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Better Game Studies Education the Carcassonne Way

By Ken | Published: July 22, 2009

Following Noah’s lead, I thought I’d post the extended abstract and ask for comments on my upcoming DiGRA paper.  This is joint work with Noah as well as Sri Kurniwan at UCSC.

ABSTRACT

As game education programs grow, educators face challenges bringing formal study of games to students with varied backgrounds.  In particular, educators must find ways to transition students from viewing games as entertainment to exhibiting deeper insights.  One approach is to expose students to a wider variety of games, particularly German-style board games.  We hypothesize that greater familiarity may lead to improved understanding of game mechanics and test this hypothesis with a study involving students in an introductory game design class.  Initial analysis of the results shows increased understanding and changes in the student’s view of games.  From this we may suggest directions for future research and game education pedagogy.

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Distant Worlds: San Francisco Symphony Plays Celebrates Music from Final Fantasy

By Sherol Chen | Published: July 20, 2009
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Sold out SF Symphony show

There are 3 takeaways I hope to convey in this post.  First, I’d like to share what it was like to be there Saturday night in the symphony hall.  Secondly, I want to describe what I thought about my second time at an FF concert (my first is described here).  Most importantly, I want to discuss a bit about the significance and meaning of such an event.  There is great meaning evident in the type of response that a video game event, such as this one, creates.  Unlike what is often described of video games in the media, this is not just an exploitation of fanaticism, rather, it is a celebration of the deeply meaningful presence Final Fantasy has had.  I cannot think of a better example to show that video games, rich and full of meaning, are about more than “just playing a game.”

After seeing the concert, there are certain things I’d do differently.  For one, I probably shouldn’t have started this post the night before the concert.  It sort of prepared me to over think the experience while I was there.  What makes it awesome is quite indescribable, and trying to explain it definitely takes away from the experience.  So I am going to put up my pics, finish capturing the moment, and forget as much about it as I can before the next time I go.  I suggest that if you plan to ever see a Final Fantasy show (and haven’t yet) that you similarly forget anything you know about it, or that you don’t read anything about it (and just take my word that it was awesomely moving).

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Digital Humanities 2009: My First Humanities Conference

By Sherol Chen | Published: July 17, 2009

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Trying to find traction in my pursuit of academic scholarship is quite daunting at times.  There are just so many people in the world doing so many interesting things, and it often feels like an endless catching up with the many experts of today.  What I do know is my childhood aspiration to tell stories through video games drives me on this adventure of discovery.  What I didn’t know was how many communities of thought there would be along the way: communities that care about stories, communities that care about games, communities that care about stories in games.  (It keeps me constantly feeling like the “the new kid” in school.)  And what I take away from this last conference is a new collaboration of interesting research questions that I could’ve very well been working on.  Not that I’m second guessing the path I’m currently on, but rather, I look forward to bringing my own discoveries to the intersection of all these communities.  So, let me share a little bit of what I learned about the Digital Humanities community.

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Agency Reconsidered

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: July 13, 2009

Steven Dow, Michael Mateas, Serdar Sali, and I have an abstracted accepted for DiGRA titled “Agency Reconsidered.” We’re working on the full paper this month, and will certainly share it when available, but one of the things I value about blogs is that they provide a place to do academic work in public. So I’m posting the abstract here, along with some thoughts on where we’re going for the final paper, and I’d appreciate any ideas/pointers that people have. Suggestions and criticisms that arrive now (rather than after it’s completed) are much more likely to shape the final paper.

Agency is a fundamental concept for understanding computer games, and digital media generally. However, as with many important concepts, its initial formulations were not entirely fleshed out. Subsequent work has developed the concept further, through humanistic, design-oriented, and empirical means. This paper provides a synthesis of some of the most important work on agency over the last decade and describes how a more mature formulation can serve as a basis for future research.

The fields of game scholarship and game design have two different starting points for discussions of agency. Read More »

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What do Amnesia, Immortality, and Mind Control have to do with Game Design, Immersion, and Suspension of Disbelief?

By Sherol Chen | Published: July 11, 2009

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What breaks your sense of presence in a story? The culture of video game playing has developed a tolerance for the common practices and limitations in designing and producing games.  We’ve stopped asking “why?” and have come to expect the typical input arrangements, the impermanence of death, and restrictions of our own free will.  Although much of the work in the EIS lab is focused on investigating new practices in creating and playing games, I’ve found, in my personal “research” of popular games, that despite the predictability, certain innovations in narrative are notably novel.

If we break down a game into layers of: paidia, ludus, and narrative, an area that is quite nontrivial is the connection between paidia and narrative.  Often, your paidia is constrained such that you don’t ruin the narrative layer in the game.  For example, it is common that your agency sucks in order to maintain the story elements.

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Analog Corner #1: …aber bitte mit Sahne

By Ken | Published: July 10, 2009

(aka You Have to Divide the Pie)

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While there’s lots of great discussion of digital games here, I thought it would be nice to have some discussion of games of another kind: analog games, aka board games, card games, tabletop games, etc.  In particular, I’m a big fan of German-style board games and usually have some opinions about them I’d like to share.  If you’re not familiar with the genre, check out the Wikipedia article or BoardGameGeek.com.

A game that’s been getting a lot of play in my group recently is …aber bitte mit Sahne (English: With cream, please).  This is a clever filler game (under 30 minutes playing time) designed by Jeffrey Allers.  You can find an English version of the rules linked on the game’s BGG page, so I’ll just give a quick description here:

aberbittemitsahneexample1The game consists of 57 slices of pie.  There are 8 different kinds, each with a different point value and a number of whipped cream dollops.  There are 3 slices of value 3, 4 of value 4, etc., up to 11.  Also, the higher the point value of a slice, the more dollops it has (up to 3).

The proceeds like this: on their turn each player takes 11 slices without looking at them.  They arrange them in circle and divide it into a number of portions equal to the number of players (rearranging the order of pieces is not allowed).  Then, starting from the player to the divider’s left, each player takes a portion, with the divider getting last pick.

At the end of the game, the player who has the most slices of a particular type of pie gets the point value of that type (ties are friendly).  For example, if I have 3 of the 9 valued slices, another player has 2, and the remaining players have none, I get 9 points.

As an added twist, when a player takes a portion, they can choose to flip over any number of the slices they take.  Flipped over slices don’t count towards the majority, but they do score points for the number of dollops on them.

For more information, read Jeffrey’s design blog.

So what’s so interesting about this game?  Its mechanics, the degree of player interaction, its accessibility to non-gamers, its quick playing time, and its plain and simple fun.  Read on for more!

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