Game Research

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The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces

July 9, 2010 in Game History, Game Psychology, Game Research, Philosophy | 23 comments

The other day I was having coffee with friends who brought their 2 1/2 year old son over for a visit. He was bored, looking for anything to do in our (boring) house – so I handed him an original Game Boy with Super Mario Land 2. I figured that a toddler would enjoy smashing the Game Boy’s bulletproof buttons, making Mario run and jump, and hearing the ear-piercing four-channel music. He took the Game Boy from my hand with interest, and held onto it in the familiar way that all of us hold portables. He looked at the cabbage-green screen and squealed, “MARRIOO!” I asked his mother if he had played games before, and she said, “Oh yeah. He loves playing kiddie games on our iPhone.”

I turned back to her son, and he was frowning intently at the Game Boy. He reached out tentatively and pushed on the plastic screen. Nothing happened. He pushed again, in a different spot. Nothing. I reached over and pushed a button – Mario jumped. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and turned back to the game. I eventually had to slide his fingers over to the D-Pad and buttons, pushed them down a few times to show him how it worked, and he started to “get it”.

I realized in that moment that we are now living in a time when the standard D-PAD + Buttons layout can no longer be assumed the “standard” way of playing a game. A new generation of players are growing up with motion-based interfaces from Sony (the upcoming Playstation Move), Nintendo (Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board), Harmonix (Rock Band), as well as touch based devices from Apple (iPod Touch/iPhone). Where the 1980s and 1990s almost always guaranteed a familiar mediating interface – whether it be a keyboard, mouse, or D-Pad – I wonder at how the recent explosion of alternative interfaces has changed the way gamers understand what a game is?

For instance, can we really say that Myst or Monkey Island 2 SE for PC are the “same games” as their iPhone variants? On what basis could we distinguish between our experience of playing the two (temporarily setting aside differences in sound quality, resolution, etc)? Is the “touch” aspect really that different from a point-n-click interface using the mouse?

I’m going to waffle here, because I just don’t know. And here’s why:

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When do you call a game a Game?

March 11, 2010 in Game Industry, Game Psychology, Game Research, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 14 comments

Yesterday I happened across an article about comic books in a local newspaper (See Magazine for fellow Edmontonians). In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?

All of those answers – yes they are, and no they aren’t, X – get us no closer to answering his initial question. And that’s the same question we’ve been trying to face for years in the gaming world. When do we call a game a game? Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey’s (Tale of Tales) creations The Endless Forest, the Graveyard, and The Path all provoked a response from gamers. Some praised their willingness to experiment with what has become a starkly conventional medium. Others simply raged with incredulity at what they saw lacking in terms of gameplay, while others said things akin to, “I want to tell you that, in its most banally distilled form, The Path is a game about exploration, risk, patience and vulnerability – but I’m hampered by the obvious fact that The Path is just not a game. At all.”

That last response is the one that interests me most. In some ways, it reflects the problem that Kenton Smith runs into in trying to define comic books in terms of their essential structure. Although Kenton is obviously sensitive to the importance of a reader’s experience in defining what a comic book “is”, he does not approach the question that way. Similarly, I think that most of us get caught up in using language that tries to define a game as “a thing” rather than as a kind of experience that we have. We create a problem for ourselves when we think of games only as things with definable properties separate from ourselves, when really no problem exists at all. We continue to try defining games as objects with properties – as Igor Hardy attempts to do in this recent article on adventure games – and end up confusing ourselves over what they really are for us. (Edit: Be sure to read Igor’s article and the comments below it, as well as the exchange between Igor and I. We have a lot more in common than I originally assumed!) In this article, I provide an alternative to the current understanding of games, and hope that it gets us out of this foxhole.

(Note: Chris Crawford’s wonderfully written The Art of Computer Game Design is a step in the right direction I think, but not a complete one)

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The New Dark Continent of Childhood

September 15, 2009 in Game History, Game Psychology, Game Research | 17 comments

lost_worldThis morning I was doing some research for an article I’ve always wanted to write about Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus, The Last Express. Among the wonderful treasures I found, including an unfinished script for a prequel to TLE, was a link to Michael Chabon’s NY Review of Books article titled, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood.” In the article, Chabon laments the disappearance of a form of childhood that all of us (in our 30′s and 40′s and older) remember with conflicting emotion. The kind of childhood where a kid, even in the most urbanized environment, would freely explore every dark forest, alleyway and abandoned lot with a pack of her or his friends. It was a childhood experienced as a neighbourhood of familiar and tempting and scary things. In this article I want to take Michael Chabon’s wonderful article and turn it towards gaming, and see how the disappearance of “exploration” and “excellence” has influenced a new generation of gamers.

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Psychology 201: Games That Changed Your Life

September 10, 2008 in Education, Game Research | 20 comments

Early next year I will have the opportunity to teach a course in Psychology that will be laden with game content, and I’d like my students to get a chance to play some games and talk about them. My goal in the course is to show that games, like books, movies, plays, and other creative art forms, can sometimes elucidate deep psychological changes in the player. By deep, I mean the kinds of significant non-transient insights we have when something really grabs us and shows us how to picture the world in a different way. My goal for the course is to show students that games play an active role in our psychological lives, even though we may not notice it. To achieve that, undergraduate students (minimum 2nd-year) will be playing what you consider to be psychologically transforming games, participating in lectures and discussions that interpret the psychological meaning these games have, and by the end of the course writing a paper that discusses their particular experience with a game.

