Irritating Rants

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Tiger Parenting, Minecraft, and the Values of Play

January 19, 2011 in Game Psychology, Indie Games, Irritating Rants | 14 comments

Recently, my sister referred me to an article that made quite a splash on the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua: “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”. (Read it first if you have not). The article is certainly polemical, and it paints a bleak picture of the Chua household: no sleepovers, no playdates, no being in school plays/drama, no watching tv or playing computer games, and above all “no grade less than an A”, etc etc. This is the familiar stereotypical picture of a household run purely on achievement, instrumentality, outcomes and accomplishments. It is a familiar morality tale that could come from the confines of an upper-class household in Victorian England.

Excluded from that life, by definition, is anything that will not lead to a positive outcome in the parent’s eyes (these of course are defined economically: getting a high-paying job, graduating magna cum laude at an Ivy League school, receiving educational awards). I have no opinion on whether or not Amy Chua (a professor of Law and economic commentator at Yale) is a good or bad mother, or whether her children are good or bad people. Those conversations have been had.

Instead, I want to know: if a family excludes play from the household or puts major restrictions upon its expression, what kinds of values are being ignored or denied to the child?

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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 | 15 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 Humble and Valiant (ie. Filthy Rich/Powerful) Hero

November 26, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 23 comments

keef-thiefInto my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

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Body Armour and the Problem of “Avataritis”

October 16, 2009 in Game Art, Game Psychology, Irritating Rants | 17 comments

masterchiefToday, Martyn Zachary of The Slow Down posted a very lucid reconsideration of the industry’s current obsession with what he calls “avataritis”: the phenomenon of adding character customization to every game and in doing so attempting to fully cater to the player’s conscious desires. Martyn (successfully, I think) argues that character customization (ie. create-your-own-avatar) in games is a feature at odds with itself. He writes,

Customization may seem to offer developers and players alike a chance to mask, to separate an avatar from its perfunctory position and move it closer to the player, bridging the gap between various players of different origins, but due to the avatar’s function as a literary element, a character never does become perfectly liberated from its original environs and place of creation.

After wading through so many awful, pretentious and intellectualistic blog posts over the years, Martyn’s post seized me right away. It is thoughtful, smart, and honest. And important to anyone who thinks in terms of the idea of a gamer community, it leaves the door open for re-articulation and consideration; not just opinion launching. But before, before you read my response, read Martyn’s excellent article for yourself.

In this article I want to very quickly sketch out my re-take of Avataritis, and try to contextualize the problem in terms of a psychology of defense, and show that gamers fall prey to some of the same problems that my students do. I may just fall into a pit of crocodiles on this one, so read generously ;)

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Bastard in a Basket

February 11, 2009 in Artful Games, Irritating Rants | 8 comments

boy-bawling

Yesterday, Brian Green over at Gamasutra posted his reflections upon the necessity of establishing “artistic legitimacy” for games. The article does not go into any depth or detail into what cultural/artistic/financial legitimacy actually means for people who are culturally/artistically/financially oppressed; instead it amounts to a bunch of rich kids screaming “You don’t understand us!” and “We hate living in this house!”

I apologize for my derisive tone, but I have never seen this degree of self-aggrandizement and self-pitied whimpering in all my time spent writing about, and criticizing, games. But really, does this kind of whining lend any legitimacy to developers at all? Besides – why has nobody asked if we really want legitimacy? Does legitimacy make good art? Since when was someone stopping developers from making games about the horror of war, or guilt and penance? I hate to rain on your parade here, Green, but most developers stop themselves from making artful games because they perceive a “small market” for that kind of thing. Brian Green claims that “we are stuck making works that can only be appropriate for children”. You say that you’re stuck in the children’s game business? Honestly, I’d like to see Mr. Green name 10 children’s games released this year that did not suck. Compare that to the hundred violent action games that were released, and made money, and we can start talking. Until then, this is self-deception to the nth degree.

Seriously. The folks of “Project Horseshoe” who came up with this idea need to pack up their sleeping bags, take their football, and go back home. Or move to Hollywood where you’ll get all the ego-stroking you need.

Note: Kumar Daryanani Arias posted a very insightful reply over at “Destral’s Blog”; it is worth reading in relation to Green’s article.

New Games Journalism is Dead. Long live New New Games Journalism.

February 9, 2009 in Game History, Game Writing, Irritating Rants, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 33 comments

tonetownIn this article I confront the New Games Journalism movement, and take a look at where it went. As a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek article over at Hardcasual.net parodies, it is becoming obvious that we produced a dysfunctional and narcissistic child. While I cannot pretend to have the “answer” or “fix” for our current crisis, I do offer what I think is a credible alternative. We need to open a dialogue on this issue, I think, instead of diagnosing and treating it like an out-patient. This involves our very identity as gamers, and without a hard look at ourselves we are at risk of repeating a long, uninteresting, history.

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The Medium is Not a Message

June 18, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Irritating Rants, Philosophy | 14 comments

This is a short response to Michael Abbott’s latest post over at the Brainy Gamer, on the topic of understanding video games as artistic works. While I couldn’t possibly put his eloquent words into finer poesy, perhaps the following few points are worth thinking about. I admit that they’re controversial points, but I don’t offer them for the sake of controversy – I simply want to extend the “language” for video games in whatever way I can. The best way to do this, I think, is to make some distinctions between the kinds of language often used in video and computer games, which are often mixed up and conflated with each other. This is my first official crack at it.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Games, Games, and Academic Research

October 25, 2007 in Game Research, Irritating Rants | 4 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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The Game Industry: Still Learning Nothing from World of Warcraft

September 17, 2007 in Indie Games, Irritating Rants, Mainstream Games | 8 comments

After reading psychochild’s critique of the industry’s failure to learn from WoW’s financial success, I keep asking myself: does this re-analysis tell us anything about how to advance the mainstream game industry?

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