Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better I sort of hope the Zero Punctuation knock-off dies a quick death, but reader Nathan M. sent us this video, which is based off an article by designer James Portnow. There’s nothing ground breaking here — the idea that educational games simply try too hard, while regular ‘fun’ titles can inspire learning without having to try and teach themselves is nothing new, but the video is certainly a lot more fun than the average essay. Nathan said, “I’m a 5th grade social studies teacher. I still like to play games as much as I can but I’ve always been disappointed with state of educational games. This gives the best explanation of this phenomena and the best approach to correcting it I’ve seen.”
The National Science Foundation has awarded $100,000 to do a cross-cultural study of World of Warcraft — Bonnie Nardi, an infomatics professor at Irvine, will be looking at player gaming habits and culture in the United States and China. Nardi has already spent time in the field, observing WoW players in Beijing internet cafés; she’s already noted some basic differences in play styles and similarities in culture, so I’m curious to see where she’ll go from here:
Via Terra Nova comes word that a new series of academic articles centered around Everquest II has just kicked off, starting with an article on ‘who plays, how much, and why’ (with a couple of ‘oddball’ gems scattered throughout the data). The results weren’t always what researchers — or the general public — would expect. While there have been other studies done in MMOs, this group was the first that took place in the game engine had the full cooperation of a company like SOE. What are they going to be looking at over the course of the study?:
In the last Japanese history seminar of my first year of graduate school, we shifted gears from the economic and political legacy of the immediate post-war period to slightly more current topics – the ‘afterlives of area studies,’ the fate of post-colonialism in a world weary of po-co, and … Pokémon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was at once delighted and disappointed to see respected academics tackling questions of “popular culture” that we often shy away from, at least in the context of “history” books. After we broke for coffee and reconvened, we launched into our discussion of some of the essays included in Japan After Japan: Social and Culture Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. “Any thoughts on ‘Pokémon Capitalism at the Millennium’?” my professor queried. Most eyes were on me, the ‘gamer/game writer.’ “Well, I thought it was an interesting essay,” I started. “And it’s nice to see gaming centre stage like this, but …”
There’s always a ‘but.’ The thing that struck me most about Anne Allison’s otherwise interesting essay was for me — a “gamer” and someone who writes about games — was that she clearly had little experience with games themselves. As it turned out, she was apparently inspired to look into the Pokémon phenomenon after her children started playing; beyond purchasing and observing, she herself had no experience with gaming. My criticisms weren’t aimed at her thinking or writing or research, per se – no, my quibble was with nit-picky details that didn’t quite ring true.
There are plenty of fields where the academic-’real world’ divide is pretty sharp — and it’s probably no surprise that game-related research falls into that category. Richard Bartle, MUD co-creator, criticises universities who are resistant to change — while ‘modern’ universities (ones who developed from polytechnics or institutes, at least in the UK) are more willing to lead the way with creative courses, older institutions are less likely to follow suit:
Malcolm Ryan is putting together a most interesting list of game design-related books — except these are the ones that are flying under the radar as it were. Ryan describes these ‘secret books’ as “books that are not explicitly written about games, but which any game designer who reads them just knows that they are really about games.” As part of this, Ryan will be reviewing a book a week on a variety of narrative and game-related topics (even if the connection isn’t immediately apparent). In the ‘secret book’ category, he’s got two examples: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud and A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander.
There’s not much yet, but if Ryan can stick to the book-a-week premise, I think there will be a nice and very accessible collection of reviews and thoughts on a wide variety of books. It’s one of those things I’ve added to my feeds and just hope it doesn’t peter out.
The Secret Books of Game Design [Words on Play via Grand Text Auto]
Preservation of ‘new media’ has gotten some attention in recent months — a lot of venerable collections are moving to figure out the best ways to preserve games and gaming media in an archival setting, while building useful collections for the future. The University of Texas at Austin was recently awarded over $US 250,000 to study the collection and preservation of MMOs. In addition to the obvious bits of preservation problems — software and the like — the project is also pretty broad in scope, including an oral history component, as the project head Megan Winget explained:
I’ve really been enjoying GameSetWatch’s series called ‘The Game Anthropologist,’ which (among other things) looks at various gaming communities — this week is a look at one of my favourite blogs, Michael Abbott’s The Brainy Gamer. We’ve looked at Abbott’s efforts to create (pretty collectively!) a syllabus for his history of RPGs course, which has inspired a lot of discussion both on his blog and here at Kotaku. The interview goes quite a bit beyond the borders of his blog, and I was particularly interested in his thoughts on games and academia, especially for those of us who cannot really be classed as ‘game studies’ people:
Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer has a nice little roundup of some of the current thinking on narrative designs in games — it’s nice to have a couple of reasonably prominent writers/designers/etc. put together in one place, with easily digestible clips. And, as usual, the comments section is just as worthy of attention as the article itself. But is this emerging collective ‘manifesto’ really deserving of the title ‘manifesto’?:
Perhaps “manifesto” is too strong a word for what I’m describing, but at the moment I can’t think of a better one. Most dictionaries define the term as a public declaration of intentions, motives or views. Beyond that simple definition, however, manifestos are intrinsically anti-status-quo. Regardless of its framework – politics, ideology or art – a manifesto is a defiant call for change and an implied “Who’s with me?” All of the people I’m about to describe are plugging into something that sounds very much like a collective manifesto to me.
Many people currently writing about narrative and game design do share a lot of commonalities in thinking, so some sort of ‘collective manifesto’ (even just informally speaking) does make sense. Anyways, Abbott’s roundup isn’t particularly long, but worth a read; he’s done the work for you when it comes to pulling out some particularly salient bits of the essays.
Narrative manifesto [Brainy Gamer]
Via Terra Nova comes a fascinating paper by Richard Heeks that covers the historical, social, and economic aspects playing into real money transactions. I’ve just had time to take a quick gander at the paper, but unlike a lot of information out there, this appears quite comprehensive and with a more unbiased position than we usually see:
This paper reviews what we know so far about gold farming, seeking to provide the first systematic analysis of the sub-sector. It assembles available data at the sectoral, enterprise and worker level. Five main analytical lenses are then applied. Economic analysis shows how exchange rate variations and scale economies do and do not impact gold farming; and the strong influence of information failure in the purchase of virtual items: known as “real-money trading”. Analysis from the perspective of industrial sociology charts the commoditisation and globalisation of the sub-sector, while value chain models identify resource dependencies and power inequities. Enterprise analysis investigates enterprise entry, existence and progression, and outlines the competitive forces shaping the sub-sector’s development; particularly threats. Developmental analysis investigates the impact of this sub-sector in macro and micro terms. Finally, there is a sociological analysis of the role played by perceptions and other social forces.
I’ve got it saved for future reading, and from what I’ve seen, it’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in issues of RMT and gold farming. It is long (and academic!), but think about wading through if you’re feeling inspired.
Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming” [IDPM Working papers via Terra Nova]
