Slashdot Mirror

The more we accept "Hollywood-model" games ...

Sorry, but that is about the same as saying 'The more we accept McDonalds-type food ...'

We need to accept - on all terrains - that as a collective, we are a bunch of naked monkeys. Our biological makeup (or evolutionary history, if you will) makes us vulnerable to having our primitive behavior elicited by marketing techniques and other forms of manipulation. For an individual that may not be a problem, but for a collective, it is. Especially when the collective is a source of resources for for-profit organizations. Yes, I am talking about the free market.

The problem in your reasoning, imho, is that the current state of the (Hollywood-)system is somehow mainly due to the evilness of MBA's and 'industry types', where in reality the nature of the free market is thus that it eventually finds the most profitable way to make a profit. That includes (ab)using our (most) common vulnerabilities and treating us all like naked apes. Every sufficiently mature free market does this, simply because it is profitable, not because it is run by a bunch of malicious bastards.

See also, Cow Clicker, for a remarkable example of (ab)using vulnerabilities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml

Two words: Cow Clicker

If you mean recent studies on iPads, yes, but there was some successful use of computers in the classroom in the 80s. Of course, it also depends on what you care about. Using Logo increased procedural literacy, but whether Number Munchers increased mathematical literacy is more questionable. Iirc, the most positive effects generally came around long-term motivation rather than short-term imparting of facts; stuff like an oil-drilling simulation or Logo could help get kids interested in technology.

I'm just old enough to have grown up playing DooM at 320x200, although that doesn't mean I wouldn't choose to play it at 1920x1080 with hardware acceleration; it's about the gameplay, not the graphics. Carmack is a genius, but...

DosBox can fairly faithfully reproduce the execution and the audio of the title, but input and display might not be quite up to spec. For input, I mean older gaming peripherals. Often just the keyboard; you can buy modern USB versions of the IBM model M keyboard, which should satisfy that part at least.

Display is a bit trickier. If you want a really authentic experience, you're going to need to plug a CRT monitor into your modern computer. Not impossible, and since computers back then tended to have fairly small screens, not necessarily all that space consuming either. Grab an old 15" CRT and you're set.

If you can't do that, there are still... possibilities. I don't know about DosBox specifically, but there have been many projects out there that aim to reproduce the feel of playing on an old CRT on modern displays. The higher resolution your modern display the better. There's hardware devices that intentionally fudge the video signal to reproduce classic effects (add scanlines, slightly blur on the horizontal), and there are software filters out there that go much further, trying to actually reproduce the CRT sub-pixel pattern on modern LCDs. One example can be found here: http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml

Next, a real-life Cow Clicker game, anyone?

http://www.bogost.com/games/cow_clicker.shtml

That oh so reminds me of the Cow Clicker game. I think Facebook users have been shown in the past to be, in masses, very, very dumb.

* click-cow ultimate and cow-clikcer are (I hope) completelye fictional.

I hope this doesn't ruin your day (though it will probably result in at least a facepalm) but cow-clicker is quite real.

They had developed a meditation game for their "Joyboard" game controller (for skiing games & the like, I think) - the goal was simply to sit still. Legend has it they'd play that game when the Amiga OS crashed during development, to calm down.
Wikipedia references this: http://www.bogost.com/games/guru_meditation.shtml

check this out: http://www.bogost.com/games/cow_clicker.shtml
One of the stupider aspects of Facebook, distilled into a pure, stinky essence of wasted time.
Funny stuff.

I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".

FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games", with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.

I personally rather like Ian Bogost's book on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance).

An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a .txt of a book describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.

For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index. In addition, there's a recent paper discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.

I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".

FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games", with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.

I personally rather like Ian Bogost's book on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance).

An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a .txt of a book describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.

For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index. In addition, there's a recent paper discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.

http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml

In the academic field of game studies (analogous to film studies, though much smaller), the idea of games as rhetoric/etc. has been discussed for several years. Probably the most prominent academic who also makes games in that vein is Ian Bogost, who explicitly describes a lot of what he does as making "playable editorial cartoons". The New York Times for a while was actually publishing them on its online editorial page, strengthening the analogy (until a change of editor). He also happens to have a book on the somewhat broader subject of games as a means of commentary/expression/rhetoric, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007).

There is also an index here of editorial-style "newsgames", i.e. games about recent news events released in a timely manner that make some editorial commentary about the event.

Maybe not quite in the discomfort-with-lack-of-openness sense that he meant it, but the iPhone is supposed to be a temperamental item to own, much like a Chihuaha.

In Persuasive Games, I advance a theory of how videogames make arguments and influence players. Games represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, I analyze rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already studies visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Here I argue that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.

Basically, he looks at rule-based systems as a form of rhetoric, a method by which to artfully and effectively communicate ideas. Just as Melville had a point to make about life in Moby Dick, so too Bogost talks about how you can use rule-based systems to communicate in similarly effective ways through the rule-based systems of video games.

I bought it a few weeks ago and am partway through it -- so far it is really good.

If you're not interested in shelling out $$ for the book, you can get a free paper from MIT Press Journals entitled "The Rhetoric of Video Games", also by Ian Bogost.

Ian Bogost isn't a PR guy..

He is a prof a Ga Tech and he helped found Persuasive Games. He is actually a rather interesting fellow.

http://www.bogost.com/