village” games. (Let’s not get into dating games here!). And everyone knows about the best-selling franchise of all time, The Sims. But while making friends and influencing people can be challenging in this genre, there’s nothing all that puzzling about it. Your average pulp romance novel has more suspense built around its “social physics” than these game titles.

I would like to imagine one day having a game built around social dynamics (whether with AI or real people) with the same engaged immersion as Portal succeeded with physics.

Nowadays downloadable content (DLC) is the new hot thing, with even the New York Times deigning to review Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned. So when, oh when, is Nintendo going to catch on to the gold mine it is sitting on, a/k/a Wii Fit? My partner and I would pay cash money (or whatever passes for money on these consoles) for voice packs, never mind new Yoga poses. How many times can you hear the same “Great job!” before you stop believing it? (Answer: about 10).

Here’s what I believe to be the problem for the Wii and DLC: a good chunk of their new market segments can’t do WiiWare. I don’t think my mother-in-law has ever explored any other channel other than the main game. She doesn’t browse the game aisle at Target nor set foot in Gamestop. So while a lot of the complaining around the Wii’s relatively low tie ratio seems to blame uninterested consumers, I would argue that publishers — even Nintendo itself — hasn’t thought carefully on how to reach them. First, make new DLC worth DL’ing. I want a Wii Fit expansion pack, not Jillian Whats-her-name’s Total Body Ripoff. Second, make it easier to download than a Rock Band song. And test the interface on your most difficult demographic. If the non-gaming housewife can do it, so can the pimply teenager. Hop to it Nintendo, you’re leaving my money on the table!

According to the New York Times, the redesigned Honda Insight offers a built-in ecology game:

Honda has loaded it with an array of gauges and displays intended to coach drivers to be more economical. For instance, the speedometer’s background color changes from blue to green as one’s driving becomes “more environmentally responsible.” Readouts reward the frugal driver with an “eco score”; if you excel, you win a digital trophy surrounded by a wreath.

The author and his colleagues all found that they beat the EPA measures, probably because of the electronic coaching. How’s that for a “game for change” that might actually really change the world? Just keep your eyes on the road and watch out for cyclists, Insight drivers!

Once upon a time, video game arcades functioned as a third place, a Starbucks for teens and tweens, mostly boys, but also girls and adults. With rising prosperity, we could afford not only consoles that beat the pants off did the arcades’, but also bigger living rooms to store new piles of gaming hardware. Fifteen years ago it would be hard to imagine Rock Band succeeding on the scale that it did, simply because many of us lacked the space for its peripherals. Today, dance pads, balance boards, drum kits, and all of that assorted game cruft is part of middle American life.

Clearly games did not become anti-social: we buy Rock Band because we want to play with friends. Rather, as play withdrew into the privacy of our homes, it became uncivil: while we strengthen relationships with our friends, we’re less likely to invite strangers to our homes to fill in the missing bass role, or jump into a quick round of Mario Kart.

Or perhaps not. For one thing, some games have found a niche in that consummate third place, the bar. Although rarely front and center, Guitar Hero is sometimes there in pubs where Centipede used to be. And of course, we might say that civil society has become virtual: what has done more to bring people into voluntary associations in this century than the MMO? And finally, of course, I shouldn’t wax nostalgic about the virtues of the archaic arcade. I quite recall them being dismal places.

Still, perhaps as Americans turn away from (or are turned out of) McMansions and run out of money and space for bulky video game hardware, perhaps we’ll see some renaissance of the arcade concept — game nights held in that third place between public and private.

I missed this article from a month ago: Videogames with a Social Conscience. It paints with the broad strokes you’d expect from a national general-interest publication, but it does zoom in on one title, Far Cry 2:

But just as soon as the game begins, the protagonist contracts malaria. The player must then choose whether to work with one faction or the other, or with the local church, to get the medication he needs. Conditions in the country continue to deteriorate over the course of the game. The sniper rifle is still the most fun part of playing, and the moral questions of right and wrong are not exactly central, but they’re there.

The piece then skips on to the marquis Game for Change, Peacemaker, which is a shame because there’s a lot more that could have been said about the diversification of first-person shooters into areas of moral complexity.

Games for Change today unveiled a set of talks and tutorials that help organizations figure out whether and how games can advance their core mission. It’s called the Games for Change Toolkit, made possible by AMD.

Randy Smith’s talk last night, Games are Art (and what to do about it), at Postmortem triggered a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there briefly. Here’s the first one:

In exploring the nature of art and different art forms, Randy looked to McCloud’s Understanding Comics to identify “closure” (the interstitial space between frames) as a unique feature of the comic medium. He then posed the question of what made video games unique. It struck me that what each medium can be defined by what each one leaves out; for example, comic books’ closures leave out what is between the frames – that is for the reader to fill in. Performance media cannot convey inner lives the way literature can (Wonder Years style voiceovers notwithstanding); it’s for the actors to interpret that inner life and for the audience to infer it from their performances. Literature, for its part, leaves to the imagination how its characters look or sound, which generates that little bit of shock when a book is translated to film. (Harry Potter provides a great example: the movies’ cast probably overrides the books’ illustrations probably overrides Rowling’s text).

So my question is: what do video games leave out for the player to fill in? Or better: what is best for video games to leave out?

Having so recently finished Fallout 3 (review coming soon!), I found myself contrasting images from today’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial with that same location in the virtual, post-apocalyptic Washington DC portrayed in Fallout. The game had generated some minor controversy when its marketers plastered the real Metro Center subway station with ads that included an image of a bombed-out Capitol Building. (Metro Center appears in the game as well).

Update: Here are contrasting images related to yesterday’s Inauguration:

The Fallout series satirizes the Cold War and in particular the aesthetics and politics of the 1950s, as seen through the lens of the Regan era (it was inspired by the 1988 title, Wasteland). And it’s cynical in a late Cold War, 99 Luftbalons kind of way, depicting both government and society as dysfunctional, greedy, and selfishly tribal. This was politics à la mode, but the hundreds of thousands gathered today around the Reflecting Pool attest to a new zeitgeist, one that makes the old cynicism seem out of place.

In Will Wright’s Spore, your task is to take a primordial life-form and evolve it to stand upright, form tribes, and ultimately traverse space. If this sounds complicated and ambitious, it’s because it is: Spore is a veritable five-course meal of a title – five “phases,” each built around a different game genre, all packed into one box. You start out in phase one helping a single microbe become the big fish in a little pond, and you wind up in phase four directing a civilization to conquer the world. The corresponding gameplay also progresses from arcade to shooter to strategy. Whether Wright is mapping the history of video games onto biological evolution or vice versa, in his universe life began when a seminal meteorite plunked into a receptive pond, and video games began with a coin dropping into Pac Man.

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some interesting news coming out re: a torture-based quest in the new WoW expansion.

what does this imply about teaching (or being unable to teach) abstract values in a gaming world?

Will there be a desensitizing effect?  I’m curious as to how we’d test for one.

An interesting idea – I don’t know enough about WoW to know if it is possible- would be to have a related quest be to save the prisoner and stop the torture.

Commentary here

 http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2008…

–Later update–

and here’s some follow-up from WIRED, arguing for what I think is a pretty good rough analogy with our “games to teach values” discussion from early last summer where we mused on using WoW to teach tolerance.