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Academic Journal on Computer Games
Espen Aarseth writes: "The world's first academic journal on computer games, Game Studies, is now online. With several international conferences and a peer-review journal, 2001 is the year that the academic world finally takes computer and video games seriously."
On a PC, I agree with you 100percent, but there are still plenty of devices out there which require low-level coding and optimisations to get the required performance if you're doing something cool.
For example... Nintendo Gameboy (GBA less so, but there's still an argument for using asm for some loops) or Mobile Phones (quite powerful, but a lot of CPU-time is taken up with 'being a phone' code).
Even something like a dreamcast has a lot of low-level registers and ports for controling the custom chipsets for graphics and audio. Sure, you can code for DC in DirectX, but you can bet your ass that Sega didn't use it for JetSetRadio!
You're right, though. The age of die-hard low-level hackery is coming to a close and your average game nowadays is written at a reasonably high level of abstraction from the hardware.
-Sy/\/apZ-
Went into the sam goody, and the kid wouldn't even tell me where the 78s were!
I live in Maine. I grew up 10 minutes from his Bangor residence. I know this is a hoax/troll and that he is alive and well, but you could at least be more specific about which of his several Maine homes he proportedly died in! Do yer homework!
Root DOWN
"Study your math, kids. Key to the Universe! - Gabriel, 'The Prophecy'
Art is a very subjective thing (disclaimer)
But usually one would note the difference between artwork and popular culture/entertainment. For instance, although the talent level is often of the same level, most people will differentiate between comic books and "gallery" art. Same thing with novels. Most people would like to seperate Tom Clancy from Ernest Hemmingway.
Computer games require alot of talent to create in every facet, from the story of Myst to q2dm1, but still remain an elaborated fantasy for the purpose of entertainment.
Unfortunately the area between art and entertainment is often hazy because viewing and interpreting art is considered entertainment. Perhaps the best distinction for me between art and entertainment is the goal. Does a computer game intend to comment or question life/humanity/etc? Or does it seek to entertain?
No wait! Whats this? The question:
Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment
(in the form, e.g., of computer games)?
I guess the answer will be printed next month?
Sort of reminds me of Chris Crawfords `journal of interactive entertainment design`, which printed a monthly list of all that was wrong with computer games, but no ideas to help right those wrongs! That was amusing for about 5 mins too.
I`m pretty sure most games programmers wont be reading this stuff very much, in the same way that most madonna fans dont read those amusing post-modern deconstructions of her work in high-brow critical theory wank mags.
Art has always been for entertainment. Its just that most people don't see thinking as entertainment anymore and so we get art that you don't have to think about.
Vermifax
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I mean, everything gets analyzed these days, games just never made money in studies before.
I plan to live forever, so far so good...
the problem, of course, is that there are no higher degrees in gaming, there are at best degrees in related fields. Prof. Aarseth is widely known for working on establishing an academic discipline from which people could get graduate degrees in computer games.
I like game dev for one... very good mag.
anyone have other favorites?
subatomic
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicglue
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
Settlers, AOE or CIV may feature "humans", but they are not about human-to-human interaction nor human emotions, and that is the interesting thing About The Sims.
What, and give up the one you were going to do on the virtual societies of MUDs?
m00.
so what about games like settlers, age of empires or civilisation, don't they feature normal humans? Let alone a game like simcity. These guys are just very short sighted, to the point of just confirming accepted prejudices.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Kilgore Trout was said to have fled the scene in his 1988 Tucker Torpedo, and he was heading south to Dunwich, Massachusetts. Possible accomplices include unemployed former bar owner Sam Malone.
So we have the philosophical aspect of gaming. Does it make you a bloodthirsty killer or whatnot. ...except that it's light on girls.
We have the engineering standpoint. Obviously tons of game specific coding skills.
Not to mention hardware engineering specifically for games
We have games as works of art. Character design, texturing, model building...
Throw in a "phys.ed." class and I think we've got the beginnings of a gaming university.. Can you imagine the kind of revenue and the amount of people to try and attend such a place... Coming soon to an ivy league near you! "Gaming U"
A really cool place to go to school
In my experience, most academics in the field of computer science consider game development to be an waste of computing resources and expertise.
I had to fight hard to get my university to allow me to develop a PSX game for my final year undergrad project and I was lucky that my supervisor was not an old-school stick-in-the-mud, and was very supportive.
I ended up with a great mark (80percent) and a lot of decent experience which got me a job in the games industry. A lot of my contemporaries ended up doing 'suggested' projects - i.e. donkey work for lecturers who wanted some kind of utility to make their lives easier.
I'm pretty anti-academia and I think my main reason for being like that is that I saw these guys (university fellows, doctors, lecturers, or whatever they want to be known as), who really should have known better, acting like they were supreme masters of computing when really the stuff they were doing was stuck in the 70s. Game development is, by necessity, cutting-edge stuff.
I'm not arguing that there is not room for more 'traditional' computing, but the way these guys dismissed game development, you got the impression they considered it something that was only for people without the intellectual capacity to do something more 'academic'. In reality, the average big-budget game these days requires more combined knowlege and skill, across a multitude of disciplines, than almost any other type of software development.
Some great developments have come about through videogames. I'm sure you've all heard about how interested the military was in Atari's tank war game, or DID's combat flight sims. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of gaming technology going mainstream a few years down the line
The bottom-line is that "fun" is very difficult to quantify and it can't be expressed in mathematical notation. Therefore, the thinking goes, it ain't science. Therefore, it ain't academic enough.
-Sy/\/apZ-
Maybe, (and maybe I'm just talking out my ass), the shift to the 'proper' way to program in games has helped the increasing crapiness of modern games.
Vermifax
Logout
"8-bit Games Software and Artificial Intelligence algorithms"
---
http://www.malakas.org
Where stupidity runs faster than light (tm)
All game magazines right now have abominable visible design: lots of blank ink and chaos, dark-purple-on-black, etc. Something that visually looks more like "The Economist" would be welcome change.
Wasn't the peak of 8bit games several years before 1988, a time at which 16 bit games were going strong?
Basicly I was not referring to the idea of the sims, which is in its own way very interesting, i might not personally like the gameplay, but that is besides the point. Basicly the monster and troll argument is what put me to it. Games have been mature way before the sims, just because they did not include interaction in this way.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Game Institute offers courses (non-trivial ones at that) for the aspiring game maker. They look pretty good, and I've heard good things about them, but I haven't done one myself.
:)
The thing about game development is that is rapidly turning into its own kind of engineering. Large projects neccesitate good engineering practice. However, there is reputedly still remarkable reluctance on the part of developers to adopt coding practices that have been the norm in other development fields for some time (the adoption of C++ for one, but I realise that can start a flame war, so don't).
I don't think it's reasonable to say that game development is an academic discipline - a reasonable acid test is whether there is active research in game development. There's loads in graphics and visualisation, probably a bundle in audio techniques, and a lot of AI... but these are all ends in themselves, rather than explicitly contributory research to the field. Most implementations of research techniques are very heavily tailored due to the contraints placed upon the games developers by technology.
That's not to say that game-development doesn't take skill - clearly there are some incredibly bright people working in the field. It certainly warrants its own journal. Maybe we'll see some standardisation bodies
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
Only someone who knows about games would say this. Doom, Quake, and their immitators have been out for many years, and they do dominate, and yes, it is not a stretch at all to call the beasties in these games "trolls and sci-fi monsters".
People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...
Ummm... how exactly would you define academic value anyway?
Academic pursuit is a kind of game in itself and it has its own set of rules. Even if there really isn't anything there that hasn't been covered in computer magazines it doesn't matter - it hasn't been done in an "academic, peer reviewed journal" - and that's part of the rules of the game.
Another very important rule is "let's all pretend twe are not playing a game".
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Hmm, that's a bit harsh. Although games have never had a scientific conference or a peer-reviewed journal of their own, they have had their place in many journals and conferences for quite a while now. A few among the many: SIGGRAPH, which sponsors many conferences including of course SIGGRAPH 2001, GI the Canadian conference which often focuses on interactive rendering and animation, Eurographics, which sponsors many publications, journals, and conferences on rendering and animation, etc, etc. Gaming is one of the stronger motivations of all this research, and they do talk about other aspects of gaming. For instance SIGGRAPH had a course on game AI for at least the past 2 years, and often presents articles on 3D sound.
Just seems slightly sensationalistic to claim that the field has been ignored by the academia while it has been a driving force of so much research for at least 5 years, perhaps 10.
-- Eric Plante,
M.Sc. in CompSci on hair dynamics,
University of Montreal, 1999.
There's no subsitute for moderation, that's for sure.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
The exact academic value of this is still in my mind doubtful.
2 7/sch-uni/sch-uni.html)
There is nothing here that hasn't been covered (in less detail but covered none the less) in various computer magazines.
Do any of the writers have a degree in gaming?(http://www.hotecho.org/hotecho/archive/se
GCM d+ s+:+ a- c++ U? P! L E-- W++ NM+ V PS- PE+ Y+ PGP- t 5+ X?+ R+++$ tv+ b+ DI++++ D---- G e
It's about time this happened. Computer game programming has evolved since it's inception from an amusement of a few engineers, to a legitimate commercial enterprise, to a force in the marketplace and finally to an area of academic research.
In fairness for those who look on this with skepticism, the computer gaming industry integrates a variety of areas of research which together can be applied to computer gaming, buy are legitimate areas of study seperately: Mathmatical modeling, Graphic Arts, a whole variety of areas around AI research from the 70s, and the study of sociology, in attempts to create acccurate simulations of human responses. Aparently, all we really needed was some motivation to study these areas, and the pursuit of entertainment is just such a motivator.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
The winner of the best paper at the AAAI conference was on AI used to play a board game. So yes, it is taken fairly seriously by existing organizations, but it is good to see more focus on this. (Gamasutra.com has some good research-level information on techniques as well.)
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence AI Magazine Summer 2001 has a paper by John E Laird and Michael van Lent "Human-Level AI's Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games". The title says it all (and I don't want to get in trouble quoting bits of it).
There's always been gamasutra. The site covers everything from sophisticated graphics techniques to editorials on the gaming culture. There is also a pretty good forum and other useful areas.
It's nice to see someone mention the hobbit on the ZX Spectrum. Doubly gratifying to see that they seem to hate it as much as I did.
Now I can go to my review board with some credibility on Quake mods as a viable master's thesis!
Root DOWN
grep what -i sed?
Well this is what i get for procrastination... I had thought of starting a similar site - however I kept finding myself playing the games rather than writing about them.
I am thinking of starting a 'Gaming School' type of site - nothing fancy, mostly some tutorials, nice graphics for different examples etc... even a monthly comic. Who knows - it's still in the works, but it's something I think I could enjoy and maybe bring some shiny happiness to someone elses life.... *pffftt* I think I'll do this one for me. ^_^;
---
ps -aux | grep mind
Tons of time and resources are devoted to all sorts of games. Algorithms are researched and revised constantly in order to make them more efficient. I'd have to say that even though the "high-society" may not enjoy reading about the latest Sims expantion, I still think that there is quite a bit to be learned from the people that code them.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
You're right, and studies of many game-driven (or at least game-related) computer science topics already are fairly common at academic conferences and meetings. I've sat through uncountable presentations on 3D-modeling, polygon reduction, texture mapping, landscape generation, networked real-time simulations, etc., in which the author(s) made it clear that computer games were one of the primary motivations for the study.
Then again, it cuts both ways---a lot of the technology available for Real Work[tm] was driven by games. A lot of the nice engineering design and visualization packages only started becoming useful on PC platforms after 3D accelerated hardware for the PC started becoming affordable---and we all know that PC 3D video performance is driven by gaming requirements. Also, many games have gotten use as more serious software---flight simulators being used in real pilot training, for example.
The possibilities of increased academic interest in gaming are interesting, because making a really good game requires a lot of useful investigation: user interface design, efficient graphics manipulation, improved realistic rendering, etc.
The worst thing about this live-action room-scale videogame simulations is having to clean up the vomitorium after a "Pac-Man" session.
I think this is a good opportunity for the enhancement of video games. For my senior project in college, I made a "human frogger" where a person moved around a room, tracked by digital cameras, and had to interact with enemies on a big TV screen (all done in Visual C.) This was a challenge for me because it not only had to be a smooth running game but it also had to interact in real time with massive amounts of input from the cameras. Anyway my point is that it would have been nice to have such a forum/journal as this to look to for advice, or maybe even contribute my final results to. I hope this journal results in better gaming for everyone.
~ now you know
That's the beauty of college these days. You can major in GameBoy if you know how to bullshit!
We've only had professional game developers for at least 10+ years :)
0 1.htm
It reminds of the Journal of MUD Research now Journal of Virtual Environments ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/ )
Maybe we'll see more well written articles like the clasic Bartle's "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS" ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1/bartle.html )
Of course we've had Gamasutra hosting articles by Ernest Adams.
i.e. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010521/adams_
but many have been "promoted" into management.
Of course a PS2 requires completely different ASM skills than a SNES or C64, (more processors, caches, wierd pipelines, bulk of code done in C instead of 100% machine code, non-obvious semantics) so that is less relevant. But at least we can remember the basics :-)
A game is a place that you go or a thing that you do, not a story you listen to. Game designers who ignore this (usually ones stuck doing a game related to some Hollywood property) produce games that lock the player onto a story track. Such games get lousy reviews, and are only played a few times.
On the other hand, the game designer can easily create a world in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. That doesn't, of itself, make it interesting, although plotless pure first-person shooters do have a substantial market. There's a temptation to add a plot or backstory to give the game depth. But the two are hard to mix. The usual options are to lock the user into a series of challenges to be faced in order, or to build an adventure game with free movement but a finite set of puzzles. Getting beyond those models is a hot topic among game designers.
The author of the journal article was, clearly, totally unaware of these issue. So they were thus unqualified to write that paper.
But at least they didn't quote Derrida.
Finally, some serious talk about games, it was TIME to people realize that Daikatana is an art form not a game.
Although less focused on critical analysis, there is lots of academic interest in video games. For example, check out: http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/2001/sss01-2.h tml
That was the third one in a series, and there will be another one next year, too, I think.
I read several of the papers on the web site, and was very unimpressed. They're about on the level of /. Articles: one person's opinion of some aspect of games. It's possible that my problem with it is that I don't know filmspeak or whatever jargon they're using, but I don't see the point in some of them, and the theses that I can find seem to be obviously false if you've actually played a lot of games.
One article lauds The Sims and bashes fantasy games because The Sims is about people and fantasy games are not (so the author says). It's nonsense to say that no fantasy games are about people. Planescape: Torment, for example, raises issues of mortality, ethics, and identity.
Another article claims that no dramatically compelling games have yet been written. It never explicitly defines dramatically compelling, but says that no games "offer captivating narrative". Considering that I know people (and have been one) who sometimes watch people play some games (Final Fantasy, Baldur's Gate II, Fallout, Zork: Nemesis, just to name a few) for the purpose of seeing how the plot (or narrative) will unfold, I'd say this proposition is clearly false.
I would like to see a high-quality academic journal about games, because I think there's a lot more to them than they are given credit for. Unforutnately, this publication isn't it.
I think this is a strange place to host the 'academic' face of the videogame industry. Norway has not been known for their great VGI culture, nor their profusion of products. Perhaps this is their way of breaking into the field? Or is the site mearly hosted in .NO and run by established members of the industry?
In any event, as a professional game designer, I am not amused by the hoity-toity leap to exclusive peer review journals cluttering up the landscape. It seems the best games come from the underground, the fresh blood seems to come out of the garage. Well, the current culture of academic arrogance has killed any chance of a new Thomas Edison appearing on the Science and Technology horizon, and I'd hate to see the trend develop for video games. Or we may never see the next John Carmack!
Uhhh.. I thought Gamasutra was the first jornal for gaming and computer science???
Most applications are built with standard gui toolkits, and innovation is not a design goal, so they use inefficient but traditional linear menus instead of faster but non-standard pie menus. But immersive games practically require innovative user interface design. So techniques like pie menus that have been around for a long time, but never widely used, are finally showing up in games. Only after pie menus are commonly used in games, will they find their way into the so-called "standard" user interface toolkits.