With that in mind, I’d like to defer to the community’s expertise in identifying some of the games that had a deep influence for you, and perhaps why/how these games were so influential. I’m hoping that with a large enough list of games and ideas, I can start identifying themes that will make up the bulk of my psychology course. I’m hoping that some day the particular games and psychological themes that you contribute will become more commonplace in the academy, and subsequently more commonplace in our daily public lives.

In return for your gracious guidance, I’m committed to doing a couple of things. First, I’ll post all of my lecture materials and information publicly, so the entire community has the opportunity to remotely take their first ‘Psychology of Games’ course. With the University’s approval, perhaps I can even post recordings of my lectures in podcast form. Second, I’m committed to posting my experience with teaching the course and hopefully encouraging my students to contribute their opinions on the course, the instructor (me!), and their experiences in playing and reflecting upon the games they play.

So if you’ve had a game that has changed you in some way, no matter how seemingly insignificant or good or bad, I’d like to hear about it. Any genre/platform/experience is fair game – I’m not going to exclude any. I’m going to keep this post alive for as long as possible to give enough people a chance to contribute their experiences/stories.

THANK YOU!

- Chris

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The Joy of Role-Playing

June 29, 2008 in Game History, Game Research, Game Writing, Philosophy, Retro Gaming | 11 comments

Sketching out dungeon maps on graph paper, marveling at the trinkets or “feelies” in Infocom and Ultima games, vigilantly reading every manual and printed material in the box, and writing pages of quest notes. Whenever my girlfriend sees me meticulously doing any of these kinds of things I get the same befuddled smirk my parents gave me when I played games as a 10-year-old: only another nerd could truly appreciate this. Yet, these are exactly the kinds of things that draw me closer to games and give me a sense of intimacy that allows me to appreciate them not just as works of art, but as worlds.

Recently, Michael of the Brainy Gamer wrote a brilliant (yet terribly misunderstood) exploration of the phenomenology of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game. Sounds a little boring eh? You bet… until you understand the level of intimacy that he creates just by writing down a few numbers and thinking through the game. In this post I’ll try to do justice to just what Michael might have meant by the word “engagement” by talking a little bit about what people do when they “engage” themselves with a game. Before you read this, it’s critical to read Michael’s post first… because I’ll be referring to it throughout. Trust me, it’s worth it.

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‘> The Painting is Firmly Attached to the Wall’: The Frustrating Art of Art Games

June 7, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Philosophy | 4 comments

Gamers are notoriously bad at dealing with loosely-termed ‘art games’. Myself included. With the recent releases of The Graveyard by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, and The Jackyard by Richard Hofmeier, I thought I’d attempt to take a somewhat broader view of ‘art games’, and try to understand exactly what an art game is.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

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Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Look From the Inside

April 18, 2008 in Game History, Game Industry, Game Research, Game Writing, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

It has been a long time since I had something worth posting here, so I hope I don’t disappoint with what I think is an utterly fascinating story. Yesterday, Andy Baio of Waxy.org posted a story reminiscent of a game archaeologist’s dream that he pieced together from internal e-mails, design docs, and prototype builds all culled from a network drive image of Infocom’s shared network hard drive. Yes, someone made an image of the “Infocom Drive” before splitting from the company in 1989 and has kept it safe for all these years. Revealed on the hard drive are (quoting Andy):

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

  1. It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ’85. The company closes with not a bang…
  2. It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers – and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.

 

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Dramatic Genius: LucasArts and iMUSE

January 31, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 6 comments

secret of monkey islandWhen I was 12 years old I received $25 for my birthday from my aunt. With the $5 I had saved from the previous weeks worth of allowance, I had a whopping $30 to blow on something frivolous. I convinced my mother to drive my sister and I to the largest computer store in the city (40 miles away) so I could buy myself a new computer game. After searching through the racks for almost an hour, I gave up – the games I really wanted were over $60, and the games selling for $30 or less looked unappetizing. I had given up and was ready to leave when my sister grabbed a copy of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge off of the shelf and handed it to me: “Buy this one! It has monkeys!” At first glance I wasn’t interested, but the screenshots on the back of the box reminded me a little of my other adventure games like King’s Quest IV and Police Quest II. I reluctantly agreed to allow my sister to chip-in $20 to buy it, and pouted the hour-long ride home as my sister opened the box and pawed through the ‘feelies’ inside. Sitting in the den in front of our 286 I unenthusiastically installed the game, and loaded it up. Within minutes my sister and I were transfixed upon the monitor and practically rolling on the floor laughing at the ridiculous conversations and character expressions. Monkey Island 2 quickly became one of our favorite PC games and was the gateway to a larger world of cinematic adventure games. Within weeks, I convinced my parents to buy me an AdLib sound card for christmas so I could hear the glorious midi music. In this article I look at LucasArts’s seminal iMUSE system – the Interactive Musical Scoring Engine that was used in every LucasArts adventure game from 1991-2000.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Games, Games, and Academic Research

October 25, 2007 in Game Research, Irritating Rants | 3 comments

The Ugly, the Bad, and the Ugly - Lego Edition!Michael’s article, “Good game / bad game” over at the Brainy Gamer, provoked me to come up with some sort of response as both a psychologist-to-be and a gamer terribly critical of the existing debates surrounding games-and-culture. Michael’s article takes on the existing (rather heated and polemical) debates about games and their relation to academic research, and his hope that academic research may paint a path out of a moral minefield full of hot air and rhetoric. Without cutting to the chase too soon, I hope to demonstrate that in fact academic research has (so far) done very little to bring any kind of intellectual finesse or insights to the debates on video games, gives us no reason to look to them for help, and is just as susceptible to unintelligible monkey screaming matches.

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