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Ian Bogost has a timely piece up on the issue of political-themed games, and their use — or lack thereof. Bogost draws a clear demarcation between politicking (which he feels most of these games do) versus politics — games have the potential to really speak towards politics, but wind up being more or less meaningless tools for politicking:
Ian Bogost sent along this link to his latest little title, this one called Honorarium: "An autobiographical art game. Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak". I've spent a bit of time with it — I guess I can sympathise with aspects of the game, since I'm the poster child for 'inability to balance life and work — wait, work IS my life.' Just as interesting, however, is his discussion of the way he created the game through Sims Carnival. EA invited Ian to create a game using the tools available through the site. And, as he points out:
Much of the rhetoric surrounding these game creation and distribution sites relies on accessibility: they are supposed to make game development easy. But the truth is, simplified creation tools don't necessarily make creativity easier or harder, they just impose different constraints.
Honourarium [Sims Carnival via Ian Bogost]
Ian Bogost has an interesting editorial over at Edge Online entitled 'The End of Gamers,' a title which he admits doesn't really capture the main argument: "["The End of Gamers"] is lurid but might not capture the main argument of the piece, which is more like "Things People Do with Games". Much of his point is that other media has a wide variety of applications, and isn't shoehorned into a few limited types of uses ('entertainment' vs. 'serious' and so on). Bogost isn't arguing for 'games as art' or 'games as useful' or anything else, just pointing out that some perceptions about the industry start to break down when one considers the wide range of applications current games can have:
Missed UCSD's SoftWhere 2008 conference and curious what went on? Well, video of the public portion of the conference is now popping up on the SoftWhere 2008 page in QuickTime and YouTube. A lot of big names (like Ian Bogost, above) had some very interesting presentations on a variety of topics -- even my Japanese historiography professor showed up and had a lot to say about history, time, and software. It was a pretty diverse group, and owing to the zippy format, you can get a good feel for a lot of the research and ideas without spending half an hour or more listening to one presentation. Confining academics to such a short period of time? Sheer brilliance.
SoftWhere 2008 videos [Grand Text Auto]
While academia occasionally manages to maintain the veneer of being 'civilised,' academic battles of words can frequently be just as epic as anything occurring outside the Ivory Tower — even when couched in elegant language and well-reasoned points, you can tell people are out to draw blood. So it (sort of) is with Roger Travis, a classics professor who wrote a passionate plea for gamers to "turn the tables on Aarseth and other doyens of game studies" in the Escapist:
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of having a mahjong addict neighbour can attest to the double-edged sword that is traditional table games: the sensation of having smooth and cool tiles in your hand can be a pleasurable one, but damn it all if that incessant shuffling isn't irritating after hours and hours of it into the wee hours. Still, it's the positives of the sense of touch that Ian Bogost picks up on in his latest Gamasutra column. Using the classic game of Go as a starting point and ending with Rez, he takes a look at what games can do — and maybe should do — to enhance the tactile pleasure of playing:
Ok, so a billboard in a driving game may make sense — but what about games where it doesn't make sense? As Ian Bogost points out, "Would an orc order pizza? Does a dystopian planet from the future need a pacer drink?":
After taking Spore's creature editor for a spin at the ICE 2008 conference and watching the average, non-gaming public's response to the editor, Ian Bogost has some opinions on the universal appeal of Spore (or lack thereof). Unlike The Sims, Bogost says, Spore is facing a significant challenge in getting to the general public:
... The observation that surprised me the most was how people totally unfamiliar with Spore reacted to the very idea of a creature editor. From my perspective, it's a brilliantly engineered, elegantly constructed content authoring tool. But from theirs, it's an unfamiliar interface to an almost deviant act.
Ian Bogost sent along this little gem, created in a moment of procrastinating from writing an article:
I wasn't sure what to expect when I checked out the Relaxation and Meditation in Games session I was assigned to. Would it even be interesting? Well, some of it was and some of it wasn't, as you'll see.
First up was Wendy Goldner who spoke about her game, Wild Divine's Healing Rhythms which was created to help with stress management. Through the use of some little leads, the player's heart rate and breathing are monitored and become used in the "gameplay." Its execution was a little hippy-dippy for my taste, something along the lines of scented candles in the bathroom and sage smudges. Various self help gurus such as Deepak Chopra appear and talk the player through various relaxation exercises like breathing in time to the pulsating graphic of a tree. Once the proper breath rate was achieved, things would happen with the graphics like magical bridges, rainbows and butterflies appearing. I'm sure it's a very helpful program for some and certainly a great concept, but not quite my cup of tea.