I designed and implemented the pie menus in The Sims, but they're hard coded, special purpose, and not reusable. But since then, I've implemented a free reusable general-purpose pie menu component, in JavaScript. It requires Internet Explorer 5.5, since it's implemented as a Dynamic HTML Behavior plug-in. Pie menus are specified in XML and rendered in Dynamic HTML, so they can exploit the full capabilities of web browser, and integrate easily with other technologies.
http://www.piemenu.com
I'm sorry that Netscape/Mozilla doesn't support the technologies necessary to run my JavaScript implementation of pie menus. I hope that instead of mindlessly complaining about Microsoft, somebody will take it as a challenge to enhance Mozilla to support XML data islands, generic scripting engines (so you can write scripts in any plug-in language, that can call each other and pass objects and data back and forth), full Dynamic HTML, style sheets, XML DOM and XSL support (just follow the standards like Microsoft did), as well as plug-in Dynamic HTML Behavior components (so you can easily implement your own intelligent reusable plug-in components in any scripting language).
Back to the topic of using games as a virus for innovation: I've written a simple little free game called "Fasteroids", whose user interface incorporates both pie menus and linear menus. (Pie menus have an option that makes them lay down and act like linear menus, so it's easy to compare them fairly.)
But actually, the game is really a candy-coated distributed user interface evaluation experiment, that empirically compares your selection times and error rates of pie menus versus linear menus. It shows you the resulting statistics, so you can judge for yourself how fast and reliable pie menus are for you. No need to take my word on it: you can find out for yourself exactly how much faster they are. And there's a button to report the results back to my server if you like, to share the statistics for use in a study.
http://www.piemenu.com/fasteroids.html
Please tell me if you have any problems with the software (as long as you're running the latest version of IE5.5 on Windows, otherwise I know it doesn't work.) I hope this will convince other people to use pie menus in their own toolkits, games and applications.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Most other academics are not as focused on such pragmatic applications of their research, but Ken Perlin serves as a great example for others to emulate. The guy has great ideas, and can really program!
http://www.kenperlin.com/
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/KenPerlinStream ing.mov
This is the audio of Ken Perlin's talk at the Game Developer's conference, about character animation, noise, and applications to computer gaming. His answer at the end of the talk to the question from a clueless audience member about "how does this apply to computer gaming" is hillarious (but to really appreciate it, you have to understand that he's a New Yorker giving a talk in California).
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Oops, somehow a space crept into that url, and I though it was just bad kerning. Here's the correct URL of Ken Perlin's talk, on my streaming QuickTime server.
http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/KenPerlinStream ing.mov
No, the space is back, and I am sure I didn't type it this time! So if you want to listen to the talk, please remove the space yourself, because I can't.
This looks like a bug in Explorer or Slashdot. Watch this line of 60 x's:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
It displays as 50 dashes, a space, and 10 more dashes. And that's the text I select in the comment preview. But in the comment editor textarea, the space isn't there, even after hitting preview.
This slashdot text area goes: <TEXTAREA WRAP="VIRTUAL" NAME="postercomment" ROWS="10" COLS="50">
What in tarnation is WRAP="VIRTUAL"? I tried to reproduce the problem by using the same html with Zope, and it doesn't have that behavior. Maybe it's a slashdot, Perl, Internet Explorer, or some combination. Sorry! Does anybody else get their long words chopped after 50 characters?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/AILabratories.html
-Don
As a professional computer game designer and programmer (it's what I do all day, every day), I think it's silly to have a journal devoted to the academic critique of computer games. To me, it's just like having a journal devoted to the critique of e-books. Computer games are just the latest technological evolution of games in general. Perhaps computer games add a couple of articles worth of genuinely new human experiences, but certainly not enought to warrent a separate field of knowledge, or even a sub-field. Why isn't there a journal of just "games"?
kaszeta wrote:
True, but conference papers aren't nearly as valuable to the professional career of the academic. Since few humanities academics work at well-funded research centers (or at any kind of research center at all), few humanities academics can afford to attend the kind of big conferences in which the proceedings are all published (thus providing all the speakers with a "publication").
Okay... but consider the mission statement from the Game Studies home page:
While some people may question the value of the existence of the humanities in the first place (that's an argument for another day), I think the real value of the journal Game Studies is its intention to legitimize the study of this particular cultural activity, which hasn't yet been taken seriously by mainstream society (beyond the same old same-old about violence and obsession).Articles on computer games do get published from time to time in mainstream humanities journals such as Computers and Composition or any of the journals that focus on postmodern cultural studies, but it's true that many of them do tend to fixate on those aspects of computer gaming that support independetly existing postmodern theories, or else they look at the gaming culture as an isolated subgroup, the way an anthropologist would. Of course there are probably scores or hundreds of exceptions to the sweeping generalization I just made, but many humanities folks still think that clicking on a hyperlink is somehow more interactive than turning to page 24 of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure novel; Aarseth's book Cybertext argues strongly for the notion that hypertext fiction is not the only kind of cybertext. This is likely not news for the Slashdot crowd, of course, but professors in departments outside of CS and AI programs need to hear it.
Perhaps some of the articles in this first issue show the literary lens through which humanities folks look at computer gaming activity... but I think it's wonderful to see a journal that intends to focus on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of computer games.
Speaking more generally, and not directly in response to kaszeta, I would say that to express disappointment with Game Studies simply because it does not look like a promising place to swap AI algorithms and Quake mods is, I think, to miss the point.
Dennis G. Jerz
Department of English
University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire
Literacy Weblog
Interactive Fiction Call for Papers
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
At SIGGRAPH this year there will be the first major gathering that includes both authors from -Game Studies- (and those doing similar work) and hard core game developers and graphics researchers. On Monday and Tuesday there will be panels in the Art Gallery (lower admission cost than main SIGGRAPH) which include those from both worlds, and then many more discussions, demos, and presentations in the main program Wednesday through Friday.
In the end I guess its a tradeoff. Console games like FF have mastered the keyboard/joypad interface and are faster, but the integrated UI style of the mouse is rather useful for a game design. All in all, Pie Menus are quickly becoming another tool in the belt to bring mice closer to the joypad interface.
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Open Source Sysadmin
The fun factor. That term "game journalists" coined to qualify the fact that some games are fun, even addicting, while some don't warrant another look. Its a start, but a horribly shoddy one. Rather than deconstruct the gameplay involved into what works and what doesn't, we get a number, from one to ten, telling us how fun everybody must think it is. Of course, this is far from the truth, or everybody would be busy playing masterpieces like Might and Magic 4, or Jumping Flash! The reality is that different games appeal differently to different people. The tendancy is to like games you're good at, and not like games you're bad at. I think a good start would be to look at why games are played. Zoologists tell you animals play games as practice for the real hunt. Your roommate says you play games to evade the fact that you have no life. Your thirteen year old brother loves games because theres lots of blood everywhere.
Its psychological. Game playing is fundamentally a developmental activity. Whether physically, socially or mentally, we seek to improve ourselves. I think the most valid analysis of game design will come from the field of developmental psychology. Ender's Game is a popular book, especially among gamers and game developers. Not for the "suprise" ending, nor the campy sci-fi atmosphere, but because of how psychological the novel is. Every moment is accomanied by what Ender is thinking. Good designers need to understand psychology. Which is why its hard to find good designers, and subsequently, good games. Great console designers have something similar to focus groups. Miyamato frequently watches player test groups to see what parts of his games players enjoy and which they don't. That doesn't mean taking out the ones that don't, just ensuring that the parts they don't like (aka dying ) were the expected parts. Much like if nobody laughs at a joke in a test screening in a theater, if players get frustrated with a game's controls, its a problem that needs to be addressed.
Single-player games are an oddity in a few ways. Like television, Single Player games have only come to popularity as of late. Players still seek to play for social connection, but now with the game, rather than other players. This is similar to television, where a person (or ironically, a group of persons) watch for a social need. This is where Operant Conditioning (the reward/punishment deal, I hope I got that right) can really shine. The most addictive games tend to be the ones that reward players just right. Enough to keep playing but not enough to make the rewards pointless. And occasionally even punishing the player. Consider Tetris. Commonly agreed as the most addictive game ever, the game uses many reward schemes to encourage the player, and any mistakes made are only indirectly punishing (no lines cleared, and another line closer to death).
Obviously my comments are superficial and barely scratching the surface of how psychology can unearth the plague of the Fun Factor.
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Open Source Sysadmin